Unlocking Potential: The Benefits of Social and Emotional Learning in the Classroom

In today's diverse classrooms, students arrive with varied motivations, academic abilities, and social-economic backgrounds. Social and emotional learning (SEL) is increasingly recognized as an essential component of education, fostering positive school environments where students can thrive academically, socially, and emotionally. SEL equips students with the skills they need to succeed in school and beyond.

What is Social and Emotional Learning?

Social and emotional learning (SEL) is the process through which children and adults acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.

CASEL identifies five core competencies of SEL:

Self-awareness: Understanding one's own emotions, personal goals, and values. This includes accurately assessing one's strengths and limitations, having positive mindsets, and possessing a well-grounded sense of self-efficacy and optimism.
Self-management: Regulating one's own emotions and behaviors to achieve goals. This requires skills and attitudes that facilitate the ability to regulate one's own emotions and behaviors.
Social awareness: Understanding, empathizing, and feeling compassion for others, especially those with different backgrounds or cultures. Social awareness involves the ability to understand, empathize, and feel compassion for those with different backgrounds or cultures.
Relationship skills: Establishing and maintaining healthy and rewarding relationships and acting in accordance with social norms. Relationship skills help students establish and maintain healthy and rewarding relationships, and to act in accordance with social norms.
Responsible decision-making: Making constructive choices about personal behavior and social interactions across diverse settings. It requires the ability to consider ethical standards, safety concerns, accurate behavioral norms for risky behaviors, the health and well-being of self and others, and to make realistic evaluation of various actions' consequences.

The Importance of SEL in Education

There is a growing consensus among educators, parents, and policymakers that education should focus on supporting essential capacities to help children navigate the world successfully. This broad notion of educating the “whole child” generally includes at least the abilities to: (1) develop healthy personal relationships, (2) treat others with respect and dignity, (3) develop the cognitive capacity to solve problems and think creatively, (4) succeed in postsecondary education and the labor market, and (5) be a contributing citizen in a democracy.

School is one of the primary places where students learn social and emotional skills. Promoting social and emotional development for all students in classrooms involves teaching and modeling social and emotional skills, providing opportunities for students to practice and hone those skills, and giving students an opportunity to apply these skills in various situations.

Benefits of SEL in the Classroom

The benefits of SEL in classrooms are numerous, impacting students' academic performance, behavior, and overall well-being. Here are some key advantages:

1. Enhanced Academic Performance

SEL has a positive impact on students’ academic achievement. This includes greater performance on standardized tests, as well as improved metrics in attendance, assignment completion, and grades. Students who participate in SEL at school experience higher levels of “school functioning” - as evidenced in higher attendance rates, greater academic achievement, and positive social relationships.

2. Improved Social and Emotional Skills

Students demonstrated increased academic achievement and school functioning including improved attendance and engagement in learning. Students also showed improved social and emotional skills, attitudes, and behaviors, such as student self-efficacy, self-esteem, mindset, perseverance, and optimism, among others.

3. Reduced Behavioral Problems

SEL equips individuals with skills to make responsible decisions, manage impulses, and maintain positive behavior, resulting in reduced disciplinary incidents. Students engaged in SEL are less aggressive and disruptive in school, and for years to follow. When young people are given the training and opportunity to express themselves in a safe space and are able to discuss the impact of potential actions before they occur, they are less likely to resort to verbal or physical outbursts.

4. Improved Mental Health

Students who participate in SEL programs also feel better in school, reporting less anxiety, stress, depression, and suicidal thoughts. SEL students also have fewer occurrences of depression, anxiety, stress, and social withdrawal.

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5. Positive School Climate

Beyond all outcomes examined, this comprehensive review reported the largest effect of SEL programs was on students' increased perceptions of safety and inclusion at school.

6. Development of Civic Behaviors

SEL programs demonstrated positive effects in both of these domains. Given the dynamic interaction between healthy climates, behaviors, and student academic, personal, and social development, results encourage SEL implementation to support healthier and safer school experiences for students K-12.

Implementing SEL in Schools

Over the past 20 years, many evidence-based approaches and strategies have been created to promote SEL in educational settings. States have now articulated learning standards (sometimes called “competencies” or “benchmarks”) for SEL. Successful and sustainable SEL requires supportive infrastructures and processes.

Curricular Approaches

One of the most prevalent SEL approaches involves training teachers to deliver explicit lessons that teach social and emotional skills, then finding opportunities for students to reinforce their use throughout the day. Another curricular approach embeds SEL instruction into content areas such as English language arts, social studies, or math. There are a number of research-based SEL programs that enhance students' competence and behavior in developmentally appropriate ways from preschool through high school.

Teacher-Student Interactions

Teachers can also naturally foster skills in students through their interpersonal and student-centered instructional interactions throughout the school day. Adult-student interactions support SEL when they result in positive student-teacher relationships, enable teachers to model social-emotional competencies for students, and promote student engagement.

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School-Wide Strategies

At the school level, SEL strategies typically come in the form of policies, practices, or structures related to climate and student support services. Safe and positive school climates and cultures positively affect academic, behavioral, and mental health outcomes for students. School leaders play a critical role in fostering schoolwide activities and policies that promote positive school environments, such as establishing a team to address the building climate; adult modeling of social and emotional competence; and developing clear norms, values, and expectations for students and staff members. Fair and equitable discipline policies and bullying prevention practices are more effective than purely behavioral methods that rely on reward or punishment.

An important component of schoolwide SEL involves integration into multi-tiered systems of support. The services provided to students by professionals such as counselors, social workers, and psychologists should align with universal efforts in the classroom and building.

Family and Community Partnerships

Family and community partnerships can strengthen the impact of school approaches to extending learning into the home and neighborhood. Community members and organizations can support classroom and school efforts, especially by providing students with additional opportunities to refine and apply various SEL skills. After-school activities also provide opportunities for students to connect with supportive adults and peers. They are a great venue to help youth develop and apply new skills and personal talents. Research has shown that after-school programs focused on social and emotional development can significantly enhance student self-perceptions, school connectedness, positive social behaviors, school grades, and achievement test scores, while reducing problem behaviors.

Best Practices for Implementing SEL

Implementing an SEL program well is critical for achieving the outcomes that research promises. Here are four best practices for implementing social-emotional learning programming in schools highlighted by experts:

Clearly Define SEL: This is the first thing educators should do when deploying a new SEL curriculum or even trying to shore up support for an existing initiative. Schools must tell their communities-teachers, students, parents, and taxpayers-why they are investing in social-emotional learning. Successfully educating communities on why a district or school is investing in SEL hinges on whether everyone-teachers, staff, parents, and students alike-is using the same definition for SEL.
Invest in Adult SEL: Once everyone is on the same page with the why and the what, successful SEL implementation depends on the teachers, staff, and administrators in the school building. A common refrain in SEL circles is “start with the adults.” Educators not only need training on how to teach students social-emotional skills, they may need to shore up their own social-emotional competencies to ensure they’re modeling good behavior.
Infuse SEL into School Culture: To be most effective, SEL can’t begin and end in the classroom. It must be infused into a school’s culture, which means all adults in the school building should adopt SEL practices, even if they’re not directly teaching those skills to students.
Provide Ongoing Support: Teaching social-emotional skills, modeling them, and infusing them into a school’s culture are hard work. So, it’s important for educators to remember that social-emotional learning is an ongoing, lifelong effort.

The Future of SEL

To provide the best possible education for students, it is essential to understand SEL’s role in promoting educational equity. The researchers urge the broader SEL community to focus on expanding the types of data collected and reported in the studies of SEL effects to support meaningful and precise measurement, evaluation, and interpretations.

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