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Merging Social Emotional Learning and Academics: Process, Rewards, & Rationale

Merging Social Emotional Learning and Academics: Process, Rewards, & Rationale

by | Oct 29, 2016 | Resources, Social Emotional Learning

 

At the end of every school day, behavior trackers inevitably found their way on my classroom floor, in the trash, or forgotten under the stacks of papers on my desk. My school was attempting to track how students communicated their feelings with classmates and teachers through individual social emotional goals to boost classroom culture and address student development. Goals were reviewed daily, but unfortunately progress was lost to the netherworld of misplaced student papers. Social emotional skills were seen as a separate, “ungraded” progress report, and students were not invested.

My classroom experience demonstrates the inefficiencies schools often experience in addressing social emotional learning (SEL). Without clear guidelines and a means to observe progress over time, we didn’t have an effective method of providing students with feedback. The developmental skills were typically separated from core content classes. Since our gradebooks were designed for academic skills, it was difficult to track and monitor SEL. There had to be a better way to instill positive communication and deeper learning that would hold beyond a 45-minute class.

I taught SEL skills effectively for the first time during my third year teaching by carving out academic instructional time. This investment paid off tenfold. I stepped over the advisory period barrier and disguised behavior trackers as components of my lesson plans. That year, I incorporated Accountable Talk, a method of classroom discourse encouraging positive communication, relationship-building, accountability, and rigorous content engagement among students. One component of Accountable Talk requires students to be self-aware and in tune with the emotions of those around them, interacting with others positively and productively, even when disagreeing. For my 6th graders, I anticipated this would prove challenging, but I was determined to establish the norm in my room that when we discussed math, we would do so by learning from each other and building these socio-emotional skills. I would later learn these skills were not only valuable to our classroom culture, but also in improving math skills overall.

At the time, I didn’t realize the competencies I was teaching were called “social emotional learning.” These skills exist in a group of national standards defined by CASEL, the Collaborative for Academic and Social Emotional Learning. I incorporated these skills by building in time to introduce conversation starters, sentence stems, how to respectfully agree or disagree with classmates, and how to build on each others’ ideas. I taught them how to be aware of their own opinions and feelings and how they would influence those around them. They observed their classmates model this behavior, they watched me model it, and they were given guidelines and suggestions for how to improve. Over time, with feedback and dynamic conversations, my students began to really enjoy the communication and would remind each other to speak respectfully and provide thoughtful feedback. The students required less prompting from me as it became a part of the class culture. Though I didn’t have a surefire way to monitor my class’s progress with Accountable Talk at the time, I saw this growth day after day.

One component that made this a success was teaching these skills in conjunction with our math skills. Whenever my students worked together on a project, discussing their strategies and approaches to the answer, they worked through both the math standards and the social expectations I’d put in place for Accountable Talk. In my lesson plans, I intentionally wove social emotional learning throughout the math problem by having students practice considering another student’s feelings in their group while explaining their approach to converting fractions. Accountable Talk prompted empathy in my class. This took time to cultivate, but the practice built stronger relationships, opened dialogue, and broadened understanding.

Today, these social awareness competencies can be tracked with technology, alleviating the lost paper tracker abyss and opening opportunities for sharing, viewing data, and making adjustments for improvement. Kiddom’s platform supports CASEL’s competencies, which would have aligned perfectly to track Accountable Talk in my class. I could have given them individual progress reports on how they were doing, an added report I didn’t have time to produce because I was overburdened writing lesson plans, making worksheets, grading assessments, the list goes on. Kiddom makes so much of this faster and actionable for teachers.

We owe parents the ability to track how their children are developing self-awareness and building relationships, in addition to science and social studies. Click on a button to download a standards-based progress report for parents that doesn’t look like a spreadsheet? Yes, please!

 

Actual photo of me saying, “Yes, please!”

Kiddom can help you align academic standards and social emotional learning standards together in one math project or ELA paper. Then, you can send feedback for both sets of skills. Social emotional learning should not be taught separately from content: it’s importance is amplified if it’s taught in tandemwith academics. When SEL is taught in a silo, it’s importance is undermined and inconsistently addressed. In reality, the skills necessary to be empathetic, relatable, and compassionate are the skills that drive student success in school and beyond.

 

 

 

 

If you’d like to learn more about teaching SEL in tandem with academics, grab SEL 101: our free guide to support your students’ social emotional development.

