Cognition and Instruction/Social-Emotional Learning

Social emotional learning (SEL) is the development of knowledge, skills and attitudes to effectively manage and understand emotions in social settings. SEL programs teach children to establish positive relationships while making responsible decisions in the school setting. SEL is intended to provide a foundation for socialization and achievement in school and later life. There are five competencies identified within SEL: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision making. These competencies enhance students’ understanding of themselves and others around them. This chapter examines the theory, research and application of the five SEL competencies.

Self-Management

Self-management is the management of one’s emotions, behaviours, and thoughts in a variety of situations. There are three approaches to social emotional learning: positive youth development (PYD), critical youth empowerment (CYE), and sociopolitical development (SPD). The approach that relates to self-management the most is PYD. PYD uses a variety of activities and experiences to assist young people in building their social and emotional competence in the society. These activities and experiences allow young people to build an attitude towards their capability at different stages of their life. It is important to develop a positive attitude because attitude is the way of thinking or feeling that is reflected in one’s behaviour. In order to maintain a positive attitude, one need to learn their capability on managing stress, motivating oneself, controlling impulses, and setting toward achieving personal and academic goals. In an educational setting, self-management is an essential component for young people to grasp. Stress is often the feeling that occurs to young people the most often in school. Self-management will benefit young people by preventing a mental breakdown and have methods of calming oneself. So through the PYD activities and experiences, young people can learn how to self-manage their social and emotional competence.

Managing Emotions

Emotions are an instinctive or intuitive feeling derived from reasoning or knowledge. Being able to manage emotions is important because it can either affect an individual’s behaviour in a positive or negative way. Every individual has different methods of coping with emotions; it just comes down to the individual's self-management skills. An individual first self-manages through learning how to manage stress, motivate oneself, control impulses, and set toward achieving personal and academic goals. Research has shown that stress is one of the factors affect a student’s level of functioning. Academic stress is when a student feels they lack the skills, emotions, and time to effectively perform a given task. Under stressful conditions, it is difficult for students to manage their emotions because majority of the time, they feel helpless about a task. Motivation can be one of the best methods to manage emotions. Motivation gives an individual the drive to set towards achieving their personal and academic goals. Throughout that process, an individual can maintain positive when they think about what their accomplished goal or the reward (if any) at the end of the goal. In a school setting, student motivation is called autonomous motivation. Autonomous motivation is undertaking an activity because of its meaningfulness and relevance. Students are more motivated to pursue activities that made more meaningful to them by their educators. It is called autonomous motivation because the educators will mold a classroom environment that allows students to make choices of their own in classroom interactions. According to a research done on social emotional learning skills such as motivation and managing stress, these skills are good indicators of future academic outcomes. The research was conducted towards high school students. The results showed that students who had lower social emotional learning skills academically scored in the bottom 25%, and students with high social emotional learning skills academically scored in the top 25%. Students who saw college as an important journey or goal in life was reflected in their grade point average (GPA) after their first year of high school. If there is a steady or significant increase in a student’s GPA, this means they had the motivation to work towards getting admitted into college. By improving students’ social emotional learning skills, students will become more self-regulated and engaged learners. Becoming self-regulated means to become autonomous by controlling their own emotions and behaviour. Self-regulated students will be able to effectively seek motivational goals to pursue. They will also be able to seek methods that can sufficiently cope with their stress.

Classroom Management

In an educational setting, classroom management is one of the contributing factors to students' self-management. Classroom management is the teacher's knowledge about student's behaviour and development, as well as developing strategies and practices that would assist students. With this knowledge, teachers can pass down the tools necessary for students to successfully manage their own behaviour. For students to gain the capability of managing their behaviours in a classroom, they must first learn how to regulate their own emotions. For example, if a student knows how to calm their own emotions and be patient, chances are they will be less disruptive in class. However, students are not the only ones who must learn how to regulate their own emotions. As an educator of the students, they must learn how to regulate their emotions before becoming a role model for the students. As a role model, the teacher demonstrates proper solutions on handling situations, as well as creating positive relationships with every student in the class. Creating positive relationships with the students will allow the teacher to understand them better. This way, teachers can develop better strategies and practices tailored to each student’s needs.

