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The social and emotional abilities are being noted as the indicators of how well a person can adjust in relation to his or her environment, or how the person adapts to changes. All of these are ultimately going to affect how much a person is going to be successful in his or her life. As a matter of fact, the core developments of abilities like conscientiousness, emotional stability, openness, and agreeableness can be or these may even be more crucial than cognitive intelligence when it comes to the determination of future employment. Thus, it is equally important that your child’s school should have a comprehensive social emotional learning curriculum in place in order for them to properly develop these competencies as they grow up.
Even when these competencies are being related to consequential life outcomes, it can still be challenging for educators to look for effective ways for them to prioritize, teach, and evaluate their student’s social and emotional skills.
Thus, it is important to stress early on that it is critical to developing these core life abilities through the social emotional learning curriculum because this is directly correlated to the success and happiness of the child as they become adults.
It is undeniable that for a number of children, school is the only place wherein deficiencies in these abilities can be addressed before these children become active members of society. And when these abilities are combined with their academic development, this will create a high-quality learning experience and environment for these children wherein such will serve as their empowerment to become effective contributors in their classrooms for today, and then in their workplace and communities in the future.
Is Enrolling your Child in a Social Emotional Learning Curriculum Worth It?
Based on a national principal survey as to how the social emotional learning can prepare children and also as to the transformation of schools, there is a reliable data that can support the importance of embedding social and emotional development in schools. Such a report has cited a meta-analysis from the year 2011 which revealed that students who were able to receive a high-quality social emotional learning instruction have achievement scores that are higher by 11 percent as compared to students who were not able to receive any social emotional learning instructions.
However, these benefits do not really end up to graduation. Another recent study was also conducted by looking at the five primary social and emotional skills which are open-mindedness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, extraversion, and agreeableness, as factors in determining the strongest indicators of success. This study revealed that students who had lacking social emotional learning skills are regularly correlated with the unfavorable outcome like an increased chance of unemployment, divorce, poor health, criminal behavior, and imprisonment.
To further stress the advantages of social emotional learning, the report also share that advances in neuroscience also imply development in social emotional learning skills in kindergarten, that it can have a long-term academic benefits on students when it comes to reading and vocabulary, and this includes high poverty schools, thus suggesting a social emotional learning curriculum can be of help when it comes to closing achievement gaps. The report also revealed that in every dollar that a school is sending on social emotional learning programs, it translates to an eleven-dollar return on investment, which substantiates that reason why investing in social emotional learning curriculum is worthwhile.
There is a positive yield from the development of these social emotional learning skills, and some of which include better academic performance, improvement on the child’s attitude, improvement on the child’s behaviors and relationships with peers, along with a deeper connection to school with fewer delinquent acts along with a reduction in emotional distress.
How do educators feel about the social emotional learning curriculum?
A report revealed that the interest in and support for social emotional learning is high among educators and school administrators. In fact, school principals are eager to undergo the pieces of training that are required for the expertise, training, and support that are necessary in order to effectively implement the new programming.
The survey also revealed that while a majority of the principals have confidence that teaching social emotional learning in their schools can lead to improvement on student’s behavior, learning and development, there is only 35 percent who were able to report that their school has been developing a plan for educating the students with social and emotional skills.
Furthermore, there is only 40 percent of these school principals who are looking forward to the fact that teaching social and emotional learning skills will be able to improve the student’s academic performance which is one of the indicators of a disconnect between the social emotional learning support and its actual implementation.
Will the Social Emotional Learning Curriculum become a priority?
Even though there is a vast majority of education stakeholders who are in agreement with the importance of social emotional learning, the program has still been continuously sidelined and this is because educators still tend to focus more on academics alone, instead of looking at the total development of the child.
But, since we know that there is immense support on social emotional learning, then we should be confident enough that it will just be a matter of time before the program will become widely adopted. Developing an emphasis on social emotional learning in schools will be able to yield in a more supportive space for students for them to liberally share their creative ideas and be confident enough in asking questions for them to be able to learn academic concepts and building lifelong skill all at the same time.
This extensive advancement of social emotional learning is going to require a step by step and ostentatious shift in pedagogy. Thus, in the process of such, we all can be able to forge a better-rounded educational system to be able to produce citizens who are more socially responsible and are better prepared in working together in order to build communities, nations, and ultimately, be contributors to building a better world.