Blended (Social & Emotional) Learning

Blended (Social & Emotional) Learning

by | Oct 24, 2016 | Blended Learning, Resources, Social Emotional Learning

As of 2010, approximately 4 million students were impacted by online learning components embedded into their daily curriculum, cementing blended learning principles in schools across the world — and that number is growing. Exponentially.

 

 

It is no secret that technology in the classroom has the ability to engage students like no other learning tool. Technology has become so ingrained in our society’s culture that students gravitate to the educational programs that have resulted from this growing accessibility to technology in schools.

But when you begin to place a stronger emphasis on social and emotional skills in your curriculum, a new question comes into play: how can emotional exploration and expression specifically function without a human being present to guide participants through challenges, ideas or stressful moments?

The fact is, emotional exploration and expression along with other components of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) require participants to reflect and build trust with one another. From students to school leaders, this can be extremely difficult work, but when done effectively and expeditiously can lead to significant improvements in academic achievement and school climate.

So in rephrasing the question, is it possible to implement SEL in the classroom through blended learning techniques?

The answer is yes: through bite-sized integration of emotional identification, expression, and management into our classrooms, virtually facilitated and practiced daily.

Not only do children seem more willing to open up and connect to a video where the facilitator is not physically present, but the educators themselves are also benefitting from the fact that they do not need any special background in mental health.

Even better: teachers prefer it too. Ease of implementation is key; the relief of the pressure to lead and the ability to participate along with the students are a few other major factors in why we are seeing more and more teachers incorporating Blended Learning into their curriculum.

 

 

At Move This World (MTW), we equip educators and students with the tools to address their social and emotional wellbeing in order to create a healthy school climate where effective teaching and learning can occur. In addition to training and consultation, these tools provide a grade-specific virtual experience and make Social and Emotional Learning in every classroom as easy as pressing “play.”

Thankfully, we have had the pleasure of seeing the effects first-hand. A few weeks ago in Baltimore, one of our trainers conducted a site visit and was immediately ambushed by smiling faces once they took notice of her Move This World T-shirt. Not only were they ready to show off their 10 Emogers, one of MTW’s emotional management strategies as part of our ritualized practice of SEL, but they were also curious as to where the “real” star was — Elliott, the lead in our virtual tool videos.

Elliott has become somewhat of a celebrity among our nationwide partner schools, allowing us to truly comprehend the strength of the program and the lasting effect daily practice truly has. And of course, it’s always fun to see the faces of hundreds of screaming kids when Elliott stops by for a surprise visit.

See Elliott in action in our virtual tool “I Can Breathe” and be sure to follow us on social media for emotional & stress management tips for the classroom.

Guest Post By: Move This World

Move This World connects human beings to their emotions through movement. It is through movement that we enhance and inspire social, emotional and civic skills. In providing education and company leaders the tools to teach these skills, Move This World creates healthier environments around the world. These tools have helped address the social and emotional wellbeing of 150,000 people, including students in over 300 schools, to date. Its technology-enabled platform provides 24/7 access to easy-to-use instructional videos along with trained coaches for support from anywhere, classroom visuals, data analytics, a resource library and much more. For more information, visit: https://www.movethisworld.org.

— —

Original publish date: 2/25/16 on character.org

Great Educators Teach the Whole Child

Great Educators Teach the Whole Child

by | Oct 19, 2016 | Content Integrations, Resources, Social Emotional Learning, Teach the Whole Child

 

“Mister, why do we have to do this? I’d honestly rather work on math right now. Or anything else.”

This was advisory class (also known as “guidance”). I was a certified high school math teacher, but like so many of my peers, I also taught advisory. In advisory, teachers met with students to develop their social skills and help them explore college and career options. The class sounds practical, particularly because I taught in New York City alternative high schools serving at-risk students.

Oddly enough, New York City’s academic policy mentions advisory only once, in a footnote:

“There are no standards in ‘guidance’ or ‘advisory’; such courses may only bear credit if they are taught by appropriate subject certified teachers…”

This might explain why advisory was so often treated as an afterthought in New York City public schools. We weren’t provided thoughtful or engaging curriculum and yet, every student took advisory twice a week to accumulate elective credits and meet graduation requirements. I rarely felt underprepared teaching math, but unfortunately it was advisory that helped me perfect the art of improvising.

