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What Are Social-Emotional Skills? | Child Development Skills

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What Are Social-Emotional Skills? Social-Emotional Skills: Know the Basics Social-Emotional Abilities Social-Emotional Tips Social-Emotional Activities What to Watch For

What Are Social-Emotional Skills?

Social-emotional skills are essential for connecting with others! They help us manage our emotions, build healthy relationships, and feel empathy.

Some examples of social-emotional skills in use are:

  • Recognizing if someone is sad, and asking if they’re ok
  • Expressing yourself with your friends in a different way than with your parents
  • Understanding your thoughts and feelings, and being able to relate to others

While these skills may sound complex, social and emotional development begins at a very young age.

Watch to see more about baby's social-emotional development:

Social-Emotional Skills: Know the Basics

When does social and emotional development begin?

Babies start learning these skills from birth! As soon as they begin interacting with the people who care for them, they begin to develop an understanding of feelings.

How do parents impact social-emotional development?

Parents help to nurture social-emotional skills so kids develop healthy relationships with friends and family members. Even as a baby, your little one is picking up on how you respond to their social and emotional needs. They feel safe at home and in your presence. They learn how to empathize, respond to the emotions of others, and say “I’m sorry” by following your lead.

What do social-emotional skills help kids do?

Kids with healthy social-emotional skills are more likely succeed in school, work, and life. Social-emotional skills help kids:

  • Make friends and keep friendships
  • Gain confidence
  • Resolve conflicts
  • Manage stress and anxiety
  • Learn social norms
  • Make appropriate decisions
  • Resist negative social pressure
  • Learn strengths and weaknesses
  • Gain awareness of what others are feeling

How long does it take to develop social-emotional skills?

Social-emotional growth takes time. Early experiences with family, caregivers, and peers greatly impact social and emotional development, but throughout our lives we will continue to be shaped by our experiences! These experiences can include meeting new people, overcoming difficult situations, or even raising children.

Social-Emotional Abilities

Is your child meeting their social-emotional abilities?

Be on the lookout for these abilities as your child grows. They are encouraging signs that your child is making progress in their social and emotional development.

Developing social-emotional skills can boost your child’s confidence and help them succeed in school, work, and life.

Missing one or two abilities should not cause alarm, as every child develops differently. However, if they are missing multiple abilities, be sure to talk with your healthcare provider.

Social-Emotional Tips

What you can do to help your child's social-emotional development

  • Be a model of the emotions and behaviors you want your child to show. You are your child’s first teacher and they look up to you as a role model.
  • Be responsive to your child’s emotions and behaviors. Responding will help to develop trust between you and your child.
  • Ask open-ended questions, such as “What would you do?” to help develop problem-solving skills.
  • Use stories to talk to your child about different social situations and how each person might be feeling.
  • Encourage kids to try new things and learn how much they can do.
  • Play games to teach kids how to take turns, win and lose, share, and negotiate. Ask yourself these questions when choosing a game for family game night.
  • Ask your child questions when they are upset. These questions can be about why they are upset, or offering alternatives to understand the root of their unhappiness. For example, “Would you like to brush your teeth or take a bath first?”
  • Sit with your child when using a screen (not recommended before 18 months) and make it a social activity, e.g. asking them questions or playing turn-taking games.

Social-Emotional Activities

 

What to Watch For

How to address social-emotional issues and delays

The sooner your child receives help in developing their social-emotional skills, the better off their health and well-being will be. Your healthcare provider may be able to help you address the issue or refer you someone who can help.

Here are a few examples of specialists who may be able to help your child:
  • Child psychologist
  • Social worker
  • Neuropsychologist
  • Psychiatrist
  • Occupational therapist
  • Speech-language pathologist
  • Developmental and behavioral pediatrician

Visit Understood.org or Child Mind Institute for more information and resources on social-emotional development.

Fundamentals of SEL - CASEL

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SEL can help all young people and adults thrive personally and academically, develop and maintain positive relationships, become lifelong learners, and contribute to a more caring, just world.

