Throughout this turbulent past year, educators fully embraced the importance of social emotional learning (SEL) - for themselves and their students. For those who have been committed to SEL for decades, this has been a welcome shift in education. Even though hundreds of programs, initiatives, and frameworks support SEL integration within educational organizations, we know significant challenges remain to achieve comprehensive, sustained implementation.

To uncover these challenges, we hosted several conversations on the world’s most popular audio-only platform, Clubhouse, through the SEL in EducationClub. Hundreds of attendees listened live as we conducted thirty-five informal conversations with educators spanning the United States, Canada, India, Romania, Britain, South Africa, China and more…what did we learn? We identified five obstacles that remained constant across location and grade level.

The EASEL Lab, led by Stephanie Jones at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has developed a number of practical tools and resources that provide information about social and emotional skills and competencies, relevant frameworks, as well as effective strategies, practices and programs that enable stakeholders to make informed decisions as they plan, implement, and assess SEL initiatives in their schools and communities. Please see below for more information about these tools and resources, as well as how to access them.

Developing children’s social-emotional skills is not a choice, the two leading experts in social-emotional learning remind us.

How can we increase social and emotional skills in children throughout the globe in a systematic way? HundrED and the Lego Foundation have partnered up to identify solutions that help parents and educators support the development of children’s social and emotional skills.

We invited two leading experts, Stephanie M. Jones, professor and director of EASEL Lab at Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Joan Lombardi, the first Deputy Assistant Secretary for Early Childhood during the Obama Administration and the first Director of the Child Care Bureau during the Clinton Administration, to have a conversation with us. They shared four elemental ‘musts’ that we as a global education community have to consider if we want to get serious about increasing social-emotional capabilities around the world.

by Leslee Udwin

H.G. WELLS once said: “Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe. Undoubtedly education is always the primary engine of progress. But what kind of education and mediated when, are I believe the key drivers in this race. When I say ‘education’, I do not mean mere access to education, nor do I mean the broken system of education that was created in and for the Industrial Revolution to fill factories, and which is not fit for purpose. I mean holistic education of the young human being to fulfil their potential for positive life outcomes. How we achieve this is not rocket-science; it’s neuroscience.

by Nicholas Carlisle

Childhood is undergoing its most significant transformation since the industrial revolution. The advent of affordable digital devices and the connectivity provided by the Internet have resulted in children spending increasing amounts of the day in front of a screen. During this past year, childhood appears to have reached a tipping point. Before Covid-19, in more developed countries, 8- to 12-year-olds averaged five hours of screen time every day. By many estimates, as school went online to contain the pandemic, those numbers have doubled. The majority of the world’s children now spend the greater part of their waking hours interacting with a screen.

BY DANIELLE DE LA FUENTE

On a trip to Chios, Greece in the middle of summer, I witnessed a shocking disconnect between the humanitarian sector and the people it seeks to serve. Amidst scorching heat, it was baffling to see that an organization would be handing out blankets. Perhaps the blankets would be useful once the season changed, but as a new organization on its first ever reconnaissance trip, it was a puzzling and disconcerting situation. Had no one properly assessed the needs of the beneficiaries and local community or understood the cultural context and settings where these blankets would be distributed? While the intention was most certainly good, the design and its implementation appeared to be misguided.