What is Social Emotional Learning?

BEAC provides educators with professional development tools and resources for Social and Emotional Learning (SEL). What is SEL? With thanks and gratitude to Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), we provide the following overview of SEL from CASEL.

Definition: SEL is the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions. (Source)

You can watch the short video created by CASEL to explain SEL here.

The Research on the Effectiveness of SEL

SEL leads to improved academic achievement (Source)

When students have supportive relationships and opportunities to develop and practice social, emotional, and cognitive skills across many different contexts, academic learning accelerates.

• Hundreds of studies involving more than 1 million students worldwide across PreK-12 offer consistent evidence that SEL has a positive impact on students’ academic achievement.

• Students participating in SEL at school have higher levels of “school functioning,” as reflected by their grades, test scores, attendance, and homework completion.

• SEL builds social and emotional skills that increase student engagement and lead to improved academic performance.

• SEL interventions that addressed the five core competencies increased students’ academic performance by 11 percentile points, compared to students who did not participate.

• The positive impact on academics lasts long-term: Years after students participated in SEL, their academic performance was an average of 13 percentile points higher than students who didn’t participate.

From: What Does the Research Say? https://casel.org/fundamentals-of-sel/what-does-the-research-say/