Where have we been and where are we now?

At the beginning of the year, I asked students to define what the different Social-Emotional Competencies meant to them. I did this to help measure my success at integrating Social Emotional Learning and to properly reflect on my students' growth in Social Emotional Learning throughout the year. Initially, most students had little to no understanding of the Social-Emotional Competencies. This did not surprise me as many had previously received little to no learning around the ideas. My original plan was to ask students what the terms meant at the conclusion of the year, but this year has not gone according to plan. I believe we all know that. In fact, the turn of events that have occurred over the last 6 weeks are precisely why I believe SEL is vital to the education of all students. We have all been faced with immense stress and difficult change. Understanding how to care for yourself, communicate needs, problem-solve, etc are more important than ever. Knowing this has led me to be intentional with checking in on my students emotional well-being and taking it into consideration more than ever.

While I am not sure I will ever get the data I was originally planning on collecting, I have decided to share with you the data and reflections of my students from their PBL and SEL integration experience. If you are interested in how I integrated SEL and PBL, I wrote a blog post about it that you may be interested in.

The Data and Analysis

Data: After the end of the project, I asked students to respond to the following question, “What did you learn about the SEL Goals and roles we had as a class?”. I categorized responses according to positive (explained clear benefits of SEL with some elaboration), neutral (simply repeated a single SEL competency or made a short declarative statement), or negative (showed frustration with SEL or did not see value). 70% of students reported a positive experience working with SEL during their project. The quotes are highlighted below. 26% of students responded with neutral statements that were largely declarative in nature. 4% of students showed frustration or saw a lack of value in SEL. These students (quotes included below) were more frustrated with the process I asked them to go through than the actual learning.

Analysis: Using this data, I would say students successfully grew in their understanding of SEL through this process. At the beginning of the year, I set the goal at 75% of students reporting a greater understanding of SEL. 100% of students who responded to the question above (50 students) showed a greater understanding of SEL even if the statements were neutral or negative. What I am more excited about is that 70% of students saw actual value!

Student Comments:

I learned that this really makes us reflect on our performance and helps us out by being self aware and helps us be more organized.
I learned that SEL goals are really helpful. We made goals every day before we worked and were for the most part able to follow them. I believe this helps because it is another step in making you conscious of your decisions. I was in charge of impulse control. As a group I feel that we had some days where we were able to stay completely off our phones but other days we struggled a bit with it. I think that because of being in charge of impulse control I have begun to recognise different ways that I can improve in my life outside of this class and at home.
I learned that sometimes I just have to listen to others a bit more and follow their lead. I also learned that sometimes I just have to take charge in order to get things done on time.
That the skills on the posters are important to all interaction with people even outside this class and to me the skills help you think about whats around you and not just yourself.
It helped me learn how much actually goes into a group project and how much that everyone should contribute.
I learned that impulse control is very important, and that everyone in my group was very ambitious, and had to work more on self awareness
i learned that communication is important when it comes to group projects and its really hard to get a group project done without communication
I learned that it is sometimes important to set goals for yourself because it helps you stay on task and keep working for something. As my role as a responsible decision maker I learned that we needed to communicate our problems and analyze our situations.
I learned a lot about relationship skills. And how to work with different people and how to talk to them and get them to listen to you. I also learned about a little bit of social awareness because when Caleb's brother was sick I knew he didn't want to do anything
I learned more about communication and how each members ideas are important
I learned how to better stay on task using the responsible decision making category. SEL Goals also helped me to understand that not everyone is comfortable talking out loud and we worked around that using the Relationship Skills category.
I learned a lot about responsible decision making because there were lots of days where things weren't working out and we had to come up with new ideas and reflect on why it was going wrong.
I learned that my job was pretty hard with responsible decision making. For this project sometimes it could be really hard for us so solve the problems with the machine and run more tests.
We learned that we need to set goals and then follow them if we actually wanted to get stuff done. I think that our group found that Relationship skills was the poster we found most useful and that we struggled with most.

Two Frustrated Comments:

I learned that goal setting can be useful but I thought of it as something that was kinda forced onto us. it is because of this that I don't think that it was very useful and more of a waist of time as we could have used that time to think of what we wanted to get done that day instead of trying to be optimistic. I also think that it is something that you forgot about right after you do it and does not play a big part into every day work that we were doing. However I think that during that time in which you got to reflect on what you did yesterday and how you could improve on it the next day.
Nothing

I hope you continue to journey with me through my SEL journey!