Being in an alternative high school, my students were academically behind and at risk of getting sucked into the school-to-prison pipeline. It was vital they graduated high school, but a diploma doesn’t guarantee students the social emotional learning (SEL) skills needed to be informed citizens and productive members of society. SEL, across schools in this country, is often put on the backburner and siloed off in classes like advisory or guidance.

According to the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, (CASEL), social emotional learning 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 defines these in terms of specific competencies that can be assessed and mastered: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making.

I can say with confidence my students didn’t learn anything in advisory in my first two years teaching it. I had no idea what I was doing and I was never paired with a veteran teacher. In my third year, I decided to write my own advisory curriculum, grounded in debate and civil discourse. I wanted my students to learn how to reason effectively: I loved hanging out with them during lunch and I was getting `irritated hearing them argue with faulty logic. That year, my students would learn how to listen actively, communicate clearly, and control outbursts. They chose to debate over issues resonating with them the most: police reform, stop and frisk, housing segregation, and gentrification. Near the end of the semester, we held a formal debate. It was fantastic, causing me to have a “this is why I teach” moment and restoring my confidence in my curriculum and the class.

 

 

When it came time for my advisory students to defend their logic in Algebra, the skills just did not transfer.

“This isn’t advisory Mister, this is MATH AND I’M TRYING TO TELL YOU MY ANSWER!”

It took a couple more years of this disconnect for me to finally figure it out:teaching social skills in isolation is absolutely ridiculous.

In “the real world” as teachers say, challenges are complex. You’re never justsolving a math problem. You’re communicating, collaborating, managing yourself, the list goes on. Life is interdisciplinary, and while our education system has finally started to acknowledge this (e.g. STEAM, the CCLS ELAstandards, etc.), we’re still compartmentalizing what makes us human: social emotional learning. The head and the heart are connected, and our schools, curriculum, and education technology should reflect this.

At Kiddom, my classroom experience with at-risk youth has proved invaluable in helping us build a platform that connects content, curriculum, and analytics. Being standards-based, we support CASEL’s SEL competencies and we encourage our teachers to track them in tandem with academic standards. Our content integrations help teachers personalize learning and provide students with the ability to self-advocate and manage their own learning, two key SEL competencies.

Here’s how it might work for an English teacher: imagine you’ve assigned students a persuasive essay and provided them with a rubric communicating academic expectations. With Kiddom, you can append SEL competencies directly into the same rubric, and track those skills in one place. If you want your students to manage themselves (e.g. complete and submit the assignment on time), you can add a self-management rubric row. Thoughtfully mixing SEL with academics ensures SEL isn’t being taught in isolation. If you want a framework for this or just more examples, download the free guide we co-authored on integrating SEL into K-12 academic curriculum.

Kiddom is just one education technology company. Teachers need more education technology companies thoughtfully creating and providing SEL content and services. And they need schools to provide the professional development they need to learn how to effectively weave SEL into curriculum. As technology gets smarter and continues to empower us, the future does not depend on all students learning how to code or take AP calculus. Rather, the future will lie in learning how to solve complex problems with empathy and sound decision-making because social emotional learning transcends the classroom.

 

 

Resources for Teachers and Administrators

This resource list is excerpted from Kiddom’s guide, Social Emotional Learning 101: Integrating Academics with SEL.

This article originally posted on EdSurge.

Put Students in Charge: A Way to Make Social Emotional Instruction Truly Actionable

Put Students in Charge: A Way to Make Social Emotional Instruction Truly Actionable

by | Oct 17, 2016 | Blended Learning, Case Studies, Curriculum & Instruction, Instructional Technology, Resources, Social Emotional Learning, Student Centered, Teacher Voice

Jessica Hunsinger

Jessica Hunsinger

Product Manager, Kiddom

Former educator passionate about building human potential. Saving teachers time through interoperability is what currently drives me. 

A Case for Social Emotional Development

After just a few years of teaching, I realized the skills woven into academic curriculum were not enough to ensure students would graduate prepared to be active citizens in society. Over time, my students’ social emotional development became as important to me as the academic skills designated by New York state. So when my administrators decided to add an advisory class to student schedules, I jumped on the chance to plan its curriculum.

Despite my best efforts to create meaningful social emotional learning experiences, the class was often treated by both staff and students as an aside, with the skills not transferring well to other classes or “real life.” I found a solution to this problem when I tried a new classroom model with self-paced blended learning instruction. A self-paced classroom is able to provide personalized instruction via blended learning, with the right balance of autonomy and support to develop both cognitive and non-cognitive skills. The students in my pilot program outperformed their peers on credit accumulation every trimester, but the real success came from the social emotional growth I was able to facilitate and observe.