There are four principles of effective classroom management :

Four Principles of Effective Classroom Management	Details
1. Planning and Preparation	Teachers have a clear lesson plan for the day so transitions between activities will be smooth.
2. Extension of the Quality of Relationships in the Classroom	Creating positive relationships with students will decrease the possibilities of classroom disruptions.
3. Management is Embedded in the Environment	Teachers use materials to support their teaching routines (eg: using charts or pictures)
4. Ongoing Processes of Observation and Documentation	Teachers need to consistently reflect upon their management skills to see if it is working effectively.

The main purpose of these principles is to allow educators to gain the skills to prevent the worst case scenarios. This means being planning ahead of time so educators will not panic and handle the situations ahead of them. These principles are not to prepare educators on how to react, but how to prevent and build skills. Reaction is how the educator manages and expresses their emotions during a situation, whereas prevention will allow the educators think ahead of time and prepare for the worst. In doing so, this promotes organization and educators will have control over the classroom. A technique that could be used to gain control over the classroom is enforcing a daily routine. This routine could be used when transitioning between activities or to get the class to quiet down. For example, if an educator wants to get the students’ attention, they could clap their hands in a rhythm and have the students follow. By doing so, this enforces positive behaviour from the students and students will manage themselves by reinforcing expectations. The clapping creates a positive behaviour and will be emitted by students in applicable situations. Also, having a particular transition between activities can create positive behaviour because it will make the classroom more predictable. For example, educators can use a particular song to end an activity to start the next. Students will get into the habit of this routine and manage themselves through reinforcing the positive behaviour.

Using these principles, students can gain autonomy through managing their own behaviour. These principles not only allow educators to gain control over their classroom, but students will have the opportunity to self-manage. To create a positive relationship with the students, educators will need to create boundaries and balance between warmth and discipline. Educators need to understand the degree of their discipline because going by the rules for everything will stray the students away from the educators. Discipline that are over controlling can cause educators to be inflexible and unresponsive to student needs. There should not be a determined discipline because every year, there will be new students in every classroom. The discipline should be modified based on the needs of the students so there will be opportunities for students to learn the skills to self-manage.

Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is assessing one’s emotions and thoughts and its impact on behaviour. One of the three approaches to social emotional learning, sociopolitical development (SPD), connects to self-awareness. SPD is the critical reflection of young people that help them see and understand structures, social values and practices that they may be struggling with. Critical thinking will assist young people on realizing what their weaknesses are. Self-awareness allows the young people to determine their strengths and weaknesses, as well as maintaining a positive attitude and confidence. This is especially important in an educational setting because young people need to understand their capabilities to set goals for themselves that are not out of their limits. Figuring out what one’s strengths and weaknesses are can influence emotions and thoughts either a positive or negative way. If one is struggling with their weaknesses, this could result with frustration, anger, or any negative emotions or thoughts. This will also lead up to negative behaviour. In an educational setting, educators need to understand students’ weaknesses so they can scaffold alongside to turn them into strengths. This will be beneficial with students’ self-awareness.

Morals and Values

On one hand, morals are a person’s standards of behaviour involving their definitive belief about what is acceptable and what is not acceptable for them to do. It is crucial for people to develop morals because they establish a set of rules for themselves based on their belief between right and wrong. Having morals will provide a person with directions, guiding them towards more positive decisions and preventing themselves from negative choices. This works in with SPD through the critical reflection that one must go through. SPD seeks out social values, structures, practices, and processes that need to be altered. A person with morals can easily seek out those social factors that do not fit in with their beliefs. Setting a set of ground rules allows an individual to determine whether their emotions and thoughts are generating a positive or negative behaviour.

On the other hand, values are what are important to an individual. Values and morals work to build on each other. Morals determine what is acceptable and not acceptable in an individual’s perspective, and values determine what is important. Values will trigger the emotions in an individual because a value sets an importance on an object, a person, a place, etc. in the individual’s life. Values can give an individual confidence and optimism in life because these values act as a motivation for the individual. Motivation is a factor that will benefit young people in schools. Motivation gives people a reason to do things because it interests them. Usually, an individual will develop motivation for a task because they can get something out of it (eg: a reward). The reward they get out of a task could be of some value of theirs. Thus, having values can also be used as a motivator for people.

