Social–emotional learning

Based on Wikipedia: Social–emotional learning

Teaching Children to Feel

In the late 1960s, a Yale professor named James Comer looked at the struggling elementary schools of New Haven, Connecticut, and asked a question that seems obvious in retrospect: What if the reason these kids are failing has nothing to do with their intelligence?

The schools he studied served low-income African-American communities. Their academic report cards were dismal. The conventional wisdom of the era would have prescribed more rigorous instruction, more homework, more discipline. Comer tried something different. He focused on the social and emotional needs of the students first, treating their feelings and relationships as legitimate subjects worthy of classroom time.

The results were striking enough that the approach spread throughout New Haven's public schools. A generation later, this experiment would evolve into one of the most celebrated—and now contested—educational movements in American history: social and emotional learning.

What Social and Emotional Learning Actually Means

The term gets shortened to SEL, and sometimes you'll see it written as "social-emotional learning" or "socio-emotional learning." But the alphabet soup obscures something simple at its core. SEL treats emotions and social skills as subjects that can be taught, practiced, and improved—just like mathematics or reading comprehension.

This might strike you as either revolutionary or completely obvious, depending on your perspective. After all, humans have always learned how to navigate emotions and relationships. We just didn't traditionally think of it as something that belonged in a classroom curriculum.

The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning—known as CASEL, which rhymes with "castle"—was founded in 1994 and has become the intellectual center of this movement. They published their first comprehensive guidebook for educators in 1997, and they've since broken SEL down into five core competencies.

The first is self-awareness. This means understanding your own emotions as they happen and developing what psychologists call a positive self-concept—basically, knowing yourself and not hating what you find.

The second is self-management, which builds on awareness by adding control. Can you regulate your emotions rather than being overwhelmed by them? Can you set goals and motivate yourself to pursue them? This is the difference between feeling angry and doing something destructive with that anger.

Third comes social awareness—the ability to read the emotions and social situations of other people. This is where empathy lives, the capacity to understand that other minds exist and contain experiences different from your own.

Fourth is relationship skills: the practical ability to build connections with other people and communicate effectively within them. You can be perfectly aware of your own emotions and those of others, but if you can't translate that awareness into functional relationships, the awareness remains theoretical.

The fifth competency is responsible decision-making. This encompasses problem-solving and accountability—the willingness to own the consequences of your choices rather than deflecting blame.

The Science of Feeling Good to Learn Well

Here's something that might surprise you: teaching children about emotions appears to make them better at math.

Multiple studies have found that implementing SEL programs is statistically associated with improving academic performance by about eleven percentile points. That's not a trivial effect. If a student was performing at the fiftieth percentile—exactly average—an eleven-point boost would move them to the sixty-first percentile, outperforming nearly two-thirds of their peers.

The molecular biologist John Medina puts it bluntly: the more empathy training students and teachers receive, the better grades become. His explanation centers on safety. When a classroom feels safe—emotionally safe, not just physically safe—learning becomes possible. When a child is anxious about social dynamics, worried about being humiliated, or struggling to process difficult emotions, some portion of their cognitive resources gets diverted away from the actual lesson.

Think of attention as a finite resource, like water pressure in a pipe. Every bit of mental energy spent managing social anxiety or emotional turbulence is energy that isn't flowing toward understanding fractions or conjugating verbs.

The research extends beyond test scores. Schools that implement SEL programs show decreases in physical aggression and reductions in bullying, particularly bullying directed at students with disabilities. One longitudinal study found that children who received SEL instruction starting in kindergarten were less likely, as adults, to use public housing, have involvement with police, or spend time in detention facilities.

These findings come with the usual caveats about correlation and causation. Children who attend schools that adopt SEL programs might differ in other ways from children who don't. But the consistency of results across different studies, populations, and methodologies suggests something real is happening.

A Program Called SPARK

One specific approach worth mentioning goes by the name SPARK. Research has shown it to be particularly effective in schools with diverse student populations—places where children come from different cultural backgrounds, speak different languages at home, and carry different assumptions about how emotions should be expressed.

This matters because emotional expression isn't universal. What counts as appropriate displays of anger, affection, or grief varies dramatically across cultures. A child from a family where emotions are discussed openly might struggle to understand a classmate raised in a tradition where feelings are considered private. SEL programs at their best acknowledge these differences rather than imposing a single cultural standard.

The Transformation of Transformation

In 2019, something significant shifted within the SEL world. CASEL introduced a new concept they called Transformative Social and Emotional Learning—sometimes abbreviated as TSEL or T-SEL.

Traditional SEL focuses on helping individual students develop emotional competencies. Transformative SEL adds a layer: it aims to guide students to "critically examine root causes of inequity, and to develop collaborative solutions that lead to personal, community, and societal well-being."

This is a substantial expansion of scope. Traditional SEL might teach a child to recognize when they're feeling frustrated and choose constructive responses to that frustration. Transformative SEL asks why certain children might experience more frustration than others, whether those causes are fair, and what might be done to change systemic conditions.

CASEL updated their official definition of SEL in 2020 to include a stronger focus on equity. Their description of Transformative SEL explicitly mentions "interrogating social norms, disrupting and resisting inequities, and co-constructing equitable and just solutions."

This language represents a philosophical choice. Is emotional education primarily about helping individuals adapt to existing conditions, or should it also question whether those conditions are just? The answer you give reveals something about your broader beliefs regarding education's purpose in society.

The Culture War Arrives

Since 2020, social and emotional learning has become increasingly controversial, particularly in the United States. The timing is not coincidental.

