How to Promote Social, Emotional, and Character Development
There’s no need for funding or special training to bring these approaches and strategies into your classroom right away.
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As more and more schools adopt social and emotional learning standards and realize that students’ college and career success depends strongly on their social, emotional, and character development (SECD), teachers are looking for guidance as to how to bring SECD into their classrooms every day. Whether or not your class has a systematic curriculum, students benefit when SECD is part of academics and classroom conversations and procedures.
Members of our Rutgers SECD Lab have the good fortune of visiting many schools in New Jersey, across the nation, and internationally. Culled from our observations of what teachers are doing in many schools, each of the eight areas below includes a list of strategies that you can introduce into classroom and school routines without any funding or in-service training.
1. Be a positive role model in your words and actions:
2. Respond to real-life situations by:
3. Read to students and use literature:
4. Encourage writing as a means of expression by:
5. Have conversations about character by:
6. Advocate for participation and service in school and in the community by:
7. Promote mindfulness in students by:
8. Help students make better decisions about their health and relationships by:
The more frequently you integrate these strategies into the learning and teaching as routines, the more habitual they will become for students. When this happens, you will be building students’ social, emotional and character development in ways that will nourish and create positive habits in their interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships.