Social-Emotional Learning
Introduction
Self-Regulation
Self-regulation skills are life skills that prepare children to navigate personal and social situations effectively throughout their lives. As children are developing regulation skills, adults co-regulate alongside children through validating, prompting, modelling, and coaching.
Social-emotional learning fosters belonging and inclusion. It is the process through which children:
Acquire knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities- Regulate emotions and achieve personal and collective goals
- Feel and show empathy for others
- Establish and maintain supportive relationships
- Exercise flexible thinking and make responsible and caring decisions
The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) provides a framework that identifies five areas of social-emotional competence:
Self-Awareness |
The ability to identify and recognize emotions and thoughts and their influences on behaviour. |
Self- Management |
The ability to regulate emotions, thoughts, and behaviours effectively. This includes planning, organizational skills, and demonstrating personal agency. |
Social Awareness |
The ability to take the perspectives of others, including those who come from a different background and culture, and to empathize with others and understand social and ethical norms. |
Relationship Skills |
Enable the establishment and maintenance of healthy and supportive relationships and to effectively navigate settings with diverse individuals and groups. |
Responsible Decision-Making |
Includes the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to make constructive choices regarding behaviour and social interactions. |
Emotional Literacy
Emotional literacy is the ability to identify, understand, and respond to emotions in oneself and others in an increasingly safe and healthy manner. Emotional literacy skills are contextual and are learned across a lifetime. Everyone has emotional responses and all feelings are okay.
"Emotional literacy is as vital as any other skill and is central to children's ability
to interact and form relationships."
- Susanne Denham & Rosemary Burton
Lessons and experiences that incorporate common language and shared vocabulary supports students in developing emotional literacy skills over time and transferring their understanding across contexts. Therefore, each elementary school in our district has been gifted this Pebble Emerge series available at Strong Nations featuring 14 emotions to help children learn where emotions come from, what they feel like, and how to cope and manage in healthy ways.
Self-regulation skills are life skills that prepare children to navigate personal and social situations effectively throughout their lives. As children are developing regulation skills, adults co-regulate alongside children through validating, prompting, modelling, and coaching. Self-regulation helps children manage their emotions, behaviours, and impulses, enabling to:
- Focus on tasks
- Make thoughtful decisions
- Interact positively with others
- Concentrate on learning
- Handle stress
- Adapt to challenges
Interoceptive awareness is the ability to be aware of internal sensations in the body. When students develop interoceptive skills, they grow in their ability to:
- Identify and understand their emotions
- Recognize building signs of distress
- Notice physical symptoms triggered by emotions
- Access coping strategies
- Plan for feel-good regulation strategies
- Recognize and indicate internal needs (hunger, fullness, thirst, temperature, toileting)
- Develop healthy sleep habits
- Identify symptoms of illness, pain, or injury
- Recognize and indicate how body parts feel
- Pick up on how others might be feeling
"There is no wrong way to feel. Interoception work is all about helping people to
discover their own inner feels, to validate each person's unique inner experience."
- Kelly Mahler
Growth Mindset
A growth mindset is the belief that abilities, intelligence, and talents can be developed through effort, learning, and perseverance.
Fostering a growth mindset involves:
- Nurturing a supportive classroom culture
- Modelling a growth mindset as a lifelong adult learner
- Using growth-oriented language
- Learning about how the brain works
- Structuring time for exploration and innovation
- Providing opportunities for challenges and risk-taking
- Emphasizing the process over the product
- Recognizing and celebrating effort and growth
- Viewing mistakes as opportunities to learn
- Building resilience as children learn to persist through challenges
- Offering feedback that drives learning forward
- Engaging children in self-reflection and goal setting
"If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning."
- Dr. Carol Dweck
Storybooks
Local public librarians in Squamish, Whistler, and Pemberton have created a selection of recommended storybooks for young readers that celebrate diversity, inclusion, and belonging. Educators are asked to encourage families to sign these storybooks out at their local public library and read them together at home. Family discussions about how the lessons within each story can be applied to daily life at home, in school, and within the broader community are recommended.
Curriculum and Pedagogy |
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Implementation and Instruction |
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CSL and Assessment |
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Professional Learning |
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Family Resources |