Social Emotional Learning in Schools: The Importance of Educator Competence

Abstract

As professionals charged with fostering student learning and well-being, educators—school leaders, teachers, school counselors, preservice teachers—should demonstrate social emotional competence. In this study, we apply the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning’s framework—self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, responsible decision-making—to ascertain what we know from scholarship about educators’ SEL competence. We conclude with guiding principles for training programs and professional learning opportunities for strengthening educators’ understanding of their own SEL to improve daily pedagogical practice and ensure each school-wide initiative around SEL drives seamless strategies for attaining school improvement outcomes.

Transformative Social and Emotional Learning (T-SEL): The Experiences of Teenagers Participating in Volunteer Club Activities in the Community

“…The importance of these non-academic forms of education have been emphasized by various authors, who emphasize character education [ 31 ], moral education [ 32 ], forms of preventing various risk behaviors [ 33 ], and the integration of feelings for the fulfilment of tasks [ 34 ]. The perspective of CASEL competencies in the context of T-SEL seems to have a wider applicability as it is useful not only for understanding various components and dimensions of the five competencies but also for guiding interventions both among teachers [ 5 , 35 ] and in the community [ 36 , 37 ].…”

Perceptions of the <i>Book Creator</i>’s role as a forefront of SEL during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…the possibility of filming and attaching a video clip directly to the BC by pressing a single button, 2. recording a comment and/or an auditory explanation, and 3. a built-in automatic voice detector that recognizes several languages, converts the voice to a text. The BC's features enable collaboration and peer learning (Anthony et al, 2020;Gimbert et al, 2021;Lashley & Halverson, 2021). An additional feature is that the BC enables continuous assessment throughout the academic term, as opposed to a singular, onetime assessment, such as a summative assignment.…”

“…The BC content is open to all viewers in the course; they can observe it, examine, and assess it. Thus, the BC enables collaboration and peer learning as well (Anthony et al, 2020;Gimbert et al, 2021;Lashley & Halverson, 2021). In addition, the features of the BC enable continuous evaluation by receiving personal, detailed feedback via audio or video recording by the lecturer.…”

“…One of the competences of SEL is collaboration (Gimbert et al, 2021). Some define it as teamwork (NCSL, 2021), developing pro-socialist relations systems (Weissberg et al, 2015) or establishing constructive relationships (Pekrun, 2017) as part of relationship skills and social awareness (Anthony et al, 2022).…”

“…This type of collaboration might aid in tackling similar challenges and normalizing the challenges that they themselves face during the learning process, as well as reaching higher academic goals (Abramczyk & Jurkowski, 2020). Encouraging socialization processes while learning, i.e., this process, provides an opportunity for students to experience some of the competences of SEL (Gimbert et al, 2021;Hart et al, 2020;Pekrun, 2017;Weissberg et al, 2015) and enable them to achieve academic goals (Hart et al, 2020;Merkel, 2021). This is in light of the fact that research indicates that collaboration is more effective than interpersonal competition and individual effort to succeed in the course of study in higher education institutions (Gillies, 2016).…”