It’s 2024. Are You Embracing Adult SEL?

By Wendy Turner, M. Ed.

Happy New Year! It’s a time for renewal, growth, and optimism. As teachers and education leaders lean into the open path ahead, it’s time for an important question. Are you embracing Adult SEL?

In the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, we know that both students and adults in the education world have increased needs. These needs range from academic support to strategies to support mental health, connection, and emotional regulation and strategies to avoid burnout. Leaders in education know firsthand the myriad challenges that arise every day including operational staffing, supporting both novice and experienced educators, and meeting accountability demands. It’s a lot. There are many things that can help. Social Emotional Learning is one of them.

Social Emotional Learning, or SEL, is critically important in education today. You know this. The research bears this out and shows that SEL can create academic gains and support student agency. Casel, the Collaborative for Social and Emotional Learning, has been championing SEL for years and with good reason. It works. Casel defines SEL as “the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions.” This includes 5 competencies or core skills: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationships skills, and responsible decision making. According to Casel, research shows that “SEL leads to improved academic achievement, contributes to healthy well-being and safe schools, develops skills that promote future readiness, and benefits adults, too.” This is all fantastic news and points to the fact that SEL matters a great deal in our education systems, schools, classrooms and community. Let’s think about the element of Adult SEL.

Casel also tells us that a “growing body of evidence suggests that focusing on educator social and emotional competence can also improve teacher well-being. Educators with strong social and emotional competence report higher levels of job satisfaction and less burnout. Focusing on SEL can help educators build and maintain stronger relationships with students and manage classrooms and teachers who teach SEL to students report feeling more effective at their jobs and lower levels of job-related anxiety.” These are all pretty compelling reasons to bring Adult SEL into our spaces. But how, exactly, does one do it?

I started to think about this question deeply a year ago. After 12 years in the classroom, I took a year off to look into different professional opportunities and address my burnout. Quite frankly, I needed a break after 3 years of pandemic teaching and I knew it. While doing so I thought deeply about my own SEL and the importance of SEL in our system. I couldn’t help but think about the fact that I had not been trained in SEL during my educator preparation program years earlier.

In January of last year, I attended a Casel webinar and asked a key question related to Adult SEL. My question was “Can you share any research around whether or not explicit instruction and competency building on SEL is being included in educator preparation programs. I have the same question around state legislation that would require it to be included. Thank you!”

Casel responded with “Hi Wendy. While there is growing interest in this area, our last scan of teacher prep programs revealed that there is a significant lack of SEL focus in most teacher prep programs”. They then provided a link to their state scan for information about how states are prioritizing SEL. This was very helpful! But I couldn’t get the idea out of my head that SEL still wasn’t showing up in teacher preparation. This creates a challenge and an opportunity for education leaders. Novice educators are coming into our system with limited explicit knowledge around SEL both in terms of classroom implementation as well as personal skill development. Experienced educators have varied levels of support, often related to local professional development programs, and their own goals and personal interest. All of this creates various outcomes for students and lots of variability with educator and leader SEL competence. So how to get at this problem?

My mission is to foster curiosity, confidence, and competence with SEL. So I started writing. Since 2017, when I was named the Delaware Teacher of the Year, I have used my voice and embraced every opportunity I could to champion for SEL, learning more as I went. With 12 years of classroom experience as well as over 5 years of experience leading professional development around the country, I was ready to create a resource to help educators and education leaders develop their personal SEL skills, a key component of SEL system implementation.

It’s important to consider several key ideas in developing one’s own SEL skills and practice.

Understand Where You Are With SEL

We are talking about SEL more than ever in education today and with good reason. SEL has a positive impact on systems, schools, leaders, teachers and students as well as communities. Many schools and districts have adopted SEL curricula and are dedicating time to SEL. This is wonderful! However it doesn’t mean that the adults using the curriculum are adequately knowledgeable about why SEL is so important, what the research says, or even how to implement the lessons and curriculum well. Some still think “SEL is not my job” and don’t know how to integrate SEL with academics. So it’s important to find out where you are with SEL. The graphic below can be helpful.

Based on the questions in the graphic above, what zone of SEL are you in personally? Before you’ll be able to lead in SEL, it’s critical you understand SEL and develop your personal competencies so you can live them and model them for others. The questions here are a guide to help you determine where you are in the current moment.

The Fear Zone is outside of the graphic above. In this place, one may not know anything about SEL and won’t want to learn about it. Research is ignored and learning and growth do not take place. In terms of SEL growth and development, it is a valley of stagnation and an empty, still harbor. SEL does not live in the Fear Zone.

