What is social and emotional learning?
Social and emotional learning (SEL) is defined in the industry as the process of acquiring the competencies, skills, and attitudes to recognize and manage emotions, develop caring and concern for others, establish positive relationships, make responsible decisions, and handle challenging situations.
Why build an early SEL foundation?
Early childhood and adolescence constitute periods of maximal sensitivity of the brain to experience and the environment. Enriched social environments and social interactions have a positive effect on brain maturation as well as on cognitive, social, and emotional development at all ages.
A growing body of scientific research indicates that students' social and emotional competence not only predicts their school success but also predicts a range of important outcomes in late adolescence and adulthood, including high school graduation, postsecondary completion, employment, financial stability, physical health, and overall mental health and well-being. (Diamond, 2014)
Join us
SEL is central to student success
Research and practice show why social and emotional learning belongs at the heart of education.
The types of skills required to care for and advocate for oneself and others - self-regulation, responsibility, empathy, and discipline - are becoming increasingly central to the work of schools and teachers and increasingly relevant to students' lifelong success.
Emotional intelligence translates into better grades for students. Studies have shown that people who are more in touch with their emotions are more likely to be better at their jobs and have better health and well-being outcomes.
Education must pursue a grander goal: an education for human flourishing. Such an education will ideally give equal weightage to knowledge acquisition and use and pay attention to developing pro-social aptitudes to allow the individual to lead a life they have reason to value and cherish.
According to extensive research by CASEL, students who were part of SEL programs showed 11 percentile-point gains in academic achievement over those who were not a part of such programs.
Early childhood and adolescence constitute periods of maximal sensitivity of the brain to experience and the environment. Enriched social environments and social interactions have a positive effect on brain maturation as well as on cognitive and social and emotional development at all ages.
Theory of Mind capabilities develop rapidly through preschool years but follow a protracted development through late childhood and into mid-adolescence, paralleling the structural maturation observed in the “social brain”.
Higher order social-psychological phenomena (e.g., self-control at the individual level, and empathy, altruism and compassion at the inter-individual level) is the result of a collection of skills hinging on interactions between multiple neurological networks that involve multiple areas of the brain.
Learning is facilitated or hindered by the learner's social and emotional experiences, which help guide attention during learning, assist in information encoding and retrieval from memory, and effectively manage the social interactions and relationships that are fundamental to the learning process.
Give your learner a head start in SEL
Try Magical LifeSkills free - puzzles, Heedios, and progress tracking included.