Practical SEL Activities Teachers Use

At VISTA INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL, we not only provide holistic education, rather emphasise on holistic development of children which we carry out through our Academics, Co-curricular Activities, and programmes. These help our students to nurture and develop their skills in wide array of core subjects which are academic and co-curricular. One such initiative is introducing SEL as part of our curriculum.

SEL stands for Social and Emotional Learning. It is the process through which children and young people develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to manage their emotions, become responsible in decision making, develop and show empathy for others, build and keep positive relationship which helps them in critical thinking and decision making.

As a Faculty Advisor of Humanities Department, was able to implement SEL as part of our curriculum even for the Board going batches like Grade X through various activities. Integrating SEL into Social Science has helped our students to manage emotions, understand other’s perspectives, and make reasoned decisions – which help us in our classroom discussions about History, Political Science, Geography, Economics. Social Science topics often involve debates, conflicting view points, value judgements, community issues, and decision-making. Sharing few of the good practices:

Activity	SEL skills	Social Science
Role – Play	Social awareness, empathy, relationship skills, perspective taking	Learning concepts in History like about rulers, society, revolutions – Nationalism in Europe, Nationalism in India, etc,.
Currency Designing	Responsibility, accountable, critical thinking, decision making	Learning concepts in Economics – Money and Credit. Students gain a thorough insight in the role played by Government Institutions like RBI, Government – Demonetisation, need for keeping the currency value sustainable.
Exit Tickets –	Self -awareness, self-management, critical thinking	Learning concepts in Political Science – Gender, Religion and Caste. At the end of the [controversial] chapter / topic, students get an opportunity to reflect on their thoughts individually – what part of the topic / chapter, made them feel uncomfortable? How are they going make a difference in such scenarios?
Graph Analysis	Critical thinking, stress management, social awareness, draw inferences, conclusions	Learning concepts in Economics like Development, Sectors of the Indian Economy. Students get to pause and reflect on the data they could gather. It helps them to research, analyse and compute data
Current Affairs / Events with SEL lens	Social awareness, critical thinking, bonding, diplomacy, empathy	Learning concepts in social science – bringing in a news item – national, global or local. Students interpret the emotions what people might have involved / felt? What social values are at stake?
Community or regional mapping	Social awareness, relationship skills	Through map marking, the students get to know not just about the region or community regards to diversity – resources, government policies, ethinicity, problems for which they try to come up with a solution.
Group Project	All SEL skills	Students pick a social issue (waste management, water, poverty, disaster preparedness) in their locality and design a small intervention or awareness campaign. They research, plan, present, reflect.
Historical Blogs	Empathy, social awareness, self – awareness	Students imagine they lived in a particular era or under a particular regime. They write “a day in the life” diary from the perspective of an ordinary person (farmer, soldier, urban laborer). Then share and compare.