Hello everyone. Today we will be talking about social and emotional learning. I'm Dr. Williams and I'll be covering the information in this video.
So let's first establish a definition and kind of what is social and emotional learning. So social and emotional learning, also known as SEL, is the process through which children and adults understand and manage their emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain a positive relationship, and make responsible decisions. So within social and emotional learning, we have all of our emotions, and a lot of times those emotions drive our decisions in every aspect of our lives, from the people that we have relationships with to the goals that we have long-term with. careers and professions in our lives, that kind of thing. So, you know, empathy is part of this motivation, self-esteem, commitment, interpersonal awareness, and decision making.
In other words, social and emotional learning is the way we build the foundation for a successful life, whether that's academically, professionally, or interpersonally. Social and emotional learning is how we learn. critical thinking, effective communication, emotional recognition and regulation, teamwork, perseverance, and so many other skills.
So with emotional recognition and regulation, that's when you may see some kids get so angry and a child's able to recognize how angry they are and either regulate it or find a healthy way to deal with that anger. Whereas some kids... gets so angry and they're not able to recognize the point where they're too far gone. And instead of having that regulation, they act out and maybe they punch something. Perseverance.
Some kids can see a problem and go, I'm going to get through this. I'm going to do it until I learn how to do it. I'm going to practice.
And they persevere through a challenge. Other students, what you'll see is they come in contact with something. that's challenging and they just revert back to well i can't do it and they just give up or you see those kids that meet a challenge and get so frustrated they get angry so again all of these and again you know they're really driven by your emotions the ability to recognize it and regulate it and it also impacts our ability to critically think and communicate with other people It's a lifelong process, so what kids are able to do in your classroom with you and the ways that you facilitate that social and emotional learning is important, and hopefully each teacher facilitates that type of learning. But this learning happens in all different contexts within that child's life, from the classroom to a part-time job to the friendships that they have.
All of those things impact their social and emotional learning. So in social and emotional learning, respect and safety are just as important as learning literacy and critical thinking skills. Research actually shows that students need to feel both physically and emotionally safe to learn. And think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, that we need that basic needs to be met and that safety. So we need to feel physically basic needs.
and emotionally the next tier of safety in order to even learn in a classroom. So we need to think as educators, what can we do in our classrooms to make students feel both physically and emotionally safe? Research shows that social and emotional learning not only improves achievements by an average of 11%, but it also increases. pro-social behaviors such as kindness and sharing and empathy.
It improves student attitudes towards school and reduces depression and stress among students. This includes safety from stereotype threat, harassment, exclusion, and all of that kind of ties into anti-bias curriculum, which I'll explain in just a few minutes. So in talking about social and emotional learning, know that it deals with self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision-making, relationship skills, social awareness. And that can be fit into a classroom where you have either a social and emotional curriculum and instruction.
So you pull from curriculum that facilitates social and emotional learning, or maybe you have components within your classroom management plan that facilitate social and emotional learning. School-wide practices and policies. So you know, the bubble gets a little bigger.
Schools have school-wide practices and policies. This may be something like a program like PBIS, so that positive behavior system. Lots of schools, you know, really have gone in that direction to try to, as a whole, have that, encourage the positive with students and that social positive behaviors and those emotionally positive behaviors.
And then lastly, we have the family and community partnerships. So what they learn at home, what they see at home, what they see in their communities also impacts them and how they act out or emotionally or how they are socially. So please keep that in mind as well. So there are different layers to what impacts that social and emotional learning of that individual, which is those five components that are very colorful in the center.
So let's talk about each of these components of social and emotional learning. These are social and emotional learning competencies. You have self-awareness. This is the ability to accurately recognize one's own emotions, thoughts, and values and how they influence behavior.
So it's the ability to accurately assess your own strengths and limitations as well with a well-grounded sense of confidence, optimism, and having that growth mindset. that, you know, this challenge is only going to make me stronger. It's going to make me better and I can overcome. So different competencies that would be within self-awareness would be identifying emotions, accurate self-perception, recognizing strength, self-confidence, and self-efficacy. Then we have social awareness.
So this is having the ability to take the person, uh, perspective of and empathize with others, including those from diverse backgrounds and cultures, the ability to understand social and ethical norms for behavior and to recognize family, school, and community resources and supports. So these competencies may include perspective taking, showing empathy or having empathy, appreciating diversity, and respecting others. Responsible decision-making, this is the ability to make constructive choices about personal behaviors and social interactions based on ethical standards, safety concerns, and social norms. The realistic evaluation of consequences of various actions in a consideration of the well-being of others and oneself.
Competencies of this would include identifying problems, analyzing situations, solving problems, and solving problems. problems, evaluating, reflecting, ethical responsibility. Then we have self-management.
This is the ability to successfully regulate one's emotions, thoughts, and behaviors in different situations, effectively managing stress, control, impulses, and motivating oneself. The ability to set and work towards a personal and academic goal. So competencies would include impulse control, stress management, self-discipline, self-motivation, goal setting, and organizational skills.
