Many students face barriers to healthy social, emotional, and academic development, but a range of strategies can help overcome those barriers.
The Issue
Social and emotional learning (SEL) equips young people with competencies to lead productive and healthy lives. There are barriers, however, that prevent many students of color and other marginalized youth from developing social and emotional competencies. For all students to benefit, SEL must be grounded in a larger context of equity and justice efforts within public education.
Key Findings
Five barriers contribute to inequitable access to a high-quality SEL education, and in turn, opportunities for all children to have healthy social, emotional, and academic development.
The authors identify those barriers as: poverty, exclusionary discipline practices and policies in school, lack of trauma-informed practices in school, implicit bias in school staff, and educator stress and burnout.
Five opportunities are identified for overcoming those barriers: School racial and socioeconomic integration initiatives, restorative justice practices for school discipline, trauma-informed system interventions, culturally competent and equity-literate educators, and SEL and mindfulness programming to support students and teachers.
[For more on this by The Pennsylvania State University, go to https://www.rwjf.org/en/librar...mic-development.html]
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