Are You Social-Emotionally Savvy?

Social-Emotional Learning in Education

• Social-emotional learning (SEL) is an educational method that aims to foster social and emotional skills within school curricula.
• SEL emphasizes social and emotional skills to the same degree as other subjects, such as math, science, and reading.
• SEL began in the 1960s at the Yale School of Medicine in its Child Study Center.
• The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) was founded in 1994.
• The five main components of SEL are self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making.
• SEL is shown to be statistically associated with improving the social dynamics of schools by decreasing physical aggression and reducing bullying of students with disabilities.
• SEL is statistically linked with improving academic performance by 11 percentiles.
• Only three states (Illinois, Kansas, and Pennsylvania) have SEL standards for their K–12 curriculum.
• Conservative publications and groups have criticized social-emotional learning as a "Trojan horse" used to bring in ideas such as critical race theory, sexual orientation and gender identity, and other left-wing politics to the classroom.
• In some school districts, students are asked to enter their current mood or feelings into an app every day, as part of the social-emotional learning curriculum.
• U.S. congressman Tim Ryan introduced H.R.4626 - Social Emotional Learning for Families Act of 2019 (SELF Act) to create a grant program that supports the creation and implementation of a program in schools that helps to develop social and emotional habits.
• In April 2022, the Florida Department of Education (FDOE) published a list of mathematics instructional materials that aligned with the state's Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking (BEST) standards. Among the submitted textbooks for FDOE review, 41% were rejected for a variety of reasons including the "unsolicited addition" of SEL in mathematics.