Giving Compass' Take:

•  The author highlights the work of Dr. Abram Jimenez, VP of Illuminate Education who argues that social-emotional learning can help students who are facing adverse experiences and should be adopted into every school curriculum. 

• What specific aspects of social-emotional learning will help students face new traumatic experiences such as cyberbullying?

•  Read about how schools can start to incorporate social-emotional learning into their curriculum. 

In an eSchool News article, Dr. Abram Jimenez, vice president of Illuminate Education, urges schools that have been on the fence about social-emotional learning (SEL) to begin incorporating it into their curriculum. SEL can help students who are faced with poverty, cyberbullying and trauma in their every day lives to become more engaged and improve academically, and can help improve school safety as a result, he writes.

SEL is more of an approach to learning and can easily be embedded across the curriculum to facilitate collaboration, teamwork, and respect for the ideas of others. It is also easily incorporated into play time when a lack of social and emotional skills is often most evident.

Social-emotional skills — or competencies — are of more increasingly important as researchers learn more about the impact adverse childhood experiences. SEL can help them become more resilient to these challenges and can hopefully teach them how to better treat others in the future. The soft skills developed through SEL can also help better prepare students for future jobs as well.

Read the full article about social-emotional learning by Amelia Harper at EducationDive