SECURe

SECURe (PreK) Strategies and Routines

Researchers have come up with a school intervention called SECURe. SECURe stands for Social, Emotional, and Cognitive Understanding and Regulation in education. This intervention is used in primary education to assist with three skills: cognitive regulation/executive function, emotion processes and interpersonal skills. SECURe uses games and songs to teach these skills, such as using a storybook to identify the emotions of the characters. The educator would then teach a method called, "I Message" . This method teaches students to express their emotions to their classmates. For example, if a student is upset with their classmate because they were calling them names, then the student would speak up to their classmate and say, "I am upset because I do not like being called names". I Message is beneficial in assisting students to become self-aware because this method allows students to regulate their emotions to discover how they were feeling and why they felt that way. By becoming self-aware, students can regulate their emotions and communicate in a calm manner to their peers about how they feel. This reduces the chance of students acting in an irrational behaviour that could lead to negative consequences.

Another component of SECURe is creating daily structures and routines because this provides opportunities for students to practice skills in recurring interactions and relationship-building activities. This is mainly for students in prekindergarten and/or kindergarten. These students have just started interacting with other students their age so creating a routine is very beneficial. Creating a structure or routine will give them the basic understanding of which behaviour to use in certain situations. Grasping this component of SECURe will enable them to move further as they progress and eventually self-manage.

Social Awareness

Social Awareness Refers to
Being aware of others
Understanding that others have feelings
Knowing that YOUR actions affect others

Social awareness is the student's ability to express and control their thoughts and emotions in different situations. Developing the student's ability to self regulate their thoughts, emotions, attention and reactivity is a key goal of SEL. Through learning social awareness strategies, students can identify which emotions are appropriate to display in different social events. For example, students know how to regulate their behaviors inside a classroom compared to a formal event such as a wedding ceremony or funeral. As students continue to develop frameworks on how to behave in a formal setting compared to a casual setting, students demonstrate more behaviors aligned with the social norm.

Through becoming socially aware of one's surroundings, students also learn techniques in how to remain motivated and focused on a given task within the classroom. For example throughout the school day, students can learn how to improve their level of motivation and focus as teachers encourage them to practice mindfulness techniques which refers to being consciously aware of how one is feeling physically and emotionally at that present moment and accepting those emotions. Research has shown students who are mindful of their emotions are more socially aware of how to regulate those positive and negative emotions For example, when students are feeling stressed and angry, being mindful of their current emotional state allows students to reflect on how they are feeling and encourages regulation of their emotions through talking about their feelings, or accepting their emotional state and relaxing. Social awareness also refers to the student’s ability to see situations in different perspectives. This teaches students how to be respectful, and open minded when being introduced to new situations with different challenges such as transitioning into a new school, classroom or having to work with new people. These new situations allow students to become more aware of one's surroundings as it also encourages students to be accepting of diverse point of views. If these skills are not practiced within the classroom, these transitional situations would lead to chaos as individuals will not understand the importance of compromising and integrating ideas from both the sides of the relationship. For example, teachers can demonstrate social awareness within the classroom by incorporating the student's ideas when creating classroom rules and boundaries. This demonstrates social awareness as the students are encouraged to speak up and share their perspectives on situations in which the teacher will take into consideration. This demonstrates social awareness as there is a level of compromise and integration of ideas when creating classroom standards and rules. These types of relationships leads students to build a trusted relationship with their teacher which allows the student to be less at risk of developing social and emotional regulation problems as the students learn new strategies in how to be open minded to different ideas . Through being open minded, students learn compromise helps to resolve social, emotional and physical problems. For example, if there is a conflict between two friends, if both individuals demonstrate social awareness by listening to the perspective of the other individual, it is more likely that the conflict will be resolved sooner as both sides of the relationship shares their ideas while listening to the other.