Critics, many writing in conservative publications, describe SEL as a "Trojan horse"—a seemingly benign educational approach that smuggles in content they find objectionable. They argue it introduces what they characterize as critical race theory, sexual orientation and gender identity discussions, and left-wing politics generally.

Robert Pondiscio, who works at the American Enterprise Institute—a think tank that leans right politically—articulates a specific concern. He argues that SEL changes "the role of the teacher, from a pedagogue to something more closely resembling a psychotherapist, social worker, or member of the clergy—no less concerned with a child's beliefs, attitudes and values." The implication is that teachers should transmit knowledge, not shape character.

Those who hold this view often point to Transformative SEL as evidence for their concerns. When CASEL explicitly states goals like "disrupting and resisting inequities," critics see confirmation that the movement has political rather than purely educational aims.

Defenders of SEL respond that teaching children to recognize and manage emotions is fundamentally apolitical—or at least, that it shouldn't be political. They argue that empathy, self-awareness, and responsible decision-making benefit children regardless of their families' political beliefs.

But this defense becomes more complicated when applied to Transformative SEL, which does explicitly engage with questions of social justice. Supporters would say examining inequity is an essential life skill; critics would say it's ideological indoctrination. The disagreement reflects deeper divides about education's purpose that predate SEL and will outlast it.

The Technology Problem

Some school districts have implemented digital tools as part of their SEL curricula. Students are asked to enter their current mood or feelings into an app every day.

This practice has generated its own category of concern, separate from the ideological debates. Parents worry about being excluded from the process—about their children sharing emotional information with schools that parents never see. Privacy advocates raise questions about what happens to this data, who can access it, and how long it's retained.

These concerns connect to broader anxieties about children's digital lives. When a student tells a school app that they're feeling sad or anxious, where does that information go? Is it stored on a server somewhere? Could it be accessed in a data breach? Might it follow a child into adulthood, the way other digital footprints do?

The answers to these questions vary by district, by app, by state law. The inconsistency itself is part of the problem.

The Legal Landscape

Only three American states—Illinois, Kansas, and Pennsylvania—have established formal SEL standards for their kindergarten through twelfth grade curricula. Given how widespread SEL programs have become, this might seem surprisingly few. But it reflects a reality of American education: most curriculum decisions happen at the local level, in individual school districts rather than state capitols.

Congressional action has been minimal. In October 2019, Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan introduced a bill called the Social Emotional Learning for Families Act, abbreviated as the SELF Act. It would have created a grant program to support SEL implementation in schools. The bill attracted exactly one cosponsor—Representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell—and went nowhere.

More recent legislative action has moved in the opposite direction. In February 2022, Oklahoma state senator Shane Jett proposed legislation to prohibit public and charter schools from promoting or applying SEL concepts using public or private funds. The bill represented a direct attempt to ban SEL entirely.

Perhaps the highest-profile clash came in Florida in April 2022. The state's Department of Education reviewed mathematics textbooks for alignment with state standards and rejected forty-one percent of submitted materials. Among the reasons for rejection: "unsolicited addition" of SEL content in math instruction.

This decision crystallized a particular critique. Mathematics, the argument goes, should teach mathematics. When a word problem about calculating percentages also includes a scenario designed to prompt reflection on feelings, it's no longer just math. Opponents see this as mission creep; supporters see it as integration that reflects how learning actually works.

What Teachers Experience

The research on SEL tends to focus on student outcomes. But Kimberly Schonert-Reichl, writing in the academic journal The Future of Children, has explored what happens to teachers in schools that adopt these programs.

Teachers who understand SEL principles and demonstrate them in their classrooms report that the learning process becomes more natural. Students relate better to content when emotional dynamics aren't creating static. Motivation increases when students feel understood. Comprehension improves when cognitive resources aren't being consumed by social anxiety.

There's a chicken-and-egg problem here. Do teachers get better results because they've adopted SEL practices? Or are teachers who adopt SEL practices already the kind of educators who get good results? Separating correlation from causation in educational research is notoriously difficult.

What seems clear is that schools implementing SEL report changes in their social dynamics—less aggression, less bullying, more cooperation. Whether these changes flow from the specific techniques of SEL or simply from the increased attention to emotional well-being remains debated.

The Deeper Question

Social and emotional learning touches something fundamental about what we believe schools should do.

One vision holds that schools exist primarily to transmit knowledge and skills. Reading, writing, arithmetic, science, history—these are the subjects that matter. Character development is the family's responsibility, and schools that venture into emotional territory are overstepping their bounds.

Another vision holds that schools inevitably shape character whether they intend to or not. Every classroom teaches implicit lessons about authority, about how to treat peers, about what matters and what doesn't. Given that reality, shouldn't schools be thoughtful and intentional about the social and emotional lessons they're teaching?

A third vision goes further still. Schools, in this view, should actively work to create a better society by teaching children to recognize and resist injustice. This is the territory of Transformative SEL, where emotional education connects to social change.

These visions aren't entirely incompatible—a school could emphasize academic rigor while also attending to emotional climate—but they represent different priorities and different theories of what education is for.

James Comer, back in those New Haven classrooms in the 1960s, noticed something that shouldn't have been surprising but somehow was: children who are struggling emotionally struggle to learn. The intervention he designed addressed that reality. Everything that has followed—the spread of SEL programs across thousands of schools, the formation of CASEL, the research studies, the political controversies—flows from that observation.

Whether teaching emotions belongs in schools, how it should be done, and who gets to decide remain open questions. The answers will likely vary by community, by era, by the broader political climate. What seems unlikely is that the questions themselves will go away. Schools will always face the challenge of educating whole human beings, not just minds waiting to be filled with facts. How they respond to that challenge reveals what they believe about children, about learning, and about the kind of society they're trying to create.