What is Social Emotional Learning?

Social Emotional Learning (SEL), as defined by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) 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.” This is comprised of five SEL competencies, all of which I was able to address in the self-paced academic setting.

Self-Paced Instruction

Self-paced instruction is “any kind of instruction that proceeds based on learner response.” There are two models: outside of the school setting and within the school.

I used a self-paced classroom design as a pilot within the alternative high school where I taught to support a variety of struggling learners. We selected a target group of students and scheduled them for a three hour block of class. Within this block, we offered thirteen different blended learning classes.

The students chose which courses they wanted to work on for the trimester (based on graduation requirement needs) and they also got to decide how to structure their time during the block. Some students opted to spend all three hours on one class and then move on, whereas others would work on things from three or more different courses during the block. I became a true learning facilitator, supporting all subjects, but responsible for one. Content experts would push in on a staggered schedule to provide support and feedback to students.

The advantage of the self-paced, blended learning model in relation to SEL is that it allows for the integration of these skills as a part of the systems and structures of the academic class instead of as a separate initiative.

Competency 1: Self-Awareness 

Self-awareness is the ability to recognize one’s emotions and thoughts and their influence on behavior. This includes accurately assessing one’s strengths and limitations and possessing a well grounded sense of confidence and optimism.

To succeed in a self-paced class, students must be aware of their strengths and limitations, because the responsibility of deciding how to learn is on them. As a means of helping students assess their personal preferences and abilities, I designed periodic student surveys to push students to reflect and develop self-awareness. They answered questions like:

  • If you want to memorize something, what do you do?
  • How would you rate your self-discipline?
  • What style of learning has work for you in the past?
  • What is something you are really good at?
  • How often do you need breaks?
  • Which seating would you prefer the most.
  • How many credits do you have? How many do you need?

Throughout the term, I provided follow-up surveys with similar questions to help them review and refine their assessment of themselves as students. This reflection and feedback helped students become more aware of their learning preferences and needs.

With some guidance, they were able to apply this understanding of themselves to maximize their academic efforts. For example, many students responded that when they want to memorize something they write it down or repeat it over and over but those same students didn’t always apply this when they were trying to study for a quiz. In these moments, we would discuss if that is actually how they learn best, if there were other strategies they should try, and why they weren’t using it in the moment to hone in on how they really learn.

Key take away: Let students express their self perceived strengths and weaknesses and support them in developing and refining their understanding of themselves. Any teacher can help build students’ self awareness by incorporating periodic student surveys, but if you really want to maximize this, having follow up conversations is a must. I could do this because of the blended learning component of this model, which afforded more time for one-to-one interactions.

Competency 2: Self-Management  

Self-management is the ability to regulate one’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviors effectively in different situations. This includes managing stress, controlling impulses, motivating oneself, and setting and working toward achieving personal and academic goals.

When students entered my self-paced classroom, they set a goal for what they wanted to accomplish that period. As part of the routine, my students were expected to create a checklist of at least three things they planned to do during the block.

Because students were responsible for choosing what they were doing each day, this also provided the opportunity for students to use that time to complete job applications, update resumes, prep for SATs/ACTs, etc, providing them with the time and space to work towards professional and personal goals as well as academic.

Prior to checking out technology for the day, they’d show me their checklist as a way to inform me of their focus and for me to provide feedback on their goal setting skills. The feedback I gave students was geared towards making SMART goals, an objective I taught over and over again in advisory class, but without the context of an academic setting and opportunities to practice.

Instead of spending a few days on goal setting skills in an advisory class, we were able to practice setting SMART goals with daily practice and feedback on the specific need for growth. Students eventually needed less feedback from me as setting and working towards achieving personal and academic goals became part of their everyday routine.

Key takeaway: To develop self-management, students must practice managing themselves. Frequent practice with goal setting should be woven into every class, so students can improve self-management. You can achieve this in a self-paced classroom with a similar routine, but could also work it into any class by including goal setting practices with class projects. Taking the time to guide students through the goal setting process regularly in an academic class is a more effective way to develop competent goal setters and achievers.

Competency 3: Social Awareness 

Social awareness is the ability to take the perspective of and empathize with others from diverse backgrounds and cultures, to understand social and ethical norms for behavior, and to recognize family, school, and community resources and supports.