Mindfulness brings many advantages to students Physically, Emotionally and Mentally

Physically	Emotionally	Mentally
Students report feeling less fatigue	better emotional regulation	Better attention span
Improved sleep cycle	teaches students to "think before acting"	better memory capacity
Lowers blood pressure	feeling less stressed	higher academic performance
Helps relieve physical tension	teaches relaxation techniques	less substance use and depression

Gestures

Gestures are the ways in which children learn to express how they are feeling through physical hand motions and body movements. These methods of learning can be integrated into the classroom setting by teaching students ways in which they can express their emotions through words and showing their emotions through their hand gestures. For example, when teachers ask students how everyone is feeling today from 1-5 (1 being bad), students should learn to express their emotions through hand gestures not simply holding their emotions into themselves. When students do not practice skills in expressing their emotions through gestures, they are more likely to develop temperament as these students may internalize all their emotional expressions . Gestures help students to develop more efficient ways in communicating their thoughts and feelings which may be unclear for teachers and peers.Gestures can also be used to teach students new information. For example, when learning their colors, body parts and letters, students can learn these information through songs, videos, and hand gestures such as Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes or ABC. Through learning these songs, hand gestures and body movement, students can retain the information in a fun and interactive way allowing the students to be more motivated and engaged to learn new information. Gestures also teaches students strategies in reading and understanding symbols in different situations. For example when seeing a "quiet" sign in the library, students will know they need to remain silent inside the library, taking into consideration the other people who maybe studying and trying to focus. However, some gestures or symbols have more than one meaning. For example raising our hands in class demonstrates the student has something they want to share. On the other hand, raising our hands while crossing the street shows a different meaning as it represents manners to the driver. Students can learn which gestures are appropriate for certain situations when the teacher demonstrates the meanings behind these gestures through "role playing" in which students and teachers act out situations helping to demonstrate which gestures are appropriate for certain situations.

Relationship Skills

Relationship skills are the strategies students use to build and maintain positive relationships among peers and surroundings. When building positive relationships, researchers often wonder why individuals chose to create friendships with certain people but not others. Researchers wonder whether creating relationships has to do with personality traits, physical abilities, socioeconomic systems, intelligence, or other features. Overall, students build positive relationships as they learn to communicate their thoughts and feelings in a positive and healthy way through using emotional regulation. Learning these techniques allows students to become more open minded to diversity within the classroom as they learn to interact with all peers regardless of their age, gender, size or ethnicity. When these skills are developed at a young age, students built upon these frameworks on how to build and maintain relationships in the future with their co-workers, family members and their partners, as students are able to identify which relationship strategy worked and didn't work while they were in school. Overall, students who show better acceptance by their peers often demonstrated more admirable qualities within them such as being friendly, intelligent, attractive and athletic. To add on, these students were shown to be more successful in the future facing less emotional problems such as depression and social anxiety disorder .

Bullying

Bullying is one of the most common issue within all school environments but can be difficult to identify due to the several different methods of bullying that takes place. Bullying can be done directly (hitting, pushing punching), or indirectly (verbally abusing someone through name calling, isolating). Two main reasons for bullying others include alleviating boredom/creating excitement and to split up friendship and group processes. Bullying is common within the classroom as students choose to reject and/or "pick on" students who look more vulnerable and seem to be easier targets .In general, researchers show females to be more verbally victimized whereas males report being bullied more physically These situations affect children emotionally as they feel alone, misunderstood and are scared to speak up and seek help from an adult due to the believed consequences behind their actions. However, not speaking to a trusted friend or adult only makes the situation worse as bullying is often a destructive process as the bully continues to become stronger within the relationship while the victim becomes weaker During these situations, teachers need to step in and teach students the effects of bullying how it can lead to depression, isolation and withdrawal within the victim . The teacher can bring more awareness of the effects of bullying by incorporating role plays of different bullying situations, or having professionals come into the classroom and speak about the consequences behind bullying and the importance of speaking up when one is involved in a bullying relationship. Through these involvements, the bullies are more likely to see the situations in the perspective of the victim, as they learn ways in how to create and maintain an equal respectful relationship with their peers.