And then lastly, we have relationship skills. This is the ability to establish and maintain healthy and rewarding relationships with diverse individuals and groups. The ability to communicate clearly, listen well, cooperate with others.
resist inappropriate social pressure, negotiate conflict constructively, and seek and offer help when needed. These competencies would include communication, social engagement, relationship building, and teamwork. So you should be able to not only look at that and see how that impacts individuals and why each one of these is important, but also how it's important to your future classrooms. So if you're putting students in groups and you want them to create something together, relationship skills is important.
So they need to be able to have that teamwork, that social engagement in order to get the project done. But they also need to have some kind of self-management where their impulse. they have impulse control, they have a little bit of self-discipline, they are able to set the goal of their group, and they have to have organizational skills. So these do impact your classroom and the students maturity and ability to meet these competencies does impact the function of your classroom.
And so being able to set expectations and to help students regulate and understand the importance of each one of these social and emotional components and competencies is important. So why social and emotional learning? Well, just showing you this little chart, this is a percentage of teens saying that each of the following is a major problem among people their age in the community where they live by household income.
So just kind of identifying and kind of. visualizing this for you, this problem for you. So they're saying that students that live in a household that makes less than $30,000, we see 70% of teens saying that the major problem is anxiety and depression. We see an income level between $30,000 and about $75,000 as being $73,000. And then the higher the income we have, the higher we have anxiety and depression.
Then we have bullying. And we see the opposite. The lower the income, the higher the major problem is bullying. Drug addiction, same thing.
The lower the income, the higher the problem. Drinking and alcohol, poverty, teen pregnancy, and gangs, all. are correlated have a relation to household income.
So what does this tell us? It tells us a few things about one, underlying problems of what they they have identified as major problems among teens, and we also have where the household income thresholds are of where the students feel the major problem is. Additionally, so going on this, the percentage of teens saying each of the following is a, you know, major problem, minor problem, or not a problem at all among their age in the community that they live. So 70% say it's anxiety and depression is a major problem.
26% say it's a major problem. 4% say it's not a problem at all. Bullying. Look how high. high these percentages are as to being a major problem and a minor problem.
Drug addiction, still same thing, 51% and 35% see it as a problem. Drinking alcohol, 45% and 39% see it as a problem. Poverty, 40%, 47% see it as a problem. So we see that these are typical issues and within teens and they've identified that these are their major problems and this corresponds with social and emotional learning because this means that they're not able to regulate somewhere here and how can we help them regulate within these competencies within our class and it's just practicing that additionally with issues with regulation.
Childhood trauma impacts students and their ability to regulate that social and emotional learning. So just a fact for you, one out of every four children attending school has been exposed to a traumatic event that can affect their learning and or behavior. So one out of every four kids. Now just kind of talking about how child trauma impacts that student.
So it impacts their school performance. You'll see these kids with childhood trauma have lower GPA, a higher rate of school absences, increase of dropout, more suspensions and expulsions, and a decrease in reading ability. Child trauma, also a fact, traumatized children may experience physical and emotional distress. So they may have anything between headaches and stomach aches, poor control of emotions, inconsistent academic performance, so one day they're on and one day they're off, unpredictable or impulsive behavior, over or under reacting to bells, physical contact, door slamming, sirens, lightning, sudden movement. Then we have intense reactions to reminders of their traumatic event.
So they may think that others are violating their personal space by saying something like, what are you looking at? They may blow up when being corrected or told what to do by an authority figure or a teacher. So whenever you ask them to, you know, please focus on your schoolwork, they may become enraged and their behavior just completely blows up.
Fighting when criticized or teased by others. So they'll resort to fighting to defend themselves instead of, you know, using their words and resisting. transition and or change in their lives.
Childhood trauma can impair learning, so a single exposure to a traumatic event may cause jumpiness, intrusive thoughts, interrupted sleep and nightmare, anger and moodiness, or social withdrawals. Any of these can interfere with concentration and memory. So chronic exposure to a traumatic event over and over and over again especially during those early years. And think of that student development module that we talked about, right?
And all of those things that go on early on in a child's life that impacts them for the rest of their lives. So just know that it can impact them adversely, affect attention, memory, and cognition. So their ability to even concentrate, it reduces a child's ability to focus.
organize and process information. It interferes with effective problem solving and planning, and results in overwhelming feelings of frustration and anxiety. So I wanted to give you an overview of the components of social and emotional learning, and how different things happening in children's lives have them on different, you know, really different steps. levels of social and emotional learning. But what can we do as educators?
We need to create a safe space that takes time and work. You know, you really need to think about what needs to go into creating a safe space for your students. You need to work on it. So maybe you do something and it doesn't work out how you think it will.
And so you have to change things up. Here are some components of the most important things that you need to do. when creating a safe space and safe climate for your students.
Active teaching of social and emotional skills. So incorporating that in your classroom management plan, being aware of it, knowing that when a student has a reaction to something that you're doing or the work or having to persevere or working with other students in the class or dealing with maybe some kind of criticism, you need to incorporate. some skills within your class that help students regulate their social and emotional competencies and mature in those social and emotional skills.
