I have been selling educational solutions to schools directly, through channel partners, and indirectly for 20 years. During that time, I have seen a growing interest in Social Emotional Learning, diversity, and inclusion from schools and teachers worldwide.
What is Social Emotional Learning?
Social emotional learning (SEL), as we know it, is a movement. Although the concept it represents has existed since the first relationship between teacher and student, researchers coined the term SEL in 1994 with the beginning of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL).
CASEL aims to bring the academic life together with the social and emotional life of a student. By aiming to teach and nurture the “whole child” not just teach academics, incidents of behavioral issues drop.1
Studies have shown that SEL programs in schools result in higher high school graduation rates, 11% higher college graduation rates, lowered drug abuse, and a whopping 13.5% lower instance of clinical mental health disorders.2
Children gradually learn skills from each of the five SEL domains and build up their knowledge throughout their school journey:
- Self-Awareness
- Self-Management
- Social Awareness
- Relationship skills
- Responsible decision-making3
Where is SEL taught or practiced?
Not all schools teach or practice SEL, but its implementation is on the rise worldwide. All 50 US states have adopted SEL competencies in Pre-K, and 27 states have adopted SEL competencies in K-12. 4
Similar regulation exists in many developed nations, such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. Over the past several years, I have seen a steady rise in demand for SEL-supporting products and content in Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and Africa.
How can SEL be implemented in a classroom?
A single teacher, a department, or an entire school can implement SEL in a classroom. A single teacher can significantly impact students’ lives using affordable resources to prepare and adopt an SEL curriculum.
You can get started without purchasing a curriculum. Reading books and resources on the CASEL website is a good way to help you approach teaching from an SEL standpoint. This is a good starting place if you have limited funds and/or support from your school or district but want to positively impact your student’s social and emotional well-being.
I’ve listed some below, but I encourage interested teachers to research what is best for you.
How is SEL related to Diversity and Inclusion?
SEL is the process of acquiring “knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions”5 The very nature of this achievement is a diverse and inclusive process. In theory, SEL includes and affects all students.
SEL education “supports inclusion by providing students the skills they need for inclusive education to be effective”.6
Social awareness, one of the five domains of SEL, “is defined as empathy and understanding of diverse perspectives and cultures”.7
To achieve social awareness, students need to learn about and be exposed to diverse cultures. The very act of this positive and reinforced exposure over time supports inclusion.
In addition to all of the generally accepted positive ways SEL and diversity and inclusion are proven to be linked, there has been pushback from far-right organizations in the US that believe SEL is a front for teaching critical race theory.8 This blog is not political, so I will not delve any deeper into this topic, but you can Google about it if you’d like to read more.
Print Products
As mentioned in this blog, teachers can include SEL in their classroom with research, time, and preparation. However, several print resources are available to help teachers and schools.
Teachers can start by reading teacher professional development books, such as Trisha DiFazio’s Social-Emotional Learning Starts With Us: Empowering Adults to Support Students.
Supplemental classroom resources for middle school and high school like Saddleback Publishing’s GO! SEL Tween and SEL Teen Literacy programs provide easy-to-implement, student-facing resources, like readers and worksheets, with correlating teacher lesson plans.
For Spanish-speaking regions, Libresa in Ecuador publishes Conociendome textbook series.
In the Middle East, Prime Press has a successful reader series to support SEL entitled Character Building.
Digital Products
The growth of educational technology (EdTech) products has allowed more people and companies than ever to create and market high-quality products to address SEL in the classroom. They no longer need a publisher to buy and back their program
Many solutions providers have SEL components in their online offerings and there are far more platforms than I would ever attempt to list, but here are some noteworthy platforms:
HMH’s Classcraft – SEL curriculum offered by one of the biggest PK-12 solutions providers in the world
Peekapak – fast-growing, CASEL-aligned, North American K-12 SEL curriculum platform
FUNecole – widely used in Europe, aligned to and approved by Cambridge Assessment International Education
Pickatale – a 2024 TIME top-20 ranked EdTech in the World, has several sets of interactive readers aligned to SEL, such as their Citizenship and Society and Health and Wellbeing libraries.
Sourcing Content
Therefore, educational solutions providers, including PK-12 publishers and EdTechs, seldom write all content in-house. Instead, they often source content when creating new educational products. Here are some resources to source appropriate content to develop SEL programs.
Cricket Media has a digital asset library with over 100,000 licensable illustrated stories, informational texts, eBooks, MP3, and illustrations for ages 0-14. Using their DAM-based asset library you can search keywords, age appropriateness, genres, topics, and more. This library makes it very easy to find diverse content to develop SEL programs.
Smile and Learn has over 12,000 activities for children and thousands of licensable videos, many of which support SEL for ages 3-12, such as their yoga and emotions videos.
Conclusion
SEL is a whole-child approach that fosters students’ holistic development, combining academic achievement with essential life skills (sometimes known as 21st-century Skills). Increasing global demand for SEL, diversity, and inclusion reflects SEL programs’ positive impact and the desire to reflect the diverse student body that schools and teachers serve in their teachings.
Implementing SEL is now easier with countless print and digital resources, aiding companies in sourcing diverse content effectively.
Now it is time to think about and thank all the wonderful teachers in the world who impact their students by creating an inclusive and supportive learning environment. I am reminded of my French teacher, Ms. “Didi” O’Donnell, who embraced all aspects of SEL long before the term was popular and whose classroom I always viewed as a refuge from all the judgment and angst of a typical teenage school day.
Feel free to contact me if you would like to bring SEL programs to your region and check here my latest blog where I talk How to Find Overseas Educational Solutions Providers.
1https://casel.org/about-us/our-history/
2https://www.educationworld.com/a_news/social-emotional-learning-has-positive-impact-success-students-according-new-study-936176731
3https://beyou.edu.au/fact-sheets/social-and-emotional-learning/five-areas-of-social-and-emotional-learning
4https://casel.org/systemic-implementation/sel-policy-at-the-state-level
5https://casel.org/fundamentals-of-sel/
6, 7https://www.globalcitizenshipfoundation.org/article/social-emotional-learning-for-all-a-call-for-inclusion
8https://www.npr.org/2022/09/26/1124082878/how-social-emotional-learning-became-a-frontline-in-the-battle-against-crt