Social and Emotional Learning

Social and emotional learning (SEL) is an integral part of education and human development. It is defined as the process of developing the self-awareness, self-control, and interpersonal skills that are vital for school, work, and life success. People with strong social-emotional skills are better able to cope with everyday challenges and benefit academically, professionally, and socially. Before we were able to teach and learn with the kids through social and emotional learning, we first had to educate ourselves about not only what it was, but how to educate through it so that we were able to foster a healthy love of learning within the SERES kids as well as a self awareness and emotional intuitiveness within themselves. To do this we read through books on SEL, went through our own lessons to be educated, and actively participated in the lessons that were planned for the kids beforehand and with them, as it is important to make sure we have the same skills we are trying to develop in them. While our general goal was to improve the reading proficiency percentage and level of the school through the kids, the main goal was to improve the children's overall love for reading and changing the general narrative of why they read so there's a desire to read rather than them doing so because they have to. To achieve this we first had to establish where all of the children were academically, whether they'd expressed an interest in book club or not. We did this by scoring the children through a specific system after hearing them read target words from a list similar to the one below (left image), with the difficulty varying by grade level. After that we met up with the kids who expressed an interest in book club, split them into girls and boys so as to build deeper, interpersonal connections and relationships with them, and gave them options for a group book after we'd established the general reading level for the group. We then had a team head who incorporated everyone's ideas as well as her own to create lesson plans based on social emotional learning for the first half, and accumulated questions with depth as well as self awareness based on the book we chose with the input of the kids for the second half of the lesson. This is how book club ran every Wednesday from November of 2021 to March 30th of 2022. I also feel inclined to mention that snack was provided as that was a vital part of book club for the kids and a running joke within the personal connection we made with them!