We define social and emotional learning (SEL) as an integral part of education and human development. SEL is 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.

SEL advances educational equity and excellence through authentic school-family-community partnerships to establish learning environments and experiences that feature trusting and collaborative relationships, rigorous and meaningful curriculum and instruction, and ongoing evaluation. SEL can help address various forms of inequity and empower young people and adults to co-create thriving schools and contribute to safe, healthy, and just communities.

What Does the Research Say?

SEL makes a difference. We know this from the research, which demonstrates that an education that promotes SEL has a positive impact on a wide range of outcomes, including academic performance, healthy relationships, mental wellness, and more.

Dive into the research

The Impact of Social and Emotional Learning

What is the CASEL SEL framework?

For many, our framework is known as the “CASEL wheel. ” At the center are the five core social and emotional competencies—broad, interrelated areas that support learning and development. Circling them are four key settings where students live and grow. School-family-community partnerships coordinate SEL practices and establish equitable learning environments across all of these contexts.

Explore the CASEL Framework

How Does SEL Support Equity?

We are driven by a vision of all children and adults as self-aware, caring, responsible, engaged, and lifelong learners who work together to achieve their goals. SEL can be a powerful lever for creating caring, just, inclusive, and healthy schools that support all young people.

Learn more about SEL and equity

How Can You Speak Up for SEL?

The majority of students, teachers, and families agree: SEL belongs in schools. But when it is co-opted by political agendas, students risk losing out on an education that will help them succeed in school and in life. Now is the time for brave thinkers and tireless doers to speak up for SEL.

Resources to champion the facts

How does SEL connect to…

The COVID-19 PandemicMental HealthCivic LearningWorkforce Preparation

The COVID-19 Pandemic

SEL offers a powerful means to support one another during these challenging times by developing crucial competencies relating to empathy, resilience, and relationship-building that students and adults need.

Read more about COVID-19

Mental Health

While SEL and mental health are not the same, SEL can promote positive mental health in many ways, and should be incorporated in a system of mental wellness supports and resources.

Learn more about Mental Health

Civic Learning

Today’s dynamic and multicultural society calls on the next generation of civic leaders to develop strong social and emotional skills. Integrating SEL into civic learning gives students the opportunity to participate as caring and engaged community members.

Read more about SEL and Civic Learning

Ready to Engage

Perspectives of teachers and parents on social and emotional learning and service-learning in America’s public schools

View PDF

2021 SEL Exchange

Virtual summit (October 14, 2021) to explore the integration of SEL and civic engagement

Read more

Workforce Preparation

By aligning and integrating SEL and workforce preparation efforts, states and districts can promote the competencies and environments that will prepare youth to thrive and succeed in the workplace.

Learn more about SEL and Workforce Preparation

Social-emotional skills in school. Part 1.

As part of the project “University Environment for Teachers” of the Moscow City Department of Education, a program of several lectures was presented at the HSE Institute of Education, the participants of which were members of the Educational Spaces Design Studio. This article will focus on lecture “Forms of work in the classroom that contribute to the development of social and emotional skills of students” , author — Tatyana Kanonir , Associate Professor, PhD, co-director of the master's program “Measurements in Psychology and Education”.

There has been a lot of talk lately about the importance of developing social-emotional skills. The educational standards of basic and primary schools in Russia require the formation of students, along with subject educational results, meta-subject and personal educational results. It is under personal educational results that social-emotional skills are hidden.

Social Emotional Skills (SES) are skills that enable people to recognize and manage their emotions, successfully manage conflicts, understand and empathize with others, establish and maintain positive relationships, follow ethics, contribute constructively to their reference communities, set and achieve goals.

Different terms are used to refer to these “non-cognitive” skills: Soft Skills or “soft skills”, skills of the XXI century, emotional intelligence ... All of these concepts differ from each other in breadth of coverage and context of use, but have similar features: conceptual independence on cognition, total value for social adaptation, relative stability over time, potential change as a result of exposure , situational manifestation.

