5 Global Obstacles to SEL in Practice
by Krista Leh
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 Education Club. 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:
Increasing Awareness - When asked to define SEL, many respond with “building relationships.” While this is true, it is a very narrow scope of social emotional learning. SEL consists of five core competencies spanning interpersonal and intrapersonal development. About a third of the educators shared the importance of understanding how the brain functions in relation to SEL skill development, including unraveling and challenging false beliefs commonly held around intelligence and behavior.
Gaining “Buy-in” and Building Capacity - Seventy-five percent of the educators first focused on the importance of staff well-being. Given the challenges of the past 18 months, educators are stressed and anxiety-ridden, unable to process adding “one more thing” to their list of professional responsibilities. Participants offered the following solutions to this challenge: aligning SEL with other initiatives, sharing the teacher benefits of SEL integration such as increased on-task engagement and pro-social behaviors in the classroom, utilizing “train the trainer” models among staff, and empowering students to facilitate staff and students learning sessions.
"Finding" Time - Educators were unanimous in sharing that SEL activities needed to be fun, engaging, and interactive. Students should be provided opportunities to practice SEL skills in a physically and psychologically safe environment where they could reflect on their choices, process with peers, reframe their thinking, and practice again. Methods shared included student-written plays, single- and multi-player games, experiential learning activities, scenarios and role-playing, and stories in which students can imagine themselves as a character. . Emphasis on academic development over social emotional growth led to educators' reluctance to design or facilitate explicit SEL lessons and conversations. A deeper awareness of how to integrate social emotional learning into the organization's culture can reshape the misconception that SEL parallels academic learning instead of complementing it. When social emotional learning is integrated into the culture, it influences the physical environment, social interactions, curriculum, instructional practices, policies, and procedures within an organization.
Collaborating with Families and Community Members - More than half of the educators reinforced the importance of connecting and collaborating with families and community members, acknowledging that providing consistent context aids social, emotional, and academic growth. Three of the most considerable barriers to family and community collaboration are cultural differences, time, and transportation. Suggestions to enhance partnership include hosting town halls to solicit insight and provide SEL information hosted within the community as well as the schools, creating and sharing electronic SEL programs for use in the homes, and fostering a shift away from the teacher as "expert" and emphasizing the parent/guardian as the expert on the child.
Monitoring SEL Growth Among Students - An underlying concern for educators who shared was the increased focus on documenting and sharing the effectiveness of the SEL program, initiative, and framework. We want to ensure that our time, money, and efforts lead to intended outcomes, and we are used to the quantitative assessment of many educational initiatives. Assessment or evaluation of SEL growth presents reliability and validity challenges. However, a consensus emerged that qualitative and quantitative data should be included when monitoring SEL growth. Additionally, educators, parents/guardians, and students should contribute to the perception data collected, resulting in a triangulation of the data.
Given the health, political, economic, and social hardships of the past year and a half, it is clear that educators must focus on supporting students' social and emotional needs so they can grow and thrive beyond their schooling years. Despite the challenges listed above, we've made significant advancements working collectively as a community of researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to evolve and reinforce the value of social emotional education for our youth. Let's continue to work in tandem to reimagine the possibilities that exist for youth as we support their social, emotional, and cognitive development.
Krista Leh, a former high school teacher and instructional coach, has spent 22 years in education. She is the founder of Resonance Educational Consulting, an organization that helps educators create sustainable, scalable social emotional learning systems.