The top challenge to teaching social-emotional learning is that students’ emotional needs feel “beyond the scope” of what educators believe schools can handle, writes Marc Brackett, founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a professor at Yale University’s Child Study Center, in an Education Week essay.
These challenges are near the top: difficulty integrating SEL into academic subjects, limited bandwidth, insufficient materials and professional development, and the pressure of standardized testing.
Teachers today are managing classrooms filled with anxiety, disengagement, impulsivity, and chronic stress. Many are exhausted themselves. And when we tell them, “Now teach SEL, too,” it can sound like one more thing added to an already impossible list.
We say students’ emotional needs are too much to handle, so we do not teach the skills. But because we do not teach the skills early, intentionally, and systematically, those needs grow larger, louder, and more disruptive. Then we say the needs are too much to handle.
When students do not learn how to deal with their feelings, those emotions show up as distraction, defiance, bullying, disengagement, and absenteeism. They show up in the nurse’s office, the counselor’s office, the principal’s office, and eventually in test scores, school climate, and teacher burnout.
Emotions exist in school. The question is whether we will give students and adults the skills to work with them wisely.
I often ask educators, “How many of your students receive a comprehensive education in emotions from pre-K through high school?” The response is usually stunned silence. Then I ask, “How much did you learn about emotions in your own schooling?” Silence, again.
This is an indictment of how little we have prepared the adults who are expected to support children.
That is why SEL must start early, involve families who must deal with their children’s emotions, and be built into the daily life of school. It does not have to be burdensome. SEL works best when it is focused, concrete, and teachable, helping children and adults build concrete emotional intelligence skills: recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing, and regulating them effectively.
Time spent developing emotional intelligence will ease the burden on teachers—reducing behavior problems and enhancing classroom climate.
To ensure that evidence-based SEL is integrated into learning environments in ways that are focused, practical, and effective, school and district leaders, in partnership with educators, must:
- Take a proactive rather than reactive approach in school. Do not turn teachers into therapists. School leaders must work with staff to build emotionally safe environments and embed evidence-based curricula so students learn skills before problems escalate.
- Encourage teachers to discuss how emotions already live inside the curriculum with students. Literature is full of jealousy, courage, grief, and hope. History is filled with fear, pride, humiliation, empathy, and moral outrage. Science requires curiosity and the ability to tolerate frustration. Math requires persistence. Writing requires vulnerability. Emotion is an inherent part of learning and is what makes learning engaging and meaningful.
- Teach educators how emotional intelligence is foundational to learning. Leaders should help teachers understand that students’ attention, memory, decision-making, motivation, and persistence are all shaped by emotion. The ability to manage frustration, sustain attention, ask for help, and make responsible decisions is what allows academic learning to happen.
- Offer teachers science-backed tools that are simple, usable, and adaptable. For example, in RULER, the Mood Meter gives students and adults a shared language for emotions. Our free How We Feel app extends that work by teaching hundreds of feeling words and offering research-backed strategies to help people manage emotions in everyday life.
- School and district leaders must provide teachers with the time, coaching, modeling, and support to learn emotional skills. One workshop will not do it. SEL works best when professional learning is ongoing and when school leaders are part of it.
The most common mistake we see is treating social-emotional learning as a burden placed on educators rather than a support for them. Done poorly, teaching SEL can become one more manual, one more initiative. Done well, it reduces the emotional chaos that makes teaching harder.
Children should not have to reach crisis before they are taught how emotions work. We should teach emotion skills before students are overwhelmed by anxiety, conflict, rejection, and failure.
And families must be invited into the process, not blamed. Parents do not need to become experts. It provides a common language.
The fact that teachers feel unprepared is the clearest argument for improving SEL. Students’ social-emotional needs are at the center of education. If we want children to learn, belong, persist, collaborate, and thrive, we must teach them the skills that make those outcomes possible.
Teaching social-emotional skills must start early, not after everything else is handled.
Education Week
