Often people face this situation when they feel emotionally weak and in such situations, it becomes difficult to react in the right way. Extreme anger is one of the most common reactions that a person might express.
That is why it becomes quite important to teach social emotional learning right from the beginning. Social emotional learning is very important for school students because this is the time when the child adapts to learning very fast.
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Social Emotional Learning is present in almost all the educational sectors. You must have heard or read about SEL on different platforms and are familiar with it. SEL is considered to be the key to the success in the academic life of a student.
It is an art of life that helps people to achieve success. Students cannot fully embrace their academic potential without unlocking their social emotional learning.
The universal definition of social emotional learning is “how kids and grown-ups learn to recognize and handle emotions, set their aims, show empathy for others, build real relationships, and make effective choices”.
Social emotional learning has five competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. A question arises that what is the most effective way to develop these five competencies among the kids in school.
The answer to this question is simple: you really don’t need a curriculum to make it work effectively, you just need to regularly monitor the child in school for these five qualities. It is better to begin with modeling each day and then watch the students for that particular competency daily.
Engage students to work on each quality and find things like which quality is the most they need to work on. This is because each child varies individually and has different qualities. But the most important thing is that you can’t teach a child anything when you are not following it. So to embed the five competencies of social emotional learning, self-learning is very important along with daily modeling learning in the classroom.
The 5 competencies
CASEL or the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning is worldwide followed for better academia of the child. Listed below is the detailed list of the 5 competencies of SEL. They are as follows:
- Competency 1- Self Awareness
This competency is all about setting your aims or goals, recognizing your strengths and weaknesses, and building the right mindset. The best model for this competency is to share your goals and dreams with the children and let them know what you are doing to fulfill them. Your struggles and experiences can help the children a lot as they can assume a role model and start working on themselves to achieve theirs.
For example, I am a very bad dancer, but I tell my students that I try regularly to make some good moves. My confidence and growth inspired the students to work better on their qualities. You can regularly share your skills and experiences even if it’s a small fear from anything and how you overcome it can inspire a lot.
A part of self-awareness is the positive outlook towards everything. I know it could be tough but if you just reframe the situation the other way then the positive side of it will definitely arise. However, many people reframing things mean totally avoiding the situation which is not the exact solution, quitting things makes no point. Regulation of emotions can definitely help a lot because you can share a story of how you positively handled the situation which was not in your favor and end by learning a lesson from it.
- Competency 2- Self-management
Managing our emotions in tough situations is the most crucial part. When you are angry, frustrated, or nervous you easily ought to lose your cool, so basically, competency 2 is self-management comes in the way. If you are good at managing your emotions in such situations then no failure can affect you ever.
Even when you are in a good mood with a positive intention you lose your cool and that is very normal to happen with everyone. Though an apology helps, in the end, to make up with people.
Initially, there are signs when you are stressed that probably end up with frustration or anger so to manage this you should keep a check on these early signs and try to deviate your mind in another way to avoid any bad experience. Identifying and handling the signs needs constant practice and you can share all this with your students to let them understand how self-management works.
- Competency 3: Social-awareness
This competency is related to empathy and appreciating others. To let the students understand what empathy is, you need to demonstrate some practical examples. For example in class when any student lacks any utility or has lost anything then you can encourage the fellow students to help him by showing empathy.
When the students are in a group then empathy matters a lot among them. Appreciating others needs a lot of courage so when the students are made to share things in a group then they learn to show empathy towards each other and appreciate others for good gestures, in this way the students will adopt this competency of social awareness.
- Competency 4: Relationship skills
This competency is about developing relations with others. Building connections include things like assistance, mediating disputes, and communication skills. It is easy to communicate with people who have the same thoughts as yours but when it comes to confronting someone who has a different opinion than many of us lose our cool.
In schools, the students should be promoted to cooperate with their fellow students and develop friendly relations to engage in productive work. This competency works well when the children are grown up as it helps them to deal with the real world in the future.
- Competency 5: Responsible decision making
Making responsible decisions in life is very important. We all are responsible for our deeds so the children should always be taught that they should never commit such things that let them feel regretful in the end. Making good choices helps in solving problems much easier and tackle different challenges.
The best way to develop this competency is to learn from past experiences and failures. Failure teaches a lot of things and helps in tackling upcoming problems. You can organize a meet in which each student expresses his/her poor decision-making experiences and let other students learn how to do better next time.
Photo by Agung Pandit Wiguna from Pexels.
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