Activating High School Students’ Social and Emotional Competencies

In just about every Portrait of a Graduate for high school that I’ve seen, social-emotional competence and character (SECC) ranks at or near the top of the list. At the same time, we hear more and more about the crisis of mental health in our teenagers. Teachers often feel they don’t have time to focus on SECC, but it can be activated in our instructional strategies and through our subject-area content. This article will focus on instructional strategies that can be integrated with all content areas.

1. Reflecting on and Being Accountable for Classroom Behavior

High school students often don’t realize how they appear to their classmates, teachers, and other adults. While this is an expected developmental phenomenon, it can persist without correction. Here is a set of ratings you can have students do at the end of class, as you wish. I recommend a simple three-point scale: Very Good, Satisfactory, and Needs Improvement.

The items for reflection can include: “I… was courteous, was cooperative, displayed emotional maturity, exercised good judgment, showed caring, took initiative, assumed responsibility for my own learning, used good problem-solving skills, handled constructive criticism (and not so constructive criticism) well, asked good questions, was a reliable partner to my classmates.”

After students complete this, ask them to go back and circle any response where they feel their classmates might disagree with them and areas that they might focus on improving. When they come in the next day, have them review their previous reflection and determine what area they will focus on improving, starting today.

2. Buddying and Mentoring

Dr. Raymond Pasi has been a principal of two high schools. In each one, he and his staff have created a structure in which all ninth graders have an 11th-grade mentor, and all 10th graders have a 12th-grade mentor. All students are exposed to the tasks and responsibilities of being a mentor and a mentee. Students rise to the responsibility and greatly look forward to becoming a mentor in 11th grade.

Student mentor groups meet at lunch time to discuss issues with mentees and problem-solve ways to address them. So many social and emotional skills and positive character attributes are activated by this structure. But you don’t need to be as comprehensive. Look in your classrooms for as many mentoring and buddying opportunities as possible, particularly for students who seem disengaged or struggling.

3. Up the Stakes to Improve the Work

Many adolescents experience the myth of the imaginary audience, whereby they imagine that everyone can see all of their foibles and flaws in exaggerated ways—it’s what makes one pimple or blemish feel like an existential crisis. But you can use this to your and your students’ advantage by creating as many opportunities as possible for their work and assignments to be shared and seen by others.

When students just submit their work to you, they often don’t check it or think much about how you will perceive what they have turned in. If they know their work is going to be displayed in the classroom, posted on a class website, shared with parents in an electronic newsletter, exchanged with students in your or other classes, etc., they will activate their own self-monitoring and self-regulation skills to a greater degree. Even if you establish a norm of only posting or sharing 10 to 25 percent of work at random, the possibility of being selected will bring out the best in your students.

This is an approach that has one specific outcome: It helps and encourages students to put forth their best work. Their worry about being judged is likely to push them to put more effort into their work, so the product is something they can be proud of. What happens in reality is that they get praised for their good work, and this begins to set up more of an internal dynamic to put more oomph into their assignments and projects.

4. Effective Group Participation

One of the most essential social and emotional skills is effective group participation, particularly because so much of what happens in work life, civic life, family life, and, of course, school life depends on how a group, team, chorus, band, committee, club, etc., functions. Start by having a conversation with your students about the characteristics and skills of someone who is a valuable group member and someone who is not. Codify this as a set of “Thou Shalts” and “Thou Shalt Nots” that you want students to refer to whenever they participate in groups.

That’s not sufficient, however. It’s also essential to discuss the norm of helping group members who are having a hard time to improve their functioning. Help students use a problem-solving protocol to constructively help those with difficulty improve their group participation. This norm ensures that all students understand they have a contribution to make, and the group needs and wants them to do so.

5. Knowing When It’s Time to STOP

There are many times in classroom and group situations when things do not go as planned. For those occasions, students and teachers should feel empowered to take out a stop sign (literally) and make a statement with this structure:

S = Share your feelings.

T = Tell what you think the problem is.

O = Outline the goal.

P = Pose this question: How do you think we can solve this problem?

A STOP can be called by a teacher or a student. Here are examples of each:

Teacher: I don’t feel good about how this class is going. It seems like a lot of people aren’t working and contributing. I would like to see us put our time in this class to good use so you can all learn the material well. How do you think we can solve this problem?

Student: I’m angry. The other people in my group aren’t listening to what I have to say. I would like a chance to speak and be heard in my group. How do you think we can solve this problem?

Bringing STOP into your classroom helps turn ongoing problems into shared problem-solving opportunities. Sometimes the discussion doesn’t generate an initial answer; other times, the solution discussed and decided on does not work as hoped. STOP can be invoked again to start another round of problem-solving.

In any subject area, you can use these instructional strategies as part of your everyday pedagogy, and by doing so, you will be helping your high school students’ social and emotional competencies and character grow.