Social and Emotional Learning: Research, Practice, and Policy最新文献

Universal school-based social and emotional learning (SEL) programs have been shown to have a range of benefits for students. However, these programs tend to focus on students, not involving parents, which may limit their impact outside the school context. We conducted focus groups and interviews with 118 parents, 58 teachers, and 6 school administrators at six public elementary schools across the United States implementing the Second Step SEL program to determine (a) what parents want to know about SEL in their children’s schools and why, (b) what parents actually know about SEL in their children’s schools, and (c) educators’ perspectives on SEL communication with parents. The findings suggest that school staff underestimate parents’ interest in knowing what their children are learning in SEL at school and perceive logistical barriers to SEL communication with parents. Accordingly, many parents report lacking knowledge about SEL despite valuing that knowledge and wishing to support their children’s SEL development. These findings point to ways SEL programs can be designed to better communicate with parents, and importantly, to facilitate parental engagement in the development of their children’s SEL skills.

A rapidly growing body of research is examining the social and emotional competencies (SEC) educators need to effectively fulfill their professional roles (see Lozano-Peña et al., 2021 for a recent review). The prosocial classroom model highlights the importance of educators' SECs as they relate to their capacity to maintain well-being by successfully coping with the challenges of emotion-laden social interactions in the classroom, building positive relationships with students, managing classrooms effectively, and providing proficient social-emotional learning (SEL) instruction (see Figure 1; Jennings & Greenberg, 2009). These elements foster a classroom environment that supports social-emotional growth and optimal student learning outcomes. Since the publication of the Jennings and Greenberg (2009) article, research has been expanding to identify specific SECs and how they relate to educators' well-being and job performance. In this paper, we situate the construct of emotional schemas as one construct related to educators’ SEC and relevant to understanding classrooms as developmental contexts for educators and students.

The benefits of social and emotional learning (SEL) are well-documented in the literature, leading to increased advocacy in school settings. In fact, it has been suggested that SEL should be integrated into all aspects of the students’ life–in every classroom, after-school activity, summer program, and beyond. Therefore, contemporary SEL programming must be flexible to meet the specific needs of the school community and be accomplished with diverse resources without imposing additional burdens on educators or schools. Furthermore, a global perspective is essential, with joint ventures among international educational communities to share teaching approaches, cultural values, and resources. We argue for the necessity of a global community-based approach to create a flexible SEL delivery model. We present two distinct SEL programs, bringing multiple international institutions together to provide enriching learning experiences for all. Through continuous communication and feedback gathered from community members, each SEL program focuses directly on what matters and what is needed for each school community at the time of the collaboration. Actively involving all relevant groups (e.g., students, educators, parents, school districts, university faculty, undergraduates, and pre-service teachers), we demonstrate how a global community-based approach can be applied to bring SEL into mainstream educational practice across the world.

Despite recent emphasis of accomplished scholars on the significant role of teachers' social-emotional skills in imparting these skills to their students, there is limited empirical research on this issue. The present study addressed this gap by examining the associations between teachers’ social-emotional skills (mindfulness, empathy, and prosocial orientation) and their students' social-emotional skills. We surveyed 45 primary classroom teachers (all teachers were women) and their 852 fourth- and fifth-grade students (54 % girls), from 12 public schools in Israel (serving students from SES ranging from the third to the eighth decile). All the study’s participants completed self-report measures of their social-emotional skills. HLM analyses indicated that teachers' mindfulness was associated with students' social-emotional skills (mindfulness, empathic concern, and prosocial orientation), and teachers' empathic concern was associated with students' prosocial orientation. These findings provide initial support for the potential significance of teachers' social-emotional skills, particularly mindfulness and empathy, in scaffolding these skills in their students. Implications for teachers' training and professional development in contemporary education are discussed.

Social and emotional learning is crucial for healthy development. Prior work has demonstrated that linguistic input (including emotion and mental state language) is beneficial for early social and emotional learning. In this Perspectives article, we build on existing research and consider the diverse ways in which emotion and mental state language can influence social and emotional learning. Namely, we discuss the importance of considering the content of language, the context in which language occurs, and the broader sociocultural factors of children’s early environments. By taking a more nuanced approach to understanding the influence of emotion and mental state language in social and emotional learning, this article aims to more comprehensively characterize how we can support social and emotional learning through everyday conversations with children. Ultimately, this will allow for advancements in research, practice, and policy to better help parents and educators guide social and emotional development through the linguistic input that they provide to children.