Attention to creating positive relationships, bullying prevention and intervention. This is really important. Bullying can happen anywhere and you do not want it happening in your class.
And if it does happen in your class, it is your responsibility as the teacher. to stop it, intervene, and do something about it. However, instead of it happening in your class, you really need to work on how can you prevent it.
Community building. Again, that outside bubble, what happens outside your classroom impacts what happens inside your classroom. So what those kids go home to, they bring it back into the classroom on a daily basis.
So just be aware of that. Explicit focus on understanding and... appreciating differences. So understanding and creating a space in your classroom where all students understand that everyone is different and we're going to celebrate that.
Meaningful conflict resolution. Teaching students to challenge biases and exclusions. So why are we excluding that child? Why do we want to do that? And then challenge that thinking and challenge that bias so that everyone is included.
And maybe facilitating some kind of upstander training. So we're upping our standards. Another one. popular thing is being aware of the safe element.
So research shows that the most effective social and emotional learning programs incorporate a safe element within their classroom. So what are the safe elements? It actually spells out safe.
So S stands for sequenced activities that lead in coordinating and connecting ways to skill develop. So you When you sequence your activities in your classroom, you are scaffolding for your students and connecting and coordinating those skills so that it builds on one another, right? That creates a safe classroom because your students feel safe maybe at the bottom tier and they can do something and then you move them slowly up with their abilities and what they can demonstrate.
Maybe you have some kind of transition from one activity to another. to another that gets harder and harder. That's safe for students because they feel safe within that ability level and then you're bringing them slowly to the next target and then overall towards that standard that we're working towards in our classroom. Active forms of learning. So this enables young people to practice and master new skills.
So when they're actively doing it, when they're practicing it hands-on. It helps them learn material better. And it enables them by saying and showing them, look what you can do.
Focus time. This is spent developing one or more social and emotional skills. So this is where you may have some small center time where you focus on certain social and emotional learning skills. Explicitly define and target specific skills.
So this may be. RTI time where you pull certain students and you work on specific skills. It may be a center time. It may be a time in your class where you're honing in on those specific skills.
However, all of this together is the safe elements and creates a safe classroom. So social and emotional learning in the classroom. Work on your classroom climate and social emotional learning cannot simply focus on empathy, kindness, and inclusion.
So it's got to extend beyond that. It extends into that those safe elements that we talked about. Social differences and bias underline many unsafe and exclusionary behaviors. So we need to be aware of our biases. our implicit biases that we have because this we do whether we know it or not exclude certain kids in certain ways in our classroom and again you know we talked about that in the last video in another courses about how to combat that these issues need to be discussed explicitly so again bullying why are we bullying why are we excluding a student we need to have those conversations in our classroom Appreciation for multicultural perspectives is also critical when teaching about relationship building and conflict management and community.
This helps students learn to draw on many traditions and experiences and address social division within your classroom. So this connects to anti-bias education. So what we're doing in social and emotional learning is we're prioritizing that social and emotional safety. It does support three of our four anti-bias domains which is identity, diversity, and action. This practice supports a classroom community in which students feel secure enough to engage respectfully with one another, productive identity and diversity.
This work also models actions necessary to nurture inclusive, respectful connections across lines of differences. So how do we do this? Let me talk about some of the strategies that support social and emotional learning. So the first thing would be a classroom contract. This is a contract of norms and behavior that can help define the classroom community as a socially and emotionally safe place.
Students should participate in shaping the contract. So your class, you would ask your class, what should our expectations be? And they help you shape a contract.
for their class about how they should act, what are the expectations. So they're shaping the contract, they're identifying a list of agreements about how the class members will treat one another, talk together, and so on. Issues such as identity, difference, and power should be addressed explicitly. What does that look like in our class and how are we going to handle it? For example, a contract could include listen with respect to experiences of others.
Try to understand what someone is saying before rushing to judgment or put downs of any kind are never okay. And so you may have in your mind some different contract ideas you want students to think about and develop. And so you would write out those topics and have them brainstorm what that expectation should be. And then you with the class come up with a statement about that topic using the ideas they put out there. You can also find explicit anti-bullying or community building curriculum.
So there's several that you can look into. So tribes learning community, respect for all project, steps to respect or second step, committee for children. Bullied, a student, a school, and a case that made history. A Guide to Film, I'm sorry, A Guide to the Film Bully by Lee Hesher, participating in the Mix It Up at Lunch Day. So these are different anti-bullying curriculums and community building curriculums.
And they're really good. They each, you know, they might take something like, you know. kids being bullied and then it might go into something specific like being bullied for you know being gay or or other things so it does go pretty deep and pretty specific based off of what you see students may need and a problem that you may see at your school is as kids are you know not accepting of a certain type of person or a student with a different background So this is just the introduction to social and emotional learning.
Here are the references for this lecture information. As always, please let us know if you have any questions about the material within this lecture or the materials that you can find throughout this module. We encourage you to not only watch this video, but access each of the different sources found within the module to kind of give you a holistic idea of the topic. Again, If you have any questions at all, please reach out. I'm Dr. Williams and y'all have a great day.
Bye.