One of my favorite courses to teach in my role as a school counselor educator is social-emotional development. It’s not that other areas of development (e.g., academic or career development) are less important when working with children and adolescents but that social-emotional development plays a central role in shaping how we approach living our lives and the many demands required of us. It consists of a set of behaviors, skills, attitudes, and strategies that are essential to other areas of development, including daily functioning and academic performance.
Social-emotional development helps explain why Raymond has a hard time focusing in his fourth grade class while thinking about how he is going to navigate the soul-crushing loneliness he feels at lunch. In the same class, Kendall is looking forward to lunch because it’s her turn to be a team captain for the same kickball games that Raymond avoids. She can’t stop thinking about who she wants on her team and can hardly be bothered with the tasks in front of her.
Consider the skills that Raymond and Kendall need to more fully engage in their academic learning, to relate to those around them, and to cope with their strong feelings. When I pay attention to helping students improve those social-emotional skills in small ways, they more often than not have fewer difficulties in other areas of their development, even when they are facing challenges in those areas. Raymond, Kendall, and their classmates would likely benefit from social-emotional development because it pays attention to the many noncognitive factors that can help students be more successful in school.
When I pay attention to helping students improve those social-emotional skills in small ways, they more often than not have fewer difficulties in other areas of their development.
The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), founded to expand Daniel Goleman’s groundbreaking work on emotional intelligence in 1995, emphasizes the importance of social-emotional development in its description of social-emotional learning (SEL). CASEL defines SEL as processes through which families, educators, and communities enhance the capacities of children and adults to “understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.”
Both Raymond and Kendall could benefit from the ability to understand and manage their emotions. It appears that Raymond might also need some skills to help him establish and maintain positive relationships. And what if Kendall could feel and show empathy for Raymond and encourage him to join her kickball team?
Although this scenario is set in an elementary classroom, there are any number of social/emotional challenges in our schools across all grades. How can we even begin to get a handle on which students need support and what support they need? The more recent attention to multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) in education that is characteristic of approaches like response to intervention (RTI) and positive behavioral interventions and supports (PBIS) provides some direction to support social-emotional development.
An MTSS approach assumes that all students benefit from some social-emotional supports (tier 1), some students benefit from additional interventions (tier 2), and a few students require intensive interventions (tier 3). In the example of Raymond and Kendall, while Kendall might benefit from skills designed to help her with emotional regulation in the same way any child would, Raymond appears to need something more. Where Kendall does not appear to be struggling with social connections, Raymond does not seem to be thriving in this area.
MTSS provides a useful framework to intentionally address social-emotional development. However, it does not provide social-emotional standards or competencies. Various groups have identified social-emotional development standards. I use the six mindsets and three behavior areas (learning strategies, self-management skills, and social skills) that include twenty-nine skills for a total of thirty-five mindsets and behaviors (see Figure 1). These are identified in literature by the American School Counselor Association (ASCA) as skills that foster the social-emotional development of all students (“ASCA Mindsets and Behaviors for Student Success”). In their critical literature review on the role of noncognitive factors in shaping school performance, Farrington et al. argue that when students develop these mindsets and behaviors, they are more likely to be successful during their formal schooling and beyond.
To help stay current in supporting social-emotional development of students and to provide a setting where my graduate students could view my skills and practice their own, I served as a school counselor one day a week at Living Stones Academy (LSA), a small pre-K through sixth grade Christian school in Grand Rapids, Michigan. At LSA the faculty, staff, and families are committed to supporting the social-emotional development of their students, and they use a social-emotional curriculum called Second Step, which was developed by Committee for Children. The Second Step lessons delivered weekly by classroom teachers serve as tier 1 support for all students to learn basic social-emotional skills, like problem-solving or how to calm down strong feelings.
As a trained mental health provider, my graduate students and I provided tier 2 interventions for students using small groups, and we provide individual counseling (a tier 3 intervention) to give more intensive support to students. I used a similar approach when I worked as a middle school counselor in New Jersey, where I began my career in education before moving to Michigan. My time working as a high school counselor in Grand Rapids was a bit more challenging simply because the opportunity to get into classrooms for tier 1 support presented more of a challenge.
If you are a high school educator, think about areas in your curriculum where there might be some natural opportunities to support schoolwide, age appropriate social-emotional development. In my experience art, health, language arts, music, religion, social studies, and special education teachers are often ready to support social-emotional development, since there is often curricular overlap with related skills.
I was recently pleasantly surprised to come across a variety of resources intended to support the emotional well-being of all students across all grade levels from All Belong Center for Inclusive Education, formerly the CLC Network, referencing the tiered approach described above (“Back to School Resources”). All Belong has an extensive page on its website dedicated to building proactive social-emotional skills for all students (tier 1) across grade levels. They also provide a summary of some of the more widely known social-emotional curriculum materials used through the middle school level. All Belong also provides ideas to support small groups of students (tier 2) or individual students (tier 3) who need more intensive interventions that can be delivered through various responsive services, including referrals to mental health professionals.
