While tracking students’ academic progress is one of the most important parts of being a teacher, it is easy to overlook other aspects of their development.
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How to Assess Social Emotional Skills in School?
While tracking students’ academic progress is one of the most important parts of being a teacher, it is easy to overlook other aspects of their development.
Social and emotional learning (SEL) skills are fundamental to a person’s ability to navigate the world and get on with peers. In this way, young people must develop these skills in tandem with their academic learning.
According to the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (or CASEL), there are five fundamental competencies children need to develop to grow into high-functioning, empathetic and ethically-minded adults. These include social awareness, self-management, relationship skills, self-awareness, and responsible decision-making.
As a teacher, you must teach your students about these competencies and assess the development of their SEL skills. Remember that even the most academically gifted students can fall behind regarding social skills and their ability to connect with others.
If you need a little guidance about how to assess your students’ SEL competencies, take a look at the following tips:
Education resources
Assessing social awareness
Social awareness involves the ability to empathize with other people, particularly those from different backgrounds, as well as the ability to comprehend a variety of ethical and social norms. To gauge how empathetic your students are, you could try getting them involved in role-play assessments to see how well they navigate difficult social situations.
Start by pairing students up and asking them to role-play an argument. Ask each student to explain their viewpoint to their partner, then get them to switch and take on the other’s perspective. If the student can see both sides of the story fairly easily and naturally, their social awareness skills will likely be strong.
Assessing self-management
Self-management is the ability to regulate one’s thoughts, emotions, and behaviors to be appropriate for certain situations. This means controlling one’s impulses and managing stress. To assess students’ self-management skills, ask them to think of a situation in which they wish they had acted differently.
From there, they can set goals for how they will deal with challenging situations in the future. They can push themselves with new goals if they successfully attain one of these goals. If a student has difficulty meeting their goals, you can try giving them extra support by speaking to them one-on-one and finding out if anything hinders their progress.
Assessing relationship skills
This is perhaps one of the easiest SEL skills to assess, as you can check how well students get on with their peers during recess. If a student can nurture healthy relationships with others through clear communication, cooperation, attentive listening, and conflict management, then you can consider their relationship skills to be very strong.
If a child finds it difficult to make friends, get on with others, or resist social pressures, they may need to work on this area. If you’d like a little more info on helping children that have trouble making friends, check out this helpful article.
Assessing self-awareness
Self-awareness is the ability to understand one’s thoughts and emotions and those of others. To assess your students’ self-awareness, try getting them to write (or draw pictures) about their feelings when entering the classroom. The older the student, the better they will be able to reflect on why they feel a certain way. Collect the results and review them privately to see how well your students can reflect on their feelings and whether there are any underlying emotional issues they need to address.
Assessing responsible decision-making
Responsible decision-making means adhering to certain ethical standards and social norms to look after one’s well-being and those of others.
To assess your students’ competence in making responsible decisions, get them to write fiction about a challenging social situation. This could include, for example, a situation in which a character’s friends are bullying a vulnerable student. Ask them to write a story about how the character should act and use the results as an assessment tool.