Building Relationships

Building relationships centers around student’s ability to learn how to create and maintain positive relationships inside and outside the classroom. It is evident that certain students have better relationship building skills compared to others, however, the true and main reason behind their advanced skills is still in research. It can have something to do with the student's cultural family background; the student's peer groups; personality characteristics and much more. Nevertheless, learning these skills at a young age teaches students appropriate strategies to use when building relationships with future peers, partners and co-workers. Students learn that the way they talk with their surrounds should be altered when interacting with people who are older than them such as teachers and parents. For example students should should show respect to older people by constantly being open minded towards receiving positive and negative feedback. If students chose to talk with adults like how they interact with their peers such as saying "what's up" or "how's it going"? teachers and adults can be lead into the perspective that this student is extremely rude and should be better educated. In order for these situations to be avoided, research has shown that students learn better when they are shown ways in how to build positive relationships. Therefore teachers should step into the classroom modelling positive relationship building techniques such as demonstrating how to share, be respectful, and be welcoming for diversity. For example, when providing students with snacks, teachers can demonstrate how giving all students 1 piece is the fair thing to do as everyone gets the same amount. To add on, teachers should model the different levels of acceptable interaction between one's peers compared to adults they know. Through modelling these behaviours, students learn to modify their behaviour and create positive and long lasting relationships with their peers and surroundings .

Responsible Decision Making

Responsible decision making is the student's ability to construct responsible choices about their personal behaviours and social interactions. For students to develop these skills they need to consider various questions such as, how would this decision benefit me? what would be the consequences behind this decision? who will it impact? These question, choices and behaviour are often guided by the individual's pre-constructed ethical standards, such as safety concerns, social norms and the evaluation of consequences behind performing these actions. These responsible decision making techniques are often guided by cultural and religious beliefs.

There are two main different cultural point of views known as:

Collectivist	Individualistic
We Oriented	Me Oriented
Blending in	Standing out
Belonging	Standing out
Group Goals	Individual Goals
Cooperation	Competition
Group Support	Self Reliant

For example, cultures that emphasize individualism (US, Canada, Australia), chose to make decisions based on what they believe would benefit themselves the most, whereas collectivist communities (Asia, Latin America) emphasizes the importance of group harmony instead of individual decisions . These cultural differences affect the student's level of moral decision making even at the young age of 4. In the CBC video babies born to be good?, researchers conducted an experiment where researchers recruited students under the age of 5 to test their level of moral reasoning. All students showed diversity in age (4-5), ethnicity and gender. In each of the situations, the experimenter left one student in a room (1 on 1) full of mess. When the experimenter left the room to grab a clipboard, all the children chose to clean up the mess to help the researcher. Before conducting the experiment, researched believed students coming from collectivist communities (Asia, Latin America) will lie in order to not receive credit for helping the researcher whereas individualistic communities would be honest and take the credit for the job being done.The results confirmed the hypothesis as researchers found students from individualistic communities didn't mind “standing out” and receiving acknowledgement” whereas collectivist students preferred “blending in”. These cultural differences can be present upon individuals as they grow older due to their different moral and ethical values. For instance, when a student receives a job offer, individualistic communities would encourage the students to make the decision based on how the situation would benefit the individual whereas collectivist communities emphasize putting their group unity before their individual choices. Despite the different cultural perspectives, in order for responsible decision making to take place, individuals need to keep in mind how this decision would affect themselves as well as their surroundings. Through using responsible decision making, students learn to become critical thinkers as it introduces them to the importance of "thinking before acting". Teachers can integrate these aspects of learning through reading short scenarios of a story and by asking students questions on what would be the responsible thing to do next? or What action can lead to a big consequence? These scenario acting techniques help students learn strategies in regulating their actions to fit their ethical beliefs.

Social Behaviour

Social behaviour looks at how individuals interact physically, emotionally and socially in different situations. This includes looking at how individuals interact through verbal face to face conversations or talking through a phone or electronic device. Social behavior also refers to physical interactions through holding hands, linking arms, hugging, etc. An individual's level of social behaviour is highly correlated with their past experiences. For example, when a child is highly neglected by their parents, they are more likely to display aggression inside the classroom due to the fact they were mostly rejected by their primary caregiver. . These negative interactions guided students to believe this world is an unsafe place therefore, they become highly defensive in new situations as they choose to reject new peers and teachers. During these situations, teachers need to step in and make the child feel safe and comfortable within the classroom, by integrating positive reinforcements such as complementing the student on their work, or providing feedback on how the student can improve their learning and understanding. Through these levels of interactions, the student often becomes less aggressive in different situations as the teacher helped to restructure the students understanding of the world to be a "safe environment" altering one's morals and shaping their interactions with their peers and parents.

