More Social-Emotional Learning Hype
Helping children with their emotions is something teachers have done for years. Certainly, assisting children and teens with appropriate, caring behavior is an important task. And, yes, there are ways to help children feel good about who they are and what they can contribute to the world.
Of course educators should address a child’s feelings and their emotional well-being. Schools should be beautiful settings with lovely activities that tell a child the adults and their community care about them.
But all of the new Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) hype is, unfortunately, simply an afterthought to Common Core. And it doesn’t work when you say, “Oops, we forgot to consider a child’s feelings, so, yep, let’s add some checklists and objectives and we will be good to go.”
It doesn’t work that way.
Last week I wrote about the relatively new social-emotional learning hype that is sweeping the states. SEL4MA is short for Social Emotional Learning (SEL) for Massachusetts, and they began following me on Twitter. I love that they did, because they present all kinds of issues to write about. But it is frightening too.
Like the fact that the two reasons they give for the need to work with children’s SEL are:
- Increase academic achievement (up 11% universally and 17% for at-risk More Social-Emotional Learning Hype:
