May is Mental Health Awareness Month, a time to raise awareness of the challenges of mental health conditions and work towards a culture that better supports mental health. Social-emotional learning educates students on mental health, provides them with tools to address their own emotional well-being, and builds capacity for school staff to support healthy emotional development.

Two of the five key social emotional learning competencies are self-awareness and self-management. Social emotional learning programs teach students how to identify and manage their feelings. Self-awareness and self-management skills empower students to take ownership of their feelings. Through a standardized social emotional learning approach, students learn about the broad range of human emotions, how to recognize that they are experiencing certain emotions, and how to process their feelings productively. This way, young people can start to take care of their mental health and recognize others without stigma.

Furthermore, social-emotional learning gives teachers and all school staff a universal language for addressing students’ feelings and their relationships with peers and adults. It offers adults tools to understand students’ social and emotional well-being.  Using a universal language when talking about feelings helps students build stronger relationships with their teachers and feel emotionally safe in their classrooms. It also gives teachers a more accurate sense of when students might be struggling with their mental health so that they can seek out a higher level of support from school mental health staff.

Social-emotional learning programs de-stigmatize the discussion and experience of the broad range of feelings so that young people can appropriately deal with them. They help students feel cared for right in their classrooms. Finally, they can connect them to clinical mental health support when necessary and appropriate. 

By Jordan Shafer, LCSW (she/ her)

Jordan worked as a School Worker for seven years with the San Francisco Unified School District, working with children in grades pre-K through eighth grade, as well as families and educators. She is highly skilled in supporting children’s mental health, social development, and well-being as flourishing members of their communities. She recently relocated from California to her home state of Connecticut to raise her growing family.

Source: casel.org