SEL in the World Language Classroom
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Overview and Purpose
Has your school been pushing Social Emotional Learning activities into your classrooms? Have you become frustrated because it cuts into your instructional time with students? This course provides you with the foundation to create SEL activities for your World Language classroom so you can incorporate Social Emotional Learning without having to give up valuable instructional time. Whether your school requires you to incorporate SEL activities or you simply know your students would benefit from further developing their SEL skills, this course is for you!
Throughout this three unit course, you will learn the basis of Social Emotional learning, what behaviors we see with students with underdeveloped SEL skills, and helpful ideas and methods to create effective SEL activities that incorporate your target language.
Needs Assessment
Coming out of remote instruction during a pandemic, many students in the United States lack the social-emotional regulation skills. This has caused behavioral issues for teachers and administrators to deal with as well as added stress and confusion for many students.
School administrators in New York State have noted this and pushed toward incorporating Social-Emotional Learning into our schools. While this does have a positive impact on students, there are also the implications of losing instruction time for these activities. I propose that World Language teachers have the ability to incorporate social-emotional learning into their Spanish lessons. If world language teachers are properly educated on social-emotional skills and are given strategies for how to incorporate them in their language instruction they can help students develop SEL skills without losing time learning the target language.
Performance Objectives
Learners will be able to identify the Social-Emotional skills they would like to work on with their students.
Learners will be able to identify strategies that will help students develop these Social-Emotional skills.
Learners will be able to plan a variety of activities that will engage students in Social-Emotional learning in the target language.
Learners will be able to identify the value of teaching SEL skills in school.
Course Units
This mini-course includes the following units. Click the title of a unit to go to its page.
In this unit learners will learn the five major areas of Social Emotional Learning. They will also learn about different skills associated with each area of SEL and where they fall into the five major areas.
Learners will look at common behaviors and what SEL skills these are related to. Then, discussing with peers, they will discuss what behaviors they have seen in their own class and collaborate on what skills these behaviors relate to.
Unit 3: SEL Activities in the World Language Classroom
Learners will search for ideas for SEL activities that work on the skill their class needs to target. After discussion with peers, learners will modify the SEL activity into a lesson that incorporates the target language.
Extended Resources
Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). (2022, October 14). Advancing Social and emotional learning. CASEL. https://casel.org/