With so many available resources, it can be difficult to know where to start, particularly if social-emotional development has received little attention, given that more often than not no one is available to coordinate schoolwide efforts. These realities underscore the importance of engaging in an annual process of assessing needs.
Imagine taking the list of thirty-five mindsets and behaviors described earlier and asking faculty and staff to highlight the five that they think students most need. School personnel might then work to coordinate which of the needs can easily be addressed in existing curriculum. Rather than approaching these competencies haphazardly, as is often the case, instructional staff can be intentional about which skills are being targeted.
“What gets assessed is important and what is important gets assessed” is a time-tested adage that holds true in education and has specific application for social-emotional development. However, I have also observed that many educators are not well equipped to assess social-emotional development for a variety of reasons.
During my time at LSA, I was inspired by the hallway assessments of some of our youngest students. These students were being assessed on their recognition of letters and their ability to count and so on. Of course I am interested in assessing academic outcomes for students, but that moment stuck with me, and I found myself reflecting on whether I might use a similar process across the school. I began to think about how the evaluation and assessment of social-emotional development could be tied to schoolwide efforts and student outcomes related to social-emotional skills.
Recent professional development opportunities led me to a practice known as conducting minute meetings (Mendoza). These consist of a series of about five questions that can provide an opportunity to make a brief connection with every student in the school over the course of a couple days in as few as one or two minutes. An example of a minute meeting that I created in Google Forms to record LSA student responses is found in Figure 2. Google Forms allows for quick collection of student responses that can be saved and analyzed at a later time. A comparison of the items from the minute meeting questions found in Figure 2 to the mindsets and behaviors found in Figure 1 reveals that the final two questions were included to help assess mindset standards two and three.
A quick Google search on minute meetings provides a variety of ideas for application of this approach. In fact, you could easily use minute meetings to target specific social-emotional areas that you wonder about with your own students, even if it is not adopted as a schoolwide practice. With an iPad in hand, I set out over the course of two days to assess the entire student body at three different times during the school year asking the same questions. I had a class list in hand, and I told the student I just finished with which student I would like to meet next. With the support of the classroom teachers, I sat with two chairs in the hallway just outside the classroom door and gained a complete snapshot of the entire school to share with faculty, staff, and families.
When I finished the first round of this assessment in September, I knew that there were two students who rated their days as bad and one of those students who also rated their school year as bad, even though the year had only just started. This summary gave me an opportunity to consider an overall snapshot of our students and compare it to the snapshots taken in February and May.
These minute meetings also provided me with the opportunity to intervene with students in immediate and appropriate ways, particularly since the students shared their responses directly with me. I held the iPad, and they provided their responses. In that moment, I was able to ask the students whether they were comfortable with me following up with them later (tier 2). Both agreed that they would be okay with that. It was my practice to not report student responses to others without first obtaining the student’s permission.
A tiered approach to social-emotional development has been shown to be an effective way to support the social-emotional development of every student, with specific services for students who might benefit from more individualized attention. In addition to using the resources shared by All Belong, lean into the personnel available to your school system, including trained mental health professionals among your staff, volunteers, and families as well as those community members who have an affinity for supporting social-emotional development.
When we are prepared to meet the social-emotional needs of all students through a tiered approach, it is more likely that we will be well positioned to support Raymond and Kendall when they show up in our classrooms. Such an approach reminds all students that we are interested and invested in more than their academic development as measured by grades and standardized test scores.
Works Cited
“ASCA Mindsets and Behaviors for Student Success: K–12 College- and Career-Readiness Standards for Every Student.” American School Counselor Association, 2014, https://www.schoolcounselor.org/asca/media/asca/home/MindsetsBehaviors.pdf.
“Back to School Resources: Supporting Emotional Well-Being.” All Belong Center for Inclusive Education, 2020, https://allbelong.org/resources/supporting-emotional-well-being.
CASEL. “Social and Emotional Learning,” CASEL.org, 2020, https://casel.org/overview-sel.
Farrington, C. A., M. Roderick, E. Allensworth, J. Nagaoka, T. S. Keyes, D. W. Johnson, and N. O. Beechum. “Teaching Adolescents to Become Learners.” University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research, 2012.
Mendoza, Laurie P. “Getting to Know You (with Minute Meetings).” The School Counseling Files, September 14, 2013, https://www.schoolcounselingfiles.com/blog/getting-to-know-you-with-minute-meetings.
Shawn A. Bultsma currently teaches at Grand Valley State University as a school counselor educator and sees clients in a small practice in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He began his teaching career at Eastern Christian High School in North Haledon, New Jersey, and also worked as a school counselor at South Christian High School in Byron Center, Michigan. He served as a founding board member and school counselor at Living Stones Academy in Grand Rapids.
