Blogs on Social and Emotional Learning

If your family is like most families, you took a few moments on Thanksgiving to give thanks for your food, the company of those around the table, and for the good things that happened in the past year. Many of you did this even though it may have not been such a good year, and perhaps you lost people who had been around the table only a year ago, so full of life.

The most important part of any social-emotional learning (SEL) or social-emotional character development curriculum (SECD) is skill development. But the formal lessons only serve to introduce the skills. Whether or not the skills are learned and generalized depends on the pedagogical procedure used.

Student stress, bullying and depression are some of the most critical issues facing our schools and communities today. In the past five years alone the rate of depression has doubled among youth aged seven to 17. Likewise, 77 percent of students report having been bullied mentally, verbally or physically in school. Most everybody knows someone who has had to deal with repercussions of this.

Bullying takes many forms, including intimidation in classrooms by peers, or at times, by teachers. Intentional or not, when students don't feel safe to participate in the classroom, their learning is severely impaired. Even the most stellar curriculum cannot get through when students are worried about negative reactions when they participate in class.