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

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.

In 2021, Oregon's legislature passed House Bill 2166, which mandated that the Oregon Department of Education (ODE), in collaboration with the Early Learning Division and the Teacher Standards and Practices Commission (TSPC), develop K-12 Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) standards for students across the state. This manuscript highlights how Oregon used the Transformative SEL framework to guide their multi-phase process, which involved extensive input and collaboration from a diverse group of educators, policy makers, parents and students. This collaborative approach ensured that the standards reflected a wide range of perspectives and addressed the unique needs of various student populations. The manuscript discusses the challenges encountered in the process, such as resistance to change, resource allocation, and professional development needs. This work contributes to the growing body of research on SEL by providing a model for states and districts to develop and implement SEL standards that align with legislative mandates and educational equity goals.

Research suggests that strong implementation across various dimensions, such as fidelity and dosage, contributes to the effectiveness of social and emotional learning (SEL) programs. Nevertheless, those who implement SEL programs are often faced with a variety of implementation barriers, especially as they relate to program characteristics or fit. These challenges are exacerbated in global crisis and education in emergency settings, where implementers often confront a unique set of implementation challenges related to feasibility and relevance. The paper presents a methodology for addressing these challenges using a behavioral insights approach, which draws on theories and evidence from a diverse set of fields to understand the root causes of human behavior as they relate to program uptake and use. Through a case study, the authors demonstrate how behavioral insights was used to explore implementation barriers and design potential solutions in a project to contextualize SEL programming in northeast Nigeria. Findings suggest that behavioral insights contributed to lowering implementation barriers and increasing participant motivation that ultimately encouraged increased uptake, dosage, fidelity, and quality of SEL programming. This work furthers the emerging integration of behavioral insights into SEL program design and implementation by describing a suggested methodology for the application of behavioral insights and outlining important lessons learned that may be relevant to future projects that seek to model this approach.

Social and emotional skills play a pivotal role in an adolescent’s healthy development. In recent years, there has been a greater focus on the international expansion of social and emotional learning (SEL) efforts to support students’ well-being. SEL efforts in China for example, have expanded significantly to address the increasing trends in the rates of anxiety and depression among adolescents. Despite the increased focus on SEL, there remains a lack of standardized measures to inform these efforts. This study describes the application of the cultural adaptation process for assessments outlined by the International Test Commission to create a Chinese version of the DESSA High School Edition Student Self-Report (DESSA SSR). The DESSA SSR is a standardized, norm-referenced, strength-based behavior rating scale that measures the social and emotional competence of students in 9th through 12th grades. In addition to a rigorous translation process, expert cultural review and a measurement invariance study were conducted. Findings support the use of the DESSA SSR with Chinese students.

Teaching is a challenging profession, and teachers experience stress due to the difficulties associated with shifting educational policies, disengaged or dissatisfied parents, and the behavioral, emotional, and academic needs of diverse students. This stress can lead to burnout, which often results in departure from K-12 education system. These stressors can also reduce teachers’ sense of self-efficacy, i.e., their perceived ability to accomplish tasks and overcome challenges. These elevated levels of stress and burnout and reductions in self-efficacy negatively impact student outcomes. In this study, we evaluated the potential for cooperative learning (CL) to reduce stress and burnout and enhance teacher self-efficacy. To aid in the implementation of CL and reduce the burden on teachers, we used an innovative software platform (PeerLearning.net). Data were from a cluster randomized trial encompassing 12 middle and high schools (N = 111 teachers, 62.2 % female, 86.5 % White). We found that teachers in intervention schools (i.e., schools given training and access to PeerLearning.net) reported reduced levels of stress and beneficial effects on self-efficacy (i.e., higher levels of Student Engagement and Instructional Strategies) and burnout (i.e., reductions in Emotional Exhaustion and higher levels of Personal Accomplishment) compared to teachers in control schools that conducted business as usual. We found no significant differences in Classroom Management (an element of self-efficacy) and Depersonalization (an element of burnout). These results suggest that CL, implemented with PeerLearning.net, can have some beneficial effects on teacher well-being.

Human development involves intraindividual changes across the life span. Developmental changes may involve instances of change common to all individuals (nomothetic change), change common to only some groups of individuals (differential change), and change specific to an individual (idiographic change). All three types of change must be measured to obtain a holistic and integrated understanding of any facet of human development. To date, most studies of the development of social and emotional learning (SEL) skills have focused on assessing nomothetic and differential change. The analysis of data derived from this research is variable-focused, and longitudinal studies with such a focus typically do not have enough time points to model intraindividual trajectories with sufficient power. Such trajectories require analysis wherein each individual is compared to themselves across time (ipsative analyses). Change-sensitive measures used within intensive longitudinal designs and analyses are suitable for ipsative analyses of participants and enable direct comparisons of whether intraindividual trajectories are reflected in group data. We discuss research findings reflecting that meaningful idiographic changes are not reflected in group data. We also argue that future studies of SEL should integrate idiographic data with differential and nomothetic data in the service of understanding the holistic development of SEL.