Are you in the Curiosity Zone, Confidence Zone or Competence Zone? As someone in the Competence Zone, I find that I am continually honing and developing my skills. The journey in SEL is never finished, remember it’s an ongoing process. So before you start moving forward, understand where you are. Once you know where you are, help your team determine where they are so too, can move forward.

Develop an SEL Practice

As I mentioned earlier, my mission is to foster curiosity, confidence, and competence in SEL. To do this, I want to inspire others to develop their own personal SEL practice. This is a challenge without a framework or a roadmap of how to do so.

Recall that Casel’s definition of SEL includes 5 core skills or competencies including self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making. Each is important in and of itself, however all of the competencies are intertwined and have elements that tie into the others. To help stay organized and clear in one’s approach, it can be helpful to think about skill progression and learning about and practicing ways to get better at each competency in both personal and professional contexts. This graphic can be helpful in understanding this idea.

We all need a place to start. Starting with self is both necessary and wise. When we understand ourselves deeply, we can better understand how we both present ourselves and impact people and the world around us. After we focus on ourselves, we move outward, towards others. Deepening our understanding of people, including better understanding various perspectives and cultures, helps us to be more successful in our interactions and challenges with people in our communities. It makes sense to build these skills. Once we are self-aware, can manage ourselves, and embrace multiple perspectives, use empathy and understand cultures, I believe we’ll just enjoy better relationships. I like to think about these ideas with this graphic.

Decision making is where it all comes together. Finally, when all of these skills and habits have grown and while they continue to evolve, we’ll be able to make better decisions. This is where SEL all comes together. I like to think about this concept in this way. When do I make better decisions? Quite simply, it’s when I talk to people I trust, I stay regulated, I consider perspectives and devote time to the process when I can. These ideas are all rooted in SEL skills and competencies. If I build these skills and effectively apply them in my life, I am able to make better decisions. As a leader, you will too.

You can learn more about my approach to developing your Adult SEL skills in my book, Embracing Adult SEL: An Educator’s Guide to Personal Social Emotional Learning Success. Packed with research and valuable resources, it will immediately help you grow in your SEL knowledge, skills and leadership. In it I share my life experiences, journey in education, and the everyday moments that spoke to me about SEL. It includes practices you can use in your personal and professional life that will turn you into a leader in SEL. I include a roadmap and concrete strategies to build your own SEL practice and skills using proactive, in-the-moment, and reflective strategies for each of the five core SEL skills in the Casel model. The benefits we see from this work enhance our entire life because we are one whole person. It’s time to lead. Embrace Adult SEL today!

Purchase on Amazon, Routledge Publishing, Barnes & Noble and In Bulk

References

Advancing Social and emotional learning. CASEL. (2023a, July 18). https://casel.org/

Fundamentals of sel. CASEL. (2023a, October 9). https://casel.org/fundamentals-of-sel/

Turner, W. (2023). Embracing adult SEL: An educator’s guide to personal social emotional learning success. Routledge.

What does the research say?. CASEL. (2023, July 19). https://casel.org/fundamentals-of-sel/what-does-the-research-say/

About the Author Wendy Turner is an educator, author, advocate, and teacher leader. She changed careers at age 40 to become a teacher and after six years in the classroom, was honored as the Delaware Teacher of the Year in 2017. Wendy is an experienced elementary educator in Wilmington, Delaware and currently teaches 3rd grade in a Title 1 School. With passion, she embraces social emotional learning personally, as well as professionally, while delivering dynamic learning experiences for her students, working to foster a safe and supportive learning environment for her students that is trauma informed and infused with SEL. She also works to build capacity in others to do the same. Her first book. Embracing Adult SEL: An Educator’s Guide to Personal Social Emotional Learning Success, was published in 2023.Throughout her career, she has been honored with awards and recognition including a Presidential Award for Excellence Teaching Science, a Delaware Compassion Champion Award, an outstanding STEM Educator Award, and NEA Educator Excellence Award as well as an NEA Foundation Global Learning Fellowship with field work in South Africa. Wendy served as the teacher leader on the Delaware State Board of Education for 2 years. She continues to facilitate professional learning on trauma and social emotional learning both locally and nationally and regularly contributes to education blogs, articles and podcasts on these topics as well. Wendy loves to spend time with her husband, two teenagers, and their German Shepherd. Her hobbies include travel, reading, spending time in nature, running, movies, the beach, lifelong learning, and routing for the Green Bay Packers. You can find Wendy on Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Instagram. She'd love to hear from you via email at wendy@wendyturnerconsulting.com