Social Emotional Learning

Social Emotional Learning support is provided for students to meet individual needs, personal coping skills and strategies. 

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Facilitate Personal Coping Skills & Strategies

Providing a model of self-regulatory skills is not sufficient for most learners. They will need sustained apprenticeships that include scaffolding. Reminders, models, checklists, and so forth can assist learners in choosing and trying an adaptive strategy for managing and directing their emotional responses to external events (e.g., strategies for coping with anxiety-producing social settings or for reducing task-irrelevant distractors) or internal events (e.g., strategies for decreasing rumination on depressive or anxiety-producing ideation). Such scaffolds should provide sufficient alternatives to meet the challenge of individual differences in the kinds of strategies that might be successful and the independence with which they can be applied.

Provide differentiated models, scaffolds and feedback for:

• Managing frustration

• Seeking external emotional support

• Developing internal controls and coping skills
• Appropriately handling subject specific phobias and judgments of “natural” aptitude (e.g., “how can I improve on the areas I am struggling in?” rather than “I am not good at math”)
• Use real life situations or simulations to demonstrate coping skills

Promote Expectations & Beliefs that Optimize Motivation

One important aspect of self-regulation is the personal knowledge each learner has about what he or she finds motivating, be it intrinsic or extrinsic. To accomplish this, learners need to be able to set personal goals that can be realistically reached, as well as fostering positive beliefs that their goals can be met. However, learners also need to be able to deal with frustration and avoid anxiety when they are in the process of meeting their goals. Multiple options need to be given to learners to help them stay motivated.

• Provide prompts, reminders, guides, rubrics, checklists that focus on:
• Self-regulatory goals like reducing the frequency of aggressive outbursts in response to frustration
• Increasing the length of on-task orientation in the face of distractions
• Elevating the frequency of self-reflection and self-reinforcements
• Provide coaches, mentors, or agents that model the process of setting personally appropriate goals that take into account both strengths and weaknesses
• Support activities that encourage self-reflection and identification of personal goals