In this article we will focus on 2 social-emotional skills
  1. Achieving goals : working towards achieving short- and long-term goals, including in changing conditions:
    • stability (ability to maintain stable work for a significant time),
    • self-control (the ability to control one's state in the process of performing a task),
    • striving for a goal (awareness of the need to achieve the goal - independent or set by the teacher).

  1. Collaboration with other people
    • sociability (ability to establish and maintain social contacts),
    • respect (tact and respect for peers and adults, including those from other cultures),
    • caring (disinterested assistance to the interaction partner).

Exercises to help teachers develop these social-emotional skills in students

1. Formation of the skill of achieving goals

Exercise : mutual assistance in achieving individual goals (conducted in small groups)

  1. The teacher begins the lesson by telling the children about the difficulties people often face in achieving their own goals and suggests the most general strategies for overcoming these obstacles, writing the main points on the board. For example, it could be a list like this:
    • frustration (depending on the audience, a more understandable term may be used, such as depression) that the goal is too difficult. Possible strategies: relaxation, distraction, break from work.
    • boredom . Possible strategies: set a shorter-term goal, give yourself a reward (such as a break or ice cream). too lazy to do the task. Possible strategies are: assign yourself a reward, think about how you will feel when you complete the task, or that if you do not study, you will let the whole group down.
    • anxiety due to fear of failure . Possible strategies: remember situations in which everything worked out, relaxation techniques.
  2. Then the teacher formulates in writing an individual educational (or near-academic) goal for each of the children (it is better to do this work in advance) and divides them into groups.
  3. Children sit in a circle, each voices his goal and names the possible obstacles to achieving it. The rest of the group suggests possible solutions based on the information on the board or their own experience, and also try to suggest one action that they personally could help another child (for example, “I can call you on Friday and remind you that in you have to do the weekend…”, “I can call and find out how you are doing…”, “I can explain to you the material that you don’t understand…”, etc. ).
  4. In the next week, students discuss in groups their progress towards their goals, how they felt when they were helped by classmates, what kind of help was most useful.

Expected results : children learn to anticipate barriers to achieving a goal and think in advance about possible options for overcoming them, children learn to help others achieve their goals, ask for help and accept it.

2. Learning how to work with others

Exercise : learning together

projects - for example, to study material about a country, continent, scientist, physical phenomenon, etc.,

  • each student is instructed to work through a certain part of the material, and then tell all the other members of the group about their findings,
  • then the group should prepare a joint presentation for the rest of the class,
  • at the end of the work it is necessary to discuss - what has been done and what has not been done? What turned out to be difficult in doing joint work, what can be done differently next time (when discussing, it is important not to indicate value judgments).

    • This exercise can have many variations, for example, “brain rings”, “debates” of representatives of different historical eras, etc.

    According to the head of Educational Spaces Design Studio Rai Ivanovskaya, the task of forming and developing SES among students can definitely be solved with the help of designing the school space: forgot about the goals set (by the teacher or by themselves) - you can make a special stand in the class, on which they could write their goals, indicate the planned deadlines for achievement, indicate the expected obstacles and how they eventually coped with them. That is, this information is constantly “in sight” (the guys will not forget), and is also a demonstration of their success. In the event that someone does not cope with the task on their own, this is also visible and the teacher can “hint” to the students that their help and support is required (and this is already a manifestation of caring - that is, the skill of working together).

    The stand itself must be visually attractive in design (with motivating phrases, for example), made of modern materials (marker film, cork, etc.) - so that children would be “pleasant” and interested in interacting with it.

    Educational space design studio: we turn boring school interiors into bright and beautiful ones! View our work in the PORTFOLIO section.
    By the way

    Many currently existing SES assessment tools have disadvantages: they are based on purely local experience, data on the psychometric quality of methods are not published, there are practically no references to international experience, experience is often designed for individual assessment and is not scaled, and the result of assessment depends on the skills of the teacher and his attitude towards a particular student. However, if we do not have SES assessment tools, then we cannot draw conclusions about their development, can we?

