Social emotional learning is big right now, and for good reason! There are so many benefits to incorporating SEL into your classroom. This approach improves emotional regulation and behaviors, promotes responsible decision making, and improves social interactions. And of course boosts academic performance in a nurturing and collaborative environment.
While there is every good reason to teach social emotional learning concepts to your students you might be feeling like it’s one more thing to add to your long to-do list. Totally understandable! You’re a busy teacher.
While social emotional learning is a curriculum to teach, it’s also a way to live! In other words, instead of teaching SEL units during the day you can naturally make it routine by fostering an SEL culture in your classroom.
An environment that has this mindset can produce the same benefits without creating extra work for you. It’s also a great way to introduce social emotional instruction if you plan on formally teaching SEL too!
Want to see how you can turn your classroom into an SEL classroom? You can do it with these easy tips!
SEL - A Quick Refresher
Before we get into the tips let’s have a quick overview of social emotional learning. So what is it?
According to Casel.org, social emotional learning is an educational approach to learning and growing as a human. Both children and adults learn skills, attitudes and apply knowledge to develop their identities, manage emotions, have empathy for others, achieve goals, build relationships and make good choices.
Teaching these skills gets students into the zone of learning because they can better manage their behaviors, improve their mental wellness and acquire positive attitudes and experiences in school, at home and throughout the community.
SEL is broken up into 5 competencies. These 5 areas break down social emotional learning into a very doable framework for educators that can be implemented in a variety of settings. Classroom climate is at the heart of this framework too.
Let’s look at what these 5 core SEL competencies are before we get into tips for creating an SEL climate in the classroom.
Self-Awareness
This competency teaches learners to become aware of things within themselves. This includes one’s own emotions, thoughts, strengths, limitations, interests and purpose. This competency also helps students understand how behaviors are shaped and influenced by things within themselves.
Self-Management
This competency teaches skills and strategies to help students manage their behaviors, emotions and thoughts. This includes managing stress, planning and organizing, finding motivation, and practicing self-discipline.
Social Awareness
This competency teaches how to become aware of others around a student. Learning about differences like cultures, backgrounds, and perspectives are part of social awareness. Students learn skills like understanding other perspectives, showing empathy and concern, finding gratitude, and accepting social norms in different settings.
Relationship Skills
This competency teaches essential skills for forming relationships, working with others and being a good friend. Students learn skills like communication, resolving conflict, work as a team, sharing ideas, and giving support.
Responsible Decision Making
This competency teaches children and adolescents how to make choices that are caring and constructive for themselves and others around them. Examples include evaluating consequences, finding solutions, being safe, making reasonable judgements and looking out for their own and other’s well-being.
So how can you naturally create an SEL climate using these competencies in your classroom? Let’s explore!
The Making of a Social Emotional Classroom
They say work smarter not harder and that’s exactly what you’ll be doing when you create an SEL classroom. The day in and out feel and routine are all about following social emotional learning competencies.
It’s not all about creating additional lessons or teaching formal SEL instruction. It is more interpersonal. An SEL climate is all about how we communicate and interact with one another. It’s about how we go about working through challenges. It’s how we conduct ourselves on a regular basis.
If you already teach social emotional learning lessons, creating a culture of SEL reinforces what you’re instructing. It provides great opportunities for students to apply the skills they are learning.
Promote Self-Awareness In Your Students
Self-awareness isn’t always innate, especially in kids. This subject can be difficult to teach however because it’s an internal soft skill, not an external hard skill. Like kids grasp the idea that using a loud voice inside can be disruptive (hard skill) but not grasp that a loud voice makes their desk neighbor scared (soft skill).
Effectively teaching self-awareness can start with you, and in doing so, creates an SEL climate in the classroom. The types of things you say or questions you ask can promote self-awareness. What you model to the class can also trigger self-awareness thoughts in students.
Let’s say you want learners to list out their strengths. You could write out a bunch of talents on the board and have the class pick from that list. Or you could do things like label strengths in your students as you see them in action. You could ask, “what do you think you’re good at.” You could model, “I enjoy working with kids and my interest helps me be a good teacher.”
