How to Incorporate Student Feedback to Improve SEL

Social and emotional learning (SEL) is often reduced to surface-level check-ins and scripted lessons that fail to match the complexity of students’ lived emotional experiences. The disability rights mantra that gained prominence in the 1960s comes to mind: “Nothing about us without us,” which feels especially urgent in this context. For educators, the challenge is clear: How do we redesign SEL not just for students, but with them?

Why Advisory Programs Often Fall Flat

As a high school student, Krish has experienced uninspiring advisory sessions. Schools often use materials about empathy that feel more performative than personal. When advisers improvise or skip the curriculum, student experiences vary widely. Some may find a trusted mentor; others experience advisory as an awkward, inconsistent space. It’s hard for students to have a sense of belonging when their core experience of community is underdeveloped or misaligned with their needs.

This lack of meaning affects teachers too. In almost every school where Laura has worked, advisory has looked similar for teachers. An administrator provides curriculum (often prebuilt) and asks teachers to facilitate it. Because relationship-building with students is paramount, teachers often have leeway to ignore the curriculum and build their own workshops. As a result, students’ experience in their advisory is entirely dependent on who their adviser is.

Teachers often report feeling lost—unsure of what their role is and unprepared to teach social and emotional skills or executive function skills. Advisory then becomes little more than an unstructured bonding experience.

The truth is, no one is trained to be an adviser, but every adviser brings unique skills and passions. At our school, some teachers are passionate about teaching car maintenance and financial literacy, while others are more interested in time management or cultivating school spirit. Older students, having learned much from their own experiences, are often interested in mentoring.

The challenge: How can we (or any school) leverage our strengths and interests to build a strong SEL program for students?

Refocus Your SEL Approach Using 5 Key Principles

We kept the following principles in mind as we developed a plan to reshape our SEL program.

1. Leverage your skills. Instead of expecting all advisers to be well-rounded experts, we redefined their role as facilitators. They’ll use a provided framework that defines the skill areas of focus and collaborate with seniors to coordinate workshop facilitators (including other advisers, teachers, administrators, invited speakers, parents, or seniors) so that advisory becomes a community effort.

2. Question your assumptions. Apply a design-thinking approach. Ask: What do our students actually want to learn? What skills do they feel they’re missing? What’s developmentally appropriate for each grade level? What has worked at other schools, and what lessons can we borrow from nontraditional SEL settings (e.g., theater or sports)?

3. Rely on street data. Our students completed surveys (using Google Forms), which revealed clear needs. Ninth-grade students recognized a lack of executive function skills. Tenth-grade students desired stronger emotional connections with peers. Eleventh-grade students wanted to learn about taxes and broader real-world adult skills. Twelfth-grade students were eager to mentor younger students. Rather than building the program from scratch, we listened to these students’ requests.

4. Make students drivers and leaders in SEL. For SEL to matter, students must help shape it. At our school, we prioritize student voice. Every Friday, we met during lunch to design an advisory model grounded in students’ lived experiences. When you have something that was designed by students for the student population, the impact is far more effective.

5. Provide a structured approach. Rather than viewing “social and emotional skills” monolithically, we focused our program on discrete skills for each grade. This allowed us to design workshops that anyone, including older students, could run.

Our Proposed Curriculum

We started development in fall 2024 and met weekly to bring the project to completion. It will be implemented in the 2025–26 school year:

9th Grade

Focus: Executive Function and Impulse Control

Workshops: Taking Notes, Managing Group Projects, Presentation Skills, Finding Internships, Time Management, Research Skills, Professional Emails, Using Office Hours

Special Project: Building a Practice of Council and Storytelling

10th Grade

Focus: Interpersonal Skills and Empathy

Workshops: Managing Stress, Growth Mindset, Identity and Experience, Conflict Resolution, Giving and Receiving Feedback, Maintaining Healthy Relationships, Sex Literacy

Special Project: Small Acts of Community Service

11th Grade

Focus: Real-World Skills and Self-Reflection

Workshops: Budgeting Basics, Resume-Writing, Saving and Investing, Cooking and Baking, Car Maintenance, Renting an Apartment, Navigating the Health Care System, Basic First Aid, Legal Basics, Laundry 101

Special Project: Self-Reflection Journal (maintained throughout the year)

12th Grade

Focus: Mentorship and Giving Back

Workshops: Instead of attending their own workshops, seniors must lead, facilitate, and participate in workshops with other grade levels.

Special Project: In addition to leading workshops, seniors spend some of their advisory time in college counseling.

Piloting played an important role in the development process. This past spring, we piloted workshops for ninth-grade students on finance and other topics of interest.

Developmentally Appropriate Programming

We aimed to give each grade what they needed most. Advisory groups will meet twice per week—once for skill-based workshops, and again for a special project aligned with grade-level goals where students apply the knowledge they acquired in workshops.

For example, 10th-grade students, focusing on interpersonal skills and empathy, will complete service projects on campus or in the broader community that allow them to connect with diverse perspectives. Eleventh-grade students will be learning to be functional adults while preparing for the college application process. Keeping a journal throughout the year will support them in “adulting” and college application readiness while fostering self-awareness and personal insight.

Providing a Tool kit for Advisers

To better prepare teachers, who often aren’t formally trained to be SEL-informed advisers, we created a detailed tool kit for effective advisory facilitation. This guide was informed by both student voice and research in adolescent development from Carol Dweck’s “growth mindset,” John Sweller’s Cognitive Load Theory, and Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory.

The guide includes facilitation strategies, sample dialogue, developmental theory, and clear intentions aligned to our grade-level goals. We also used our internal messaging app (Slack) to create a channel as a hotline for advisers.

Reflection and Evaluation

Having eyes on the ground is important in evaluating whether the program is working. This is where it’s especially powerful to have an administrative/student partnership. As the upper school director, Laura can check in with her faculty to understand the adult perspective on how advisory is going, while Krish can check in with the students in his role as designer of the SEL advisory program.

While we can’t outline what advisory should look like in your high school, we’ve learned that an effective SEL program should be personalized and meaningful.

We gained these takeaways from revamping our program:

1. Don’t assume your current program is working.
2. Involve input from all stakeholders when designing (don’t forget about the parents!).
3. Design with specificity and a developmentally informed focus.
4. Help facilitators understand what SEL skills are and why they are important.
5. Think of SEL as a community effort, not a class.

It’s not easy to get this right. We’ll continue to learn from this process and evolve our program.