Social and emotional learning helps to advance educational equity and excellence through authentic school-family-community partnerships. Social-emotional competency can help address various forms of inequity and empower youth to contribute to safe, healthy, and just communities. 

Social and emotional learning enhances students’ capacity to integrate skills, attitudes, and behaviors to deal effectively and ethically with daily tasks and challenges. The CASEL framework  promotes intrapersonal, interpersonal, and cognitive competence. The five core competencies; social awareness, self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision-making, and relationship skills, can be taught in many ways across multiple settings.

Research has shown that social and emotional development can be fostered, and social and emotional skills, attitudes, and behaviors can be taught using a variety of approaches:

• Explicit free-standing lessons designed to enhance students’ social and emotional competence.

• Teaching practices such as cooperative learning and project-based learning.

• Integrating SEL into the academic curriculum such as physical education, language arts, math, social studies, or health.

• Organizational strategies that promote SEL as a school-wide initiative helps creates a safe and supportive climate and culture that promotes learning.