How to Teach Social Emotional Learning

Diana Cortese Author

Teaching SEL starts with making it measurable. Break down self-awareness, social awareness, and self-management into skills you can actually teach.

Teaching social-emotional learning (SEL) can feel overwhelming because the concepts are broad and abstract. As a BCBA and former special education teacher, I've found the key is breaking SEL competencies down into specific, observable, teachable behaviors. Once you do that, you know exactly what to target, teach, and track.

The Collaborative for Academic Social Emotional Learning (CASEL) defines five core competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. In practice, most of the core work in special education falls into the first three, so that's what we're focusing on here.

Social Awareness

Social awareness deficits are visible in group settings: a student invading personal space, making off-topic or inappropriate comments, or missing the facial expressions and body language that signal how peers are feeling. These aren't personality traits, they're discrete skill gaps.

To address them, you need to teach the specific behaviors underneath: recognizing facial expressions, identifying emotions in others, understanding that peers have different perspectives, and monitoring how their body position affects the people around them. The most effective method for building these skills is games and interactive activities paired with role play. These formats create the natural social context kids need to practice reading other people.

Self-Awareness

Self-awareness covers what a student knows about themselves, including their interests, emotions, and what triggers those emotions. A student who can't identify what makes them upset or anxious is going to struggle to regulate those states.

Teaching self-awareness means giving students repeated, low-pressure opportunities to express how they feel and what they like. Activities should be conversational and reinforcing so students actually want to engage. A key piece is helping kids recognize physical sensations tied to emotions, because that body awareness is the foundation for self-management.

Self-Management

Self-management problems are usually obvious. For younger kids, it might look like knocking things over, crying, running, or slamming doors. For others, it's internal: freezing, going silent, refusing to respond. Both are signs of distress, and a student in distress is not available for social learning or connection.

Teachable self-management skills include using calming strategies independently, requesting a break, tolerating changes in routine, and shifting attention between activities when it's hard. Observable, measurable behaviors in this area include taking deep breaths before responding, using a break card, and successfully rejoining a group after a calming period.

The Core Principle

The reason SEL instruction often falls flat is that practitioners try to teach the umbrella concepts instead of the behaviors underneath them. "Self-management" is not a lesson plan. "Uses a break card independently when frustrated" is. Breaking these competencies into observable behaviors makes your teaching more precise and your activity design much easier because you already know exactly what you're targeting.

Categories: : social learning, social skills group