Teamwork

Teamwork is build within the classroom when students acknowledge the importance of collaboration of different works and ideas to make it better. Through using teamwork strategies, students learn ways in feeding off of each other through learning ways in getting their points and ideas across while listening to the opinions and feedbacks of other individuals. For example, when students work on group assignments, they often split up the work evenly and collaborate their ideas in the end. This allows the work to become more developed as it integrates different perspectives of the situation into one assignment. When there is a disagreement within the group, students learn more teamwork strategies by compromising and being respectful towards the ideas of their peers. However, if these skills are not practiced, teamwork situations would become chaotic for learners as well as teachers and students will struggle to regulate their ideas, emotions and relationships. Nevertheless, when teamwork is practiced inside the classroom through doing group projects, or playing team sports, children learn ways in building neutral and respectful relationships in the future. For example through playing a team sport, students better understand that in order to run a company, there needs to be different individuals having different roles to run the company however, group collaboration is important for the company to be successful.

Conflict

Individuals often face social and emotional conflicts inside and outside the classroom setting. The individual's ability to deal with these conflicts are highly dependent on their previous experiences resolving conflicts and is often shaped by their beliefs of social norms and ethical beliefs. For instance, at a young age, students are often unclear on social norms on how to resolve a conflict as they may have not been exposed to these situations. These students may lack morals therefore, may believe the best way to resolve a conflict is fighting back and becoming defensive. During these times, teachers can show students the consequences behind fighting back as it only makes the conflict worse. Teachers can then teach students ways to resolve the conflict through talking about the problem as students may have had a miscommunication. Many individuals also face emotional conflict such as feeling lonely, rejected, mad, and sad. During these situations, teachers should guide students in having a conversation about what they are feeling and why they are feeling this way. Research has shown students who resolve emotional conflicts through talking about it, lead the student to become more emotionally and socially stable in the future

Glossary

Academic Stress: An academic task is perceived as stressful by people who do not feel as if they have the skills, or emotional or time resources, needed to effectively manage a given activity.

Aggression: The practice of making assaults or attacks; boldly assertive.

Alleviating Boredom/Creating Excitement: Picking on an individual to make their lives more fun, eventful and interesting.

Autonomous Motivation: Engaging in an activity because of its perceived meaningfulness and relevance.

Collaboration: to work, one with another; cooperate, integrate ideas

Collectivist Perspective: view point of Asian, Latin American communities emphasizing importance of group collaboration, group unity, and group belonging.

Critical Youth Empowerment (CYE): Focuses on collaboration and connection through various models of youth empowerment.

Destructive process: as the bullying continues, the power imbalance becomes greater because the bully continues to grow stronger as they figure out more vulnerable aspects of the victim making the victim weaker and an easier target.

Diversity: The inclusion of individuals representing more than one national origin, color, religion, sexual orientation, etc.

Emotional Regulation: The child's ability to monitor their behaviour in different situations.

Ethical standards: Perception of what is morally right and wrong, and their reasoning behind beliefs.

Individualistic Perspective: view point of Canadians, Americans, Australian citizens emphasizing the importance of independence, having privacy, being self oriented, etc.

Motivation: The reason for acting or behaving in a particular way.

Neglected: Given little attention to, fail to show care.

Positive Youth Development (PYD): Using activities and experiences to assist young people in developing social, moral, emotional, physical, and cognitive competence in their community.

Reactivity: How the individual responds to the environment.

Scaffold: Process through which educators guide children along their emerging abilities.

SECURe: Social, Emotional, and Cognitive Understanding and Regulation in education.

Self Regulation: Child's ability to control their reactivity in different situations while controlling their emotion and attention.

Sociopolitical Development (SPD): Promotes an understanding of the cultural and political forces that shape one's societal status by emphasizing the acquisition of practical, analytical, and emotional faculties to act within political and social systems.

Split up friendship and group processes: Convincing others to not hangout with certain people due to having undesirable qualities.

Symbols: Something used for or regarded as representing something else; Can include words, images, phrases to represent another object.

Recommended Readings

Ann Sanson, S.A. (2004) Connections between Temperament and Social Development: A Review. 143-170.

Jackson, Cassandra McKay. (2014). A Critical Approach to Social Emotional Learning Instruction Through Community-Based Service Learning. 292-312.

Weinstein, C.S., Romano, M. (2015) Knowing Your Students and Their Special Needs. 110-145.