Social-Emotional Competency Series: Responsible Decision Making
We are wrapping up our social emotional competency series with the final piece of the SEL framework, responsible decision making in the classroom. This valuable skill is important for both students and teachers as it helps everyone learn how to make smart choices, which leads to better learning experiences and outcomes!
Responsible decision making can be combined with the 4 other competencies of SEL to create a well-rounded, happy, and productive classroom environment. It takes self-awareness and self-management to make decisions. Social awareness and relationship skills also contribute to how we decide things.
To see what the other competencies are all about be sure to check out the other posts in the series:
Self-Awareness
Self-Management
Social Awareness
Relationship Skills
Now let’s dive into responsible decision making!
What is Responsible Decision Making?
CASEL defines responsible decision making as the ability to make personal choices for things like behavior and social interactions across a variety of settings.
Contributing factors for making decisions includes considering things like safety, risk, benefits and consequences.
To demonstrate responsible decision making, students need to learn skills in critical thinking, open-mindedness, sound judgement, reason, problem solving and identifying solutions. In order to make good choices, they also need to consider not just themselves, but others as well. It is important to be able to understand how your choices affect both yourself and others.
Because the decisions we make can be far reaching, it’s important to have the wisdom on how to practice intentionality with our decisions. That’s what makes responsible decision making so important.
Why Responsible Decision Making is Important in the Classroom
According to Psychology Today, some sources say we make as many as 35,000 choices in a single day! Choices and decisions come in all shapes and sizes. Some are small, like what color shirt to wear or type of cereal to eat. Some are big, like where to go to college or what job offer to accept. And then there are all the ones in between. Students are making decisions in the classroom all day long!
Some choices are easy. You can clearly see the consequences (good and bad) and know exactly what to do.
Many choices are not easy to make for various reasons. Emotions can steer the decision instead of logical reasoning. Maybe we feel deeply one choice would make us happy, but we know logically it wouldn’t be healthy. Sometimes both options presented aren’t desirable. Sometimes the choices or options aren’t exactly clear. There might be big risks. Decisions might cause a big change with unknown results. Facing big decisions can lead to stress, so it’s important to have skills to tackle them. Drawing upon social emotional skills helps us to do this.
Learning this SEL skill prevents blindly jumping into something with little thought and having a big mess to clean up afterward. It saves us from going down the wrong path or taking the wrong actions with others. In addition, it helps us make better decisions in managing our time and tasks. It affects our relationships, both personal and professional. Responsible decision making keeps us safe, healthy, and satisfied.
Benefits of Responsible Decision Making For Students And The Classroom
There is ample opportunity to teach responsible decision making in the classroom because classes face many choices throughout the school day. Individually students make choices on how they understand and follow rules. Classmates decide on how to treat their peers. Kids make choices about how to manage their time, when to actively listen, who to sit next to (or not sit next to), and so much more.
Students can learn how to make choices that not only benefit themselves but also the entire class. Kids learn how to work within a community. Choosing certain behaviors over others teaches students how their actions affect their own learning, as well as the learning experience of others.
Making choices on how to follow rules and social norms helps students develop a sense of ethics, leadership, and cooperation.
Figuring out how to put thought into making decisions helps students learn how to manage themselves and avoid making avoidable mistakes. Learning how to decide between two things helps classes analyze a situation and solve problems.
All in all, learning to make decisions within a classroom setting sets students up for success later on in life because they will be prepared to make choices as they navigate situations and challenges. The classroom is a foundation to build these social emotional skills.
Responsible Decision Making for Teachers in the Classroom
Teachers can have a great influence on their students when it comes to responsible decision making. There are many avenues to help students make smart choices, from modeling making choices, walking kids through the decision making process to teaching specific SEL skills.
Let’s see how teachers can position themselves to teach their class responsible decision making.
Teaching Responsible Decision Making
How do you make decisions? Jump in feet first? Use your intuition? Or are you very calculated? We all have different ways and styles when it comes to picking something. It probably depends on the choice, who it affects, the weight of the consequences, and what we value.
As adults we probably learned different ways to make decisions. We’ve learned how to decipher information, weigh the pros and cons, seek counseling, etc. We might know when it’s okay to dive in and when to take time to come to a conclusion. We’ve also typically learned how to move forward after making a wrong decision. We’re aware of contributing factors that help narrow down our options. Kids and teens haven’t figured all of this out. Most younger people make decisions that are in the moment without thinking about other factors.
It could be 20 degrees but they decide to wear shorts because that’s what they like. They could choose to take the last cookie that belonged to someone else just because it looked good. Obviously going through life like this can bring unwanted results. The solution to this is to give kids the skills they need to make decisions, which often means teaching kids to simply stop and think.
Let’s check out some strategies.
Strategies For Teaching Responsible Decision Making
The Responsible Decision Making Model
An effective way to teach responsible decision making with students is to present the responsible decision making model and break down the steps into greater detail. This activity does just that.
Steps:
- Review the responsible decision making model which is: identify the problem, analyze the situation, brainstorm solutions, solve the problem, consider ethical responsibility, evaluate and reflect
- Present a scenario that presents a problem or a decision that needs to be made, some ideas (suggested to start with one scenario and all the steps as an entire class and then go through rest of the scenarios and steps in small groups)
- Child was invited to a friends house but needs to pick up room
- Child wants the last cookie but so does their sibling
- Student has a big project and a test tomorrow and needs to get everything done
- Student wants to be in the school play but rehearsal is at the same time as their soccer practice
- Have discussion to identify the problem or choices
- Ask guided questions to help analyze the situation
- What are the different options available
- How do you think the student feels about choice A vs choice B
- What are the pros and cons of the choices
- How would the different choices affect others
- Brainstorm solutions by making a list
- Instruct students to pick a solution or choice they feel is the best one for the scenario
- Discuss their responsibility to themselves or others with the choice they made
- Why is it important to make a choice for yourself?
- Why is it important to consider others?
- What responsibilities do you have to yourself and others?
- Wrap up activity by discussing what went well, what didn’t work, how they felt about their choices
These steps can also be carried over into classroom wide activities. As choices or decisions come up for the class go through this process to help come up with a solution.
T.H.I.N.K. Before You Speak
This acronym reminds kids to stop and think before they speak to make sure the words they are deciding to use are True, Helpful, Inspiring, Necessary, and/or Kind.
Multiple Solution Problems
Present kids with multiple solution problems. For example, 2 + _ + _ = 10. There are multiple solutions for this simple problem (2+5+3, 2+8+0, etc.), and talk to students about how in life, problems often have multiple solutions too. Give students examples of real-world problems, and have them work in groups to come up with more than one possible solution.
Advice to a Friend
Give students an example of a decision or problem that kids their age might often face. Have them give that person “advice” on how to solve the problem or what choice to make.
With thought and intentionality, students can learn valuable decision making skills that will help them grow into being responsible students and adults.
3 Comments
I wish I had seen your blog earlier. This is wonderful.
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Thank you. Need more on- ways to help students to make informed decisions.