This paper summarizes Oregon’s creation and implementation of Standards in Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) for Educator Preparation programs (EPPs) in response to the House Bill 2166 passed in 2021. Initial steps included gaining an understanding of current practices and new teachers’ perspectives on preparation they received in SEL. The Educator Preparation SEL Survey revealed that EPP courses largely emphasized the Learning Context and Student SEL, but not Teacher SEL in their programming. Findings from the New Teacher SEL Survey indicated that while many new teachers felt prepared to create inclusive and positive learning environments, half felt unprepared to deliver SEL-based instruction and did not feel equipped by their programs with personal SEL skills to manage the stressors of teaching. Results from these surveys highlight the need to integrate SEL into educator preparation to develop educators who can create supportive and inclusive learning environments. An interdisciplinary workgroup utilized findings from these surveys to develop SEL standards for EPPs. The workgroup adopted the Anchor Competency Framework by Markowitz and Bouffard (2020) and aligned it with CASEL’s five SEL competencies to create comprehensive standards for EPPs. These standards were reviewed and adopted in Spring 2023 and implementation strategies are underway in Oregon. The Oregon experience highlights the necessity of systemic approaches to embedding SEL in teacher education to enhance the well-being and effectiveness of future teachers. Oregon’s process detailed here serves as an example and inspiration for states aiming to infuse SEL into their teacher preparation programs.

This article presents “The Nous Project,” a SEL program designed to promote and analyze the capacity for emotional self-understanding among children attending elementary schools in Italy. The project rests on the conceptual framework that authentic educational research should be not only explorative of a phenomenon but also transformative of a context and, to achieve this, it should introduce into schools new meaningful experiences and investigate them. The children involved in the project were invited to narrate the emotions they felt during the day in a “diary of emotional life” and analyze them with the help of the metaphor “vegetable garden of emotions.” These reflective exercises were qualitatively analyzed in order to understand what ways of emotional self-understanding emerge from the realized educative experience. At the end of the program, children were asked to write what they thought they had learned, and findings from the qualitative analysis of their answers highlight their perceptions about the effectiveness of the educative experience in which they were involved.

Children’s emotional experiences during early childhood education and care (ECEC) are important for children’s emotional development and the socialization of this development by teachers. One central goal of emotion socialization is that it should help children acquire reflective regulation of their emotions, resulting in socially acceptable and age-appropriate experience and behavior. The current study is based on emotionally challenging situations of children in ECEC and aims at investigating, first, associations of teachers’ emotion coaching and co-regulation with children’s self-regulation, and, second, how teachers’ emotion coaching and co-regulation are linked with characteristics of the specific emotion episode and the involved child. Based on extensive video observations in the preschool setting (N = 19 groups), this study analyzed episodes with teacher interventions (N = 48 teachers) following a negative emotion expression by one or two children (N = 213 children aged 2–6 years old). Multilevel results show, first, that teachers’ initial emotion coaching and co-regulation through meta-cognitive prompts were associated with children’s independent self-regulation. Second, teachers’ emotion coaching and co-regulation were systematically associated with characteristics of the emotion episode, especially emotion quality and intensity. The findings support the assumption that emotion coaching and co-regulation are especially valuable tools to support self-regulation. However, emotion coaching and the different co-regulation levels and strategies do not turn out to be universal strategies that are used indiscriminately, but teachers use them depending on individual child and situational characteristics.

Preschool teachers’ emotion-focused teaching (modeling of, responding to, and instructing about emotions) is associated with children’s observed and teacher-reported expression and regulation skills, as well as their engagement with peers and learning tasks. The present study reports findings from an alternative licensure program in which teachers receive coaching during a residency on how to support children’s social and emotional development through emotion-focused teaching. Using baseline and post- observed and self-reported emotion-focused teaching from two cohorts of teacher residents (N = 65), we examined the extent to which emotion-focused teaching changed as a function of the number of coaching feedback sessions each teacher received as well as coaching modality, duration, and topical focus. Findings indicated that teachers improved in their observed and self-reported emotion-focused teaching, but characteristics of the feedback sessions were not individually associated with these improvements.

Impact statement

Early educators play a significant role in promoting children’s emotional competence, especially in early childhood. Unfortunately, teachers receive little training on how to do so except through delivering curricula. This study assesses a new licensure program for early educators that uses flexible, individualized coaching to promote emotion-focused teaching. Participating preschool teachers significantly improved their emotion-focused teaching and were highly satisfied with the program overall. These findings can inform decisions by policy-makers and higher-education administrators as they seek to address critical shortages in skilled, emotionally attuned educators to meet the needs of young children.