Humans are social animals and therefore socio-emotional skills are crucial for us to navigate through life. Socio-emotional skills include the ability to identify emotions of self and others, our ability to regulate our emotions, and responses to social situations. These are the skills that help kids build confidence, develop positive self-esteem, understand their strengths and weaknesses, collaborate with others, develop strong relationships, and make better decisions. To incorporate socio-emotional learning in classrooms, you can follow the following tips:
1. Emotional Check-in for students: You can start or end the school day with an SEL check-in. Ask students how they feel and follow up with any students who express negative emotions like anger, frustration, or sadness.
2. Provide students with reflection stops: You can help students to reflect on their emotional states encouraging them to journal. Sometimes, students may not like journaling, so you can integrate art classes with reflection time. You can ask children to draw/paint their feelings or tell the thing that is concerning them the most by drawing.
3. Use Read Alouds: When teaching language classes, you can consider reading aloud stories and encouraging students to think and talk about the feelings and thoughts of the characters. This will help students understand the emotions of others.
4. Encourage students to take ownership and accountability of classroom management. This will also help students regulate and manage their own behaviors.
5. Highlight good and bad behaviors. Do not appreciate the child their behavior but appreciate their good behaviors. Likewise, do not criticize children for their mistakes but give them feedback on how to improve it.
6. Encourage students to practice active listening, tolerance and empathy. You can hold classroom discussions and debates to help students acquire these skills.
7. Practice a lot of role-playing activities so that students get to step in different shoes and understand things from the perspectives of others.
8. Encourage students to play group games. The best way to learn socio-emotional skills is by being in social situations. Present students with games that encourage them to collaborate and communicate.
