Social-Emotional Learning: The CAsel 5

I’ve recently been working on a new project (details coming soon!) which has required me to really dive into the CASEL framework. If you’re not familiar, the framework is a set of five core social and emotional competencies that are the foundation of social-emotional learning. Additionally, the framework describes the four key settings in which kids spend most of their time and thus, should be learning social-emotional skills.

I thought it might be useful to give a brief synopsis of the CASEL wheel since I’ve spent so much time on social media, YouTube, etc. talking about social-emotional learning lately and not everyone lives and breathes it like I do.

The five core competencies that make up SEL are self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision making. They are in that order specifically because the skills embedded into each competency build upon one another. In other words, you need to master the skills within self-awareness BEFORE you tackle the skills within self-management.

So what are the skills within each competency? I’ll briefly outline them below:

Self-Awareness: recognizing, labeling and describing our emotions, identifying our strengths/weaknesses and likes/dislikes, understanding the difference between static and dynamic traits, identifying safe adults and positive role models, understanding that there are positive and negative consequences for our actions, knowing how to care for our emotional selves

Self-Management: identifying and managing our emotions, managing frustration and addressing stress, moving to a calm down space, using strategies to calm ourselves, using self-monitoring strategies, expressing our emotions respectfully, accepting constructive feedback, demonstrating honesty and integrity, setting, monitoring and evaluating goals in life

Social Awareness: demonstrating awareness of other people’s emotions and perspectives, understanding how our own behavior affects the emotions of others, being considerate of others, positively contributing to our communities, demonstrating an awareness of, and respect for, different cultures, reading social cues and responding accordingly

Relationship Skills: effectively communicating with others, using attentive listening skills, working cooperatively with others, developing and maintaining positive relationships, understanding the difference between helpful and harmful behaviors in a relationship, using problem solving and conflict resolution skills

Responsible Decision Making: being positive and accepting of people from other cultures, showing empathy for others, being honest, respectful and compassionate, knowing the steps of effective decision making, having individual roles and responsibilities in a variety of settings

If you’ve been following along with my Social-Emotional Learning YouTube series, you may be wondering how the competencies I’m discussing over there fit into all of this. Each of those 11 skills (kindness, coping skills, social problem solving, etc.) align to one of the five competencies listed above. You can think of them as the subset of skills needed to successfully master each of the core competencies.

If you remember, I also mentioned that the CASEL Wheel identifies four key settings in which social-emotional learning skills are important. These are the classroom, school, home and community. It is important that any school-based social-emotional learning program take into account the external settings of home and community, in order to be as effective as possible.

Now that you (hopefully!) have a better understanding of the building blocks of social-emotional learning, you may be wondering where to even begin. That’s a very fair question since SEL is a term that encompasses a LOT of skills. Check out the list below of a few ideas of where to start:

-Read up on the CASEL Framework here

-Check out my SEL YouTube series here

-Do a little research on your state’s SEL standards (not every state has standards and some states have poor quality standards so you can check out the Michigan standards here to see what high quality SEL standards should look like)

-Follow me on Pinterest for loads of SEL ideas and strategies

-Check out all the resources in my TPT store

-Stay tuned for a BIG announcement that will be verrrryyyy helpful in getting social-emotional learning integrated into your classroom instruction!!!