    The HSE Education Quality Monitoring Center, together with the Sberbank Charitable Foundation “Investment in the Future”, conducted a large-scale study of social and emotional skills in primary and secondary schools, based on an international research framework, associated with the Federal State Educational Standards for Primary and Basic Education, which resulted in developed monitoring evaluation tools.

    It is important that the school as a whole (that is, different teachers) have a unified system of work on the socio-emotional development of children, as well as coordinated work within the teaching team, which is organized systematically and purposefully.

    Target audience of SES development methods:

    • whole class or whole school,
    • risk group or children with a specific problem area (e.g. very shy),
    • individual students experiencing severe stress, having situational problems or going through a period of crisis (for example, in the course of adapting to a new school team when moving from one school to another).

    When reprinting a link to the website of the Educational Spaces Design Studio (www.design4school.ru) is required.

    Social-emotional skills: what it is, how it works

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    Social-emotional skills for work and building interpersonal communication.

    Soft skills are now at the same level of popularity and demand as hard skills. Employers need employees who are able to carry out their work and cope with communication both within the team and in the external environment. This helps to increase the prestige of the company's brand, as employees are the face of the company. So it's time to talk about social-emotional skills ( social emotional skills ). They just accurately describe the skills of the future, without which it is difficult to build your personal brand and team / company brand (underline as necessary).

    We will tell you what social-emotional skills consist of, how they work and what they are for. It is believed that social-emotional skills are the same emotional intelligence. Is it so? Needs to be disassembled. And, looking ahead, we are ready to say right away that there is a great similarity in these two concepts. Only the first concept is much broader and more voluminous in its significance. Of course, we are not sociologists or psychologists, but we can assume the following. Emotional intelligence is a key element for developing social-emotional skills.

    Attention is focused on the fact that it is important to form social-emotional skills among young people. Firstly, they are flexible and receptive, which means it will be easier for them to master these skills. Secondly, in this way they will more organically enter social life. Thirdly, at the stage of personality formation it will be an advantage in understanding social guidelines and rules.

    What are social emotional skills

    Social emotional skills ( social emotional skills or SE) - a set of skills that help:

    • in recognizing and controlling their emotions and behavior;
    • suggest how to establish and maintain positive relationships;
    • how to make responsible decisions and deal with difficult situations;
    • how to set and achieve positive goals.

    They are aimed at the formation of self-awareness and independence. One of the important components that should be developed from childhood are the following soft skills:

    • empathy;
    • interpersonal communication skills;
    • training;
    • control of emotions;
    • socialization.

    Studies show that this is now in demand and needed on the market. We fully agree with this, because it is not enough to understand yourself. It is necessary to enter society without losing one's individuality, to understand how this society works and what problems one may encounter, how to resolve conflict situations.

    5 factors for social-emotional learning

    These factors are needed to understand the development of SE skills. Below we describe what you need to pay attention to and work on to achieve success.

    1. Self-consciousness . Understanding your emotions and thoughts and their influence on your behavior.
    2. Municipality . This factor follows from the first. It is aimed at further management of one's own thought process and coordination of the emotional spectrum, based on the situation and the tasks set.
    3. Responsible decision making . It is carried out thanks to the analysis of the situation/problem and the “cold” weighing of the pros and cons.
    4. Public recognition . It is achieved by credibility and the ability to make the most profitable decisions. All social factors and the opinion of the team are also taken into account.
    5. Relationship skills . The formation of social interactions and a set of interpersonal contacts adds to a person's influence and willingness to lead.

    This is the set of abilities that regulate our thoughts, emotions and behavior.

    There are many exercises and practices that help parents and teachers develop this in their child. It is important to show these relationships and teach how it works already from school, if not from kindergarten.

    Learn more