Social Emotional Learning: Creating A Wholesome Child
Why SEL is important?
Socio-emotional learning is important for students’ education and development and has been shown to further influence an individual’s achievement and outcomes. This includes the level of education that students achieve, their academic progress while they are in school, their pathways beyond education including entry into the labour market, and future earnings.
Although researchers have avoided identifying direct causality between academic learning and SEL, it is widely accepted that SEL has a mutually reinforcing relationship with academic learning, whereby gains in one domain are said to bring about gains in the other.
From this perspective, improving students’ SEL is regarded as a potential area of intervention for improving students’ academic learning, and it may even help to remediate for deficits in academic outcomes.
How do we design social and emotional learning policies that help Indian students?
SEL cultivates a certain kind of holistic development during one’s childhood that can support them for life. SEL must be an ongoing process in the four major settings –Communities, Families, Schools, and Classrooms. Building synergies between these settings is crucial when maximising the learning outcomes for a child. Overall, the key components of an SEL framework should build critical inquiry, focus, emotional regulation, and compassionate action to develop a balance of intrapersonal, interpersonal, and cognitive competencies.
While the mission of Early Childhood Care and Education—which focuses on foundational literacy and numeracy—has seen the light of the day, a nationalised SEL curriculum is still not a reality in India’s education landscape. Additionally, although the NEP lays emphasis on Continuous Professional Development (CPD) for teachers to improve their teaching skills, it falls short of including SEL training for teachers as a means to cater to a student’s socio-emotional needs. In the absence of a structured framework, there is often unequal support provided to both teachers and students.
Recommendations for implementation of India centric SEL
- Focusing on addressing the stigma around mental health.
- Identifying an India-specific SEL framework.
- Ensuring implementation of SEL with proper monitoring and evaluation.
- Integrating SEL into the academic curriculum.
- Capacitating the stakeholders of the school.
- Involving students in designing SEL program
ARCHANA. K
Academic Coordinator – Teachable, EdIndia Foundation
Archana works as an Academic Coordinator for the Teachable Program. Prior to joining EdIndia, she worked as a manager for content design for Dream A Dream. She also led the Girls Education & Gender Equality Program for Room to Read and was associated with organizations like Azim Premji Foundation. In her spare time, Archana loves reading books and spending time with her son.