Striving for Social-Emotional Success

By Michelle Wilson, Rodel Teacher Council

A few weeks ago, Tricia Dallas, my colleague on the Rodel Teacher Council, wrote a post about the importance of social emotional learning in her preschool class.

As a kindergarten teacher, I’ve always been drawn to Robert Fulgum’s findings in, “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.”

This book celebrates the fact that our daily work is vitally important to our students’ academic success.

In Delaware, we assess a child’s social-emotional wellbeing within the first 30 days of school as part of the Delaware Early Learner Survey. The results (due to be released at the end of this year) will surely reaffirm the importance of teaching children to understand and communicate their emotions from a young age.

I spend a great deal of time teaching children how to reflect on a social situation. More importantly I show my students how to understand their role in a situation, so they can communicate their feelings and better understand the other individual’s role. Adults tend to step in and take over when children behave inappropriately in social situations, so the kids often miss the opportunity to handle conflicts on their own.

That’s why it’s important to role play situations with a child and discuss consequences and reactions. For example, when a student comes to me and says, “Mrs. Wilson, she was mean to me,” my first response is to say, “Well, did you tell her how you feel?”

Then I bring the two together to let them discuss their feelings, and what—if anything—caused the “mean” act. By acting as a facilitator and mediator in their own situation, the two kids will begin to understand social norms, and know what to do the next time something similar occurs.

Our state decision-makers would do well to remember that academic achievement is only one part of a student’s development and success. Delaware should continue to develop standards for evaluating and supporting social emotional skills, not only prior to kindergarten, where our early learning communities work very hard in this area, but also in the early elementary grades to reinforce both emotional and cognitive success.

I am encouraged by the thought that the social skills that I teach have helped my students become productive, successful, career-ready adults.