Cover Story
Understanding SEL By Theresa Kelly Gegen
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How are you feeling? Emotional wellness includes managing life’s daily stresses, the ability to get along with others, adapting to change, and overcoming life’s difficulties, large and small. In times of normalcy as well as times of turmoil, emotional wellness gets us through the days. How are students feeling? Children need emotional wellness, in school and beyond, and they develop emotional wellness as they grow, which they do in times of normalcy and times of turmoil. Social and emotional learning (SEL) brings emotional wellness into schools, with intentionality, in systems and structures designed to help
students learn and grow beyond (yet with) math, language arts, sciences, and social studies. As with academic learning, what students need under the umbrella of SEL varies as much as the individuals themselves. SEL aims to manage that umbrella through storms universal to personal, integrating SEL into the curriculum while considering impacts on academic success, equity, and school safety. An article discussing school safety and security measures in the wake of school shootings, “Does It Make More Sense to Invest in School Security or SEL?” by Diana Anthony noted that, “Social and emotional skills are like any skills, in that students need daily practice
to stay sharp. To make room in the crowded school day for this daily practice, SEL needs to be woven into the culture and curriculum of a school.” The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) was formed in 1994 to establish high-quality, evidence-based SEL “as an essential part of preschool through high school education.” At that time, schools and schoolchildren were presented with a wide but uncoordinated range of “positive youth development programs such as drug prevention, violence prevention, sex education, civic education, and moral education, to name a few.” All of these July/August 2020 15
