Emotional Intelligence is at the heart of academic performance, because:
|
If you believe that learning grows out of curiosity, confidence, and joy, you can't separate the social and the emotional from the academic. Children need to feel safe and accepted, in order for them to be willing to look outside themselves, reach that little bit further, and connect with their world, instead of simply reacting to it.
|
Since it is so valuable, we can’t leave the development of EI to chance - we must actively seek to teach it to our students. It is a teachable skill, just like Math or Reading.
At our school, we teach it as Social Emotional Learning, based on the work by IFSEL. And just like math and reading, some children find it easy to learn, while others need explicit instruction and plenty of practice. We address this by including SEL as part of our curriculum, and it has a scope and sequence as you move through the grades. The goal is for the students to develop a vocabulary for recognizing and talking about emotions, and then creating a toolbox for regulating them, and moving successfully through the social arena. By 4th and 5th Grade, students are starting to care more about what their friends think of them than ever before. As their teacher, my role is to create a safe social space for them, and to provide opportunities for them to practice their SEL skills in context. |
Opportunities for applying EI don’t just occur at 1:40 on Wednesday afternoons, during SEL class!
Oftentimes, they happen on the playground, or in the middle of a collaborative project in Social Studies. And some social emotional milestones are so relevant to certain age groups, that it makes sense to explore them proactively with students, transforming SEL from a series of lessons to be learned into a voyage of discovery that each class makes anew. |
This post is all about some ways that I have tried to proactively integrate SEL into the learning life of our classroom. This is SEL planned into the scope and sequence of our academic curriculum, separate from, but complimentary to, our regular SEL lessons and Class Meetings.
Pick One Thread, and Weave it into Everything
1. Teaching Teamwork To 4th Graders
In 4th Grade, we investigated teamwork all year long, as part of an integrated, backwards designed unit.
|
For example, in our first Math Unit of the year, the students practiced place value with a game of Nice, ... or Nasty? In the first round, students competed to create the greatest 5 digit number by rolling dice in turns, applying what they had been learning about Place Value. In the second round, they could give digits they didn't like to their competitors. Some even teamed up to take one person down! In the final version, each group worked together as a team to create the largest number possible. Afterwards, we talked about the Math, but we also talked about the difference between cooperation and competition. Not that one is wrong and one is right, but that they generate different feelings, and it helps to recognize the difference. All subjects can provide authentic settings for Social Emotional Learning. |
Here, the students reflected on what they learned over the course of the year.
Each student had internalized a different aspect of teamwork, and some were able to share what they needed to work on!
2. Lessons in Leadership (not Loudership)
Here, 5th graders developed a more nuanced definition of leadership, tried out different leadership roles, and investigated the relationship between effective leadership and productive collaboration. This year-long project had 4 strands:
|
3. Practicing Perspective-Taking
Not so much a unit, as a lens through which to create unit plans. 4th and 5th Grade is the perfect time to show kids how to understand and identify alternative points of view. At the start of the year, each student receives a pair of Perspectacles; plastic party favor glasses to put on when trying out an alternative perspective. They add humor to something that can feel scary and hard, and they enable young students to name perspectives without feeling like they have to own them. The physical act of taking the perspectacles on and off scaffolds the perspective-taking process.
What is Perspective? |
Why Teach It? |
In Reading, Perspective-taking means... |
In Writing, |
In Social Studies, |
Mini-Units That Match The Class Make-Up
As part of this unit about Anxiety, we read Justin Case, by Rachel Vail, and gave that fictional 4th Grade Worrier advice, based on what we were learning in class.
|
At the end, we created our own Patronuses - Harry Potter's defensive charm against the Dementors. In our case, our Dementors were Anxiety and Self-Doubt. We used the quiz below to think about what animals to choose, and then created our own versions in the Tinkering Lab. Most kids combined animals to create their perfect blend of traits - a talisman for them to call on when needed.
|