This article, written by Giancarlo Brotto for Edsurge, titled The Future of Education Depends on Social Emotional Learning: Here’s Why outlines the importance of teaching SEL at school.
Below are some of the key points outlined in the article:
Developing these core life abilities through social and emotional learning (SEL) is critical to a child’s development, as it directly correlates to success and happiness as an adult.
Students who receive high-quality SEL instruction have achievement scores on average of 11 percentile points higher than students who did not receive SEL instruction.
A lack of SEL regularly correlated with unfavourable outcomes such as an increased chance of unemployment, divorce, poor health, criminal behaviour and imprisonment.
Advances in neuroscience imply developing SEL skills in kindergarten “can have long-term academic benefits on students’ reading and vocabulary, including in high poverty schools, suggesting that SEL may assist in closing achievement gaps.”
The OECD explains that subjective well-being can be defined as having a positive mental state; when reviewing the impact of SEL on adolescents, the results—which mirror findings from adult samples—indicate more ties between SEL skills and life satisfaction than between cognitive skills and life satisfaction by nearly 10 percent.
The evidence-based Second Step program explicitly teaches the 5 core competencies of SEL (Self-awareness, Self-management, Social-awareness, Responsible Decision Making, Relationship Skills) in easy-to-teach, comprehensive weekly lessons for Early Learning through to Year 8. Each lesson is fully scripted with all lesson media and classroom activities included so there's no extra preparation time for teachers. Contact Positive Pieces Education for more information or visit the Second Step page on our website.