I started every school year with an activity to establish group norms with student input. We would post these in the room and students would sign the chart paper as a social contract. I did a similar exercise in my self-paced class, but I found a way to take this practice to the next level: I established a routine of monthly class meetings to review our progress as a group.

We discussed academic successes and how well we were meeting the social expectations we had established as a class. I asked students to evaluate how well the class was doing and consider the impact they had on their peers, which they shared with the group. My students were then able to lead the conversation about strategies for improving the group dynamic and why they should, which felt like a huge success.

Key takeaways: Let students lead the discussion on how the class is performing. Being placed in the same room is not enough to make students socially conscious. Developing a safe place where students can openly share their needs from the group and to reflect on the consequences of their actions via ongoing meetings is essential to developing social awareness, but can be done in any academic class.

Competency 4: Relationship Skills 

Relationship skills are the ability to establish and maintain healthy and rewarding relationships with diverse individuals and groups. This includes communicating clearly, listening actively, cooperating, resisting inappropriate social pressure, negotiating conflict constructively, and seeking and offering help when needed.

To promote healthy relationship skills, I heavily promoted peer mentoring and in class projects. Often, throughout the year, at least one student had already finished a course and could brief students on what to expect or offer strategies on how to learn the material.

This is different from peer mentoring in that it can happen in regular classroom settings because the “advanced” student is advanced because they have already done the work and not because they are naturally better at the subject.

Peer mentoring in this setting supported the mentoring students’ sense of self-efficacy, while providing a chance to practice communicating clearly and listening actively. Students who were being mentored were more likely to seek help from that peer again prior to asking for help from the teacher.

My favorite example of this was an ELL student supporting a peer taking Spanish class and that peer mentoring them in English and Global History. That peer advocated to expand the peer mentoring system to the rest of the school community because they felt the rewards of a healthy peer relationship.

Of course, not every student was eager to act as a peer mentor or mentee. This is why I made sure to include tasks that required students to interact with each other within the self-paced curricula. In the Financial Literacy class, they were expected to interview a peer about what they knew about credit cards. In health class, they created an anonymous 5–10 question survey about health issues they identified in the community and had to ask at least 10 peers to complete the survey.

These examples of how you can work relationship skills into a curriculum could be applied to any class model. However, unlike a traditional class where you might use “turn and talk” or purposely group students to perform a task, students in a self-paced setting had to learn how to politely interrupt another student, who was likely working on a completely different course, and explain to them what it is they were doing and why.

Key take aways: Opportunities to practice relationship skills such as communicating clearly, listening actively, and cooperating can be thoughtfully embedded in assignments. You can also foster students’ ability to seek and offer help when needed with the right peer mentoring dynamic.

Competency 5: Responsible Decision Making

Responsible Decision Making is the ability to make constructive and respectful choices about personal behavior and social interactions based on consideration of ethical standards, safety concerns, social norms, the realistic evaluation of consequences of various actions, and the well being of self and others.

A common concern about blended learning is that students will access materials online inappropriate for school or that schools will be providing a tool for cyber bullying. Some schools combat this by blocking a whole host of sites that might be distracting or unsuitable for school. As a result, I was unable to access a site with excellent videos and graphics about the transmission and prevention of HIV for health class because the website url had the word “virus” in it! In reality, students, like everyone else, want to be successful. In my experience, the most frequently observed “inappropriate” use of technology was when students got distracted by music videos trying to pick something to listen to as they worked.

I convinced my administrators that blocking sites completely blocked access to great content. Off-task technology moments serve as a starting point for conversations about responsible decision making. The questions I posed most often were, “Is that going to help you succeed? And if so how?” Usually, this was enough to curtail the activity, but if it wasn’t I would follow up by asking, “Do you need a break?”

A break is a normal part of work-life, but rarely are students given the opportunity in schools to learn how to take a responsible break. A break is something most traditional class models cannot support because each day is a new thing to be taught, assessed, remediated, and extended.

In a self-paced classroom, students can make a “realistic evaluation” of the consequence of their choice to take a break, and with some teacher-facilitated reflection, decide if that choice will prevent them from reaching their goals for the day, week, or year.

An added bonus to this flexibility was that it supported student curiosity. I had a student whose “off-task” time was often spent exploring topics that interested him, but that did not fit into his coursework. I “caught” him watching a video about useless human body parts: exploring your interests is the type of behavior schools should encourage not discourage.

Key take away: Students can only learn to make responsible decisions if you let them make real decisions. By providing real choices for the students, you may revive their curiosity.

