Reply to anyone else sick of “SEL”?

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Reply to "anyone else sick of “SEL”?"

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[quote=Anonymous]If done well SEL can be great, but it is challenging to implement in a virtual environment (as is anything). I get where OP is coming from, because actually SEL is currently making me very angry. AT my daughter's Middle School, the "SEL" mandate from Central Office usually translates into movies. Sometimes the movie can last more than one class period. Assuming their best intentions, I think that the teachers are trying to give the kids a break. They feel that the kids are working hard and that the situation of being in front of a screen all day sucks, it probably also sucks for the teacher, so why not have them enjoy a movie and check the "SEL" box too? Therefore my daughter endures an unengaging program for most of the day. At least half the time the supposed "synchronous instruction" is a waste of time with the teacher popping in for a few minutes and then leaving them with often mountains of work to do, which we catch up on during the weekend (which seems to me a sort of negative SEL messaging - "I don't really care about you. You are a box for me to check").

As for my elementary schooler, "SEL" takes place in the form of a weekly all-school meeting. There is more effort this time going into the SEL, and I encourage her to watch it every week, but she simply does not find it engaging and usually I cannot convince her to watch it. Because many children are skipping this meeting, emails every week come from the school reminding parents to have their children attend this vital "SEL" component. Again the effort really is there, with great programs planned. This is simply to say that online education is really not the most engaging, and maybe efforts should focus on core subjects.

Great teachers incorporate SEL into their teaching, without needing any help from Central Office. The elementary school teachers are doing a great job of this, and so are a couple of the middle school teachers. How it works is that the elementary school teachers want to make sure the child's camera is on. They want the child to write the answer to the math problems on the whiteboard, and they want to see that. When the child is obviously doing something non school related, they do not put up with that and will threaten to get in touch with the child's parents. I'm not sure if this qualifies exactly as "SEL", but the relationship is there, and it is real. Also when my child started in person, the kids loved doing their the self-portraits and were all the more engaged in their core subjects. At the Middle School level, the teachers doing the best with DL often take some of the class time warmly to greet each student. They engage the students throughout the class period and never abandon them. When virtual school is delayed by two hours, and class is at 9am, they send an email to their students and they still hold their class, because they know that their students need them.

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