The Importance of Social Emotional Learning in Education

What is Social Emotional Learning

Social emotional learning (SEL) is a key component of students progressing into competent, healthy adults who excel in their personal and professional life. SEL focuses on someone’s ability to manage and understand their emotions, create and maintain relationships, and develop and meet goals.

SEL starts early in a child’s developmental years and should continue throughout adulthood. The skills developed through SEL are essential to a healthy, well-rounded life, which makes it an important topic for parents and educators to understand when raising and developing young learners. When done most effectively, SEL should be taught by various people in a student’s life starting with parents and educators, extending to community members, friends, and other acquaintances.

In this article, we will highlight the importance of SEL in education and how to successfully implement it at home and in the classroom.

Benefits and Importance of Social Emotional Learning

SEL is a key aspect of a child’s development, creating a competent individual who is prepared to tackle lifes many challenges with tact, emotional intelligence, and strength. Below are some of the many benefits of engaging students in social emotional learning environments:

Improved Performance in the Classroom: Students who engage in SEL programs are proven to have enhanced performance in the classroom. According to Edutopia, SEL improves academic performance by an average of eleven (11) percentile points.
Increased Confidence: SEL programs boost student confidence in and out of the classroom by equipping them with the skills to identify their own strengths.

Better Collaboration Skills: SEL promotes group learning and individuals using each other as sounding boards for finding better solutions faster. This is a key skill for those entering the STEM workforce.

Ability to Better Cope with Anxiety and Stress: SEL programs help individuals better understand their emotions and how to healthily address life’s challenges. In The Circle Educations article Top 6 Benefits of Social-Emotional Learning in the Classroom, they talk about how the pandemic increased awareness of the need for students to have coping mechanisms that help them maintain and strengthen their mental health.

Social Emotional Learning in Schools

Students spend roughly 30 to 40 percent of their week in school. This high percentage highlights the hours of opportunity educators have to impact a students education and life. Regardless of grade level, educators can and should be implementing SEL lessons into their classroom to help students build key life skills. The idea of implementing SEL can be daunting at first; however, the positive impact it has on students makes it worth the initial risk!

Here are some execution ideas of educators looking to implement SEL with students for the first time:

Mindfulness Exercises: In an era of technology and constant stimulation, it is easy to go throughout our daily tasks without proper intentions. Through mindfulness exercises, students can center themselves in the moment and go into their day and learn with more focus and intent. At STEM Sports®, we start each curricula with a Mindfulness Matters exercise focused around students setting their intentions of the STEM lesson and highlighting their desired outcome, which leads to increased engagement and success.
Group Learning Activities: Collaborative learning experiences help students develop communication, problem-solving, and conflict resolution skills essential to their success in the workforce and personal life. This execution can be used in another classroom lesson, such as STEM, while giving students exposure to SEL concepts.
Promote the Creation of SMART Goals: SEL highlights the need for individuals to create goals and effectively work toward them until they are achieved. At the beginning of the school year or the start of the new semester, educators can promote students to create SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goals, which can be periodically checked in on throughout the school year to track progress and align on what needs to be done to achieve the goal.

Supporting Diverse Learnings

Every student is unique in their personality, background, mental health, learning style, and current academic skill set. As educators, our goal is to create a safe classroom environment where every student is set up to succeed socially and academically. SEL programs are an effective way to ensure all students feel supported and develop the skills they need to continue on a positive track into adulthood. SEL learning is not only beneficial for diverse learning styles in the classroom, it is also beneficial for other students to better understand their classmates and see that everyone is unique, which is not a bad thing!

To learn more about equity and SEL, click here and read an article written by Casel.

Using STEM Sports® to Promotion Social Emotional Learning

SEL programs, which are essential to student success, can easily and effectively be weaved into existing classroom curricula. STEM Sports® curricula uses hands-on, interactive sports lessons to teach students complex STEM concepts. In each lesson, students work together to better understand a different area of STEM, which is connected to a real-life sports scenario. This curricula allows students to improve their STEM literacy and improve their 21st century skills that are promoted throughout SEL programs.

If you are an educator looking to facilitate cross-curricular learning of STEM and SEL, click here to explore STEM Sports® current curricula offerings.

Lauren Chiangpradit