What’s the Next Step?

Providing students some level of autonomy is one way to bridge the gap between academic and social skill development. I found it easier to address the skills I had been trying for years to teach in advisory with my self-paced classroom model. Of course, there is always room for improvement and if I still taught, I would purposefully track my students’ SEL development as part of their overall class evaluation. While I had plenty of anecdotal evidence to support my claim that students made SEL progress, the students themselves should also be aware of their SEL development as they are of their academic grades. The two should not be separate.

If you are interested in learning about other ways to incorporate Social Emotional Learning in your classes and/or how to track student growth in both cognitive and non-cognitive areas simultaneously, check out SEL 101: a no-nonsense guide to incorporating SEL in the classroom. SEL 101 was co-authored by teachers and Kiddom, a learning platform supporting educators making this important change.

 

 

Resources:
https://edglossary.org/advisory/
https://www.casel.org/social-and-emotional-learning/
https://www.casel.org/social-and-emotional-learning/core-competencies/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-paced_instruction

 

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Bridging Academics and Social Emotional Learning

Bridging Academics and Social Emotional Learning

by | Apr 30, 2016 | Resources, Social Emotional Learning

 

Close your eyes and imagine you’re back in middle school. You’re hard at work cranking out a five paragraph essay. It’s a tough assignment: take a stand on school uniforms. You have to back your position up with evidence. This is your third and final draft, which means you’re either writing it in pen or typing it up. You’re a bit late turning it in, but when you finally think your paper is good enough, you hand it over. Your teacher smiles and says, “Thanks for turning this in! Of course, I’m going to take five points off because it’s a day late.”

Why? And more importantly, from where?

Situations like these bothered me as a student because I was a geek and petty about points. In the scenario above, I could’ve presented an argument for school uniforms in a powerful, convincing paper. Yet, the value of my writingwas devalued when I turned this paper in late. “X points off for [insert behavior here]” is very random and unjustified. If a world-famous chef is opens her restaurant two weeks late, does that mean her restaurant earns one less Michelin star than it could’ve? No. The world outside of the classroom doesn’t work like that.

I’m guessing a long time ago, a teacher wanted students to learn that meeting deadlines was important. They may have assumed students cared about their grades and may have thought, well why not tie the two together? Today, we have the luxury to take a step back, reflect on this process, and adjust accordingly if there’s a better way. And there is: if we want students to demonstrate “good” behaviors, we can grade those behaviors, without erroneously devaluing their academic skills. This has to do with social emotional learning.

Ideologically, American educators are slowly but surely adopting a standards-based grading (SBG) mindset. This is a big win for students, because SBGrequires teachers to isolate and track specific skills. The logical next step is to integrate social emotional learning (SEL) standards into the academic curriculum. Yes, this might push some educators outside of their comfort zones, but if we’re going to teach our students to be lifelong learners, we must also be lifelong learners. And in the end, blending academics in with SEL is what’s best for students: educators will accurately be able to inform their students areas of strength and development, both academically and personally, with actual data to back it up.

What might this look like?

 

 

Let’s say I’m an English teacher and I’ve assigned my students a persuasive essay. I’ve provided my students with a rubric, which communicates my academic expectations. I may then incorporate some social emotional learning competencies into the samerubric. For example, if I want students to manage themselves (i.e. complete the assignment, submit it on time, etc.), I might add a self-management row to the rubric, communicating my expectations for the task at hand. Now I can express academic strengths and weaknesses, as well as character strengths and weaknesses.

Meg, I took X points off from self-management because you turned this paper in two days late. Content wise, this was powerful. You made a convincing argument, well done.

If I’m a Social Studies teacher grading a class debate (e.g. Communism vs. Capitalism), I might include a social awareness standard in the debate’s rubric to communicate what it means to model “appropriate behavior” for this specific task.

Jack, your arguments were supported with facts and examples. Clearly, you were well-prepared. I took off some points in social awareness due to your inappropriate outburst near the end. See me after class if you’d like to discuss.

Social Emotional Learning at Kiddom

At Kiddom, we’ve incorporated CASEL’s social emotional learning competencies into our standards database and we’re making a big deal about it. We want to ensure our teachers and schools have the tools they need to develop the whole child, and not just on academics.

To learn more about how we’re tying academics and social emotional learning, click here.

 

 

By: Abbas Manjee
Chief Academic Officer at Kiddom