Easy SEL Tips To Try:
- Model your own thought processes to the class by thinking out loud
- Give praise to students for things you see in the moment and encourage classmates to do the same
- Offer opportunities for students to try new things to discover their gifts, challenges, preferences and interests
- Build trust between classmates so students feel safe to take risks
- Explore new skills together and reflect on the experience of everyone
- Make reflective questioning a norm
- Use positive affirmations to boost confidence
- Regularly label emotions and pair it with the situation (“I see many smiles and hear laughter after reading that silly book. Or I am hearing worried voices when the fire alarm went off)
Develop Self-Management Skills
When it comes to self-management many times youth need to learn how to manage their behaviors or emotions, use skills to get regulated, or realize they need to use the skills they already know but don’t want to use.
We aren’t perfect and don’t always know how to act or feel at times. Helping students with self-management skills doesn’t mean you’ll have a perfectly well behaved class all day every day. Creating a SEL classroom climate can increase those moments and bring out the best in your class though.
Easy SEL Tips to Try:
- Create a daily routine that allows students to have breaks, movement and other self-regulation activities in their day
- Make classroom expectations simple and clear
- Express the things you see and hear as they are happening (I hear many friends talking right now during quiet work time)
- Provide visuals of solutions to common problems that students can refer to if they need help with self-management
- Reflect on how kids can be in charge of their actions and emotions by saying, “How can we fix that?”
- Help students draw connections between their emotions and actions they can take to get back into the zone of learning, (When you feel frustrated at the math problem taking deep breaths or getting a drink of water helps you not feel frustrated)
Boost Social Awareness
Did you know there is an ego-centric stage in child development? Most often it’s between the ages of 2-7 where children naturally don’t look outside of themselves. The ability to see how their actions impact others or consider differing viewpoints is low. It’s why sharing toys is hard at this age.
Eventually kids do open up to the world around them but they still need to learn how to become socially aware. A social and emotional friendly classroom is the perfect spot to boost social awareness!
Easy SEL Tips to Try:
- Model empathy by validating your students feelings and emotions
- Express ways to help classmates when you see a struggle
- Point out the actions of others (without putting them on the spot) and how it affects others like (when we put our materials away in the right spot our friends can easily find them again)
- Give opportunities for group classwork and incorporate time for reflecting on working together. Discuss things like similarities and differences or how the group felt working together
- Show respectful actions like understanding personal space or waiting to speak
- Celebrate differences
- Emphasize multiple ways to complete the same task
- Incorporate texts & discussions about social topics like race, LGBTQ, various family dynamics, cultures, etc.
Encourage Relationship Skills
Relationships, whether it’s with a best friend or an acquaintance are much more enjoyable when interactions are healthy. When you create a social and emotional culture in your classroom, peers will naturally build trust and rapport with one another.
The entire class may not become BFF’s, but when they have a mutual respect and appreciation for one another being together greatly improves the learning environment. An environment of sharing, cooperation, helping each other is just better!
Easy SEL Tips to Try:
- Include connecting activities, like show and tell or ice breakers into the routine
- Foster a spirit of being a helping hand to each other as much as possible
- Give time for “turn and talk” where students can turn to their neighbor to discuss a lesson or answer a question
- Emphasize that the classroom is a safe space for everyone and respect is a must
- Let students work in groups
- Mix students up to expand friendship circles
- Incorporate moments where the class can have fun and simply enjoy each other’s company
Build Responsibile Decision Making Habits
Making good choices is an instruction young people probably hear daily. Sometimes it’s easy to make a decision. Other times it’s not. This is where adults step in and either decide for kids or guide them through the decision making process. Guidance is typically the better option.
How do you work this concept into an SEL climate? Much of it has to do with how things are presented and communicated.
Classroom wide there are probably decisions that need to be made daily. These are great teaching opportunities to encourage responsible decision making that students can then pick-up for themselves. Individually then you can help adolescents make choices because they are familiar with how decisions are made.
Easy SEL Tips to Try:
- Model making choices by labeling options and consequences to both options
- When regular lessons call for solving problems present the lesson in the way that incorporates the decision making process: ID problem, gather information, brainstorm solutions, look at consequences, make a choice, take action
- Offer choices throughout the day for simple things
- Provide time to let students or class think through their decisions
- Avoid stepping in to make a decision for students
- Model talking through making a choice as a class and individually with students
Are you ready to transform your classroom climate?
Evidence shows that social emotional learning increases academic performance, improves mental wellness and behaviors and builds important social skills. SEL also creates a more equitable learning environment in which to learn and grow.
If you want to reap the benefits that SEL offers, try creating an SEL climate in your classroom! To learn more, DOWNLOAD MY FREEE GUIDE TO BECOMING A SOCIAL EMOTIONAL TEACHER.
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