Uplifting hearts, connecting minds

January 31, 2023 • • 2 min read
January 31, 2023 2 min read

SEL Day is March 10

By Jennifer Ly and Maurice J. Elias  

March 10, 2023, is International SEL Day, an annual celebration that promotes social-emotional and character development in our schools and communities. SEL stands for “social-emotional learning.” The theme this year is Uplifting Hearts, Connecting Minds. Since the inception of SEL Day, no state in the U.S. has done a better job than New Jersey in learning through various showcases of efforts in cultivating SEL in their community and schools.  

Research has shown, and the New Jersey State Board of Education has affirmed, that students need social-emotional and character competencies as much as they need skills like reading in order to master the many tests of life they will most certainly face. All educators have a collective responsibility to systematically encourage the growth of these skills in students. SEL Day is meant to be a catalyst for those efforts. 

The five focal SEL skill areas are self-awareness, social awareness, emotion management, building constructive relationships and responsible decision making. It’s hard to imagine any classroom or school functioning successfully when students lack age-appropriate empathy, the capacity to manage their strong emotions, take others’ perspectives, set and achieve goals, get along with peers and adults, or solve problems effectively. We have taken these skills for granted in the past. Now it’s time to recognize that we fail to build these skills explicitly and intentionally at our collective peril.  

No matter what your role is in a school, there is a place for you to join the celebration of SEL. We have collected different artifacts from schools all across New Jersey and have gathered a few ideas and lessons for you to implement in the classroom between now and SEL Day… and thereafter! 

Equity and a culture of caring, kindness and helping 

Classrooms are places where everyone needs to be helpful, cooperative, kind and caring. For 180 school days, students enter classrooms wanting to be successful, recognized, valued and supported. They want to belong. Create this kind of supportive environment by reviewing and renewing a collaborative set of classroom rules or norms for how to treat one another. 

Observe existing patterns of caring, kindness and helping within your classroom, and pay particular attention to discussing how students can help one another and seek out help from adults in the school. Make it clear that caring and kindness are the norm, not the exception, and that no students are excluded from receiving and providing these attributes.  

Teachers can also provide students with equitable opportunities to speak, participate, and lead; to join groups, teams, or clubs; and to be recognized and appreciated. Barriers that perpetuate unequal access and participation should be eliminated to enable opportunities for all students. For further reading on this, check out “Who Do You Call On? Rooting Out Implicit Bias” and “Addressing Equity Through Culturally Responsive Education & SEL”. 

Activity: SEL Challenge 

An excellent schoolwide event that teachers and staff members can participate in with their students is an SEL challenge. Teachers hand a list of challenges and tasks to the students, and they must complete it as a class. Students keep track of and comment on what they do in a special journal. When the whole school completes the challenge, it gets announced to the school, the parents and the wider community.  

The following are some examples that you can include in your SEL Challenge:  

  1. Make a thank you card for two people in the school (not a teacher) you are thankful for.  
  2. Write a paragraph about someone you are reading about in an assigned book that shows an example of good character. 
  3. Do three kind things for other people in your school over the course of a week. 
  4. Draw about something that makes you a good person.  
  5. Practice some kind of mindfulness or meditation for two minutes every day for a whole week. 
  6. Share a song that reflects the core values/character of your classroom or school. 

Use SEL to connect minds: Infusing SEL into existing lesson plans 

English/Language Arts 

There are a variety of ways that you can implement SEL into your class lessons. Having students watch a film or reading a book that focuses on SEL themes can spark conversations and help students build social-emotional skills.  

At Tinc Road Elementary School in Mount Olive, Becca Hopler asked her fourth grade students to read Where Oliver Fits by Cale Atkinson. The book follows the story of a small, curious puzzle piece named Oliver who dreams of being part of a bigger and exciting picture. Oliver embarks on this adventure to find a place to fit in. Being met with different rejections from other puzzle pieces, Oliver pretends to be a different puzzle piece by changing his color and shape in order to fit in with the puzzle. By the end of the book, he realizes that he will not find happiness by pretending to be someone else.  

The book illustrates the importance of being true to oneself and not changing aspects of ourselves to fit in. Inspired by the themes that were explored in the book, Hopler developed a lesson plan to help the students reflect on their identities and to understand the value of self-worth.  

The students wrote a paragraph about what makes them special. They then decorated and personalized their own puzzle pieces. This exercise is an excellent way to encourage students to recognize that they should stay true to themselves and help them embrace their qualities instead of trying to change them.  

For added challenge and to “connect minds,” have students start with a set of completed puzzle pieces that they can individually take and personalize and reassemble. 

Here is a framework that can be used for reading ANY book with an SEL lens: 

  • I will write about this character………… 
  • My character’s problem is………….. 
  • How did your character get into this problem? 
  • How does the character feel? 
  • What does the character want to happen? 
  • What actually did happen? 
  • How might the rest of the story go?/How else might the story have gone?  
  • What questions would you like to be able to ask to the character you picked, to one of the other characters, or to the author? 

Physical education 

In the East Orange School District, Lita King-Morton, a social worker and harassment, intimidation and bullying (HIB) specialist, designed a fun and creative way to help students build their SEL skills in physical education classes. The students are instructed to reflect and write down their short-term and long-term goals for PE for the year. (Of course, this activity can be carried out at any point in the school year.) Then, the PE teachers set up different obstacle courses that the students must complete.  

The purpose of the exercise is to encourage students to set goals, as it will help them focus their efforts and find something they can work toward achieving. The activity is an engaging way to help the students practice perseverance and determination as they are learning how to overcome the obstacles to attaining their goal.  

Here is the lesson plan: 

  1. Hand out sticky-notes to students and have them write down two PE goals: one goal for the school year and one personal goal for themselves (this can be modified for a marking period). 
  2. Once they are finished, have the students stick the note against the wall closest to the finish line. 
  3. Set up an obstacle course with a starting point and a finish line.  
  4. Have the students complete the obstacle course. 
  5. Have the students reflect on the activity by asking them these questions: What are some potential obstacles you might face in achieving your goals? How do you plan to overcome these obstacles? How have you been handling the obstacles thus far? What can help you do better? 

Visual and performing arts 

The Center for Arts Education and Social Emotional Learning (ArtsEdSEL.org) is dedicated to the mission of facilitating social-emotional learning in art education. Countless resources, lessons and curricula designed to develop and build SEL competencies are available at their website. 

An engaging and inclusive way for students to express themselves is by hosting an SEL-themed arts exhibit or gallery event. The arts exhibit can have a specific character or SEL theme (e.g., gratitude, empathy, problem solving) or the students can choose whatever SEL-related topic they want to explore. They can either identify an artistic work (you can constrain the medium to painting, sculpture, music, theater, etc.), create an artistic work, or both. The products can be displayed at a schoolwide event during the week of SEL Day (or before or after, of course) and teachers, parents and students can walk through the gallery, view the artists’ showcase and discuss the works with the exhibitors.  

This is a great opportunity for the students to recognize their thoughts and feelings and to reflect on these emotions through the artistic process. Having self-awareness allows the students to create as they are tasked to generate an artistic idea, develop a way to bring their vision to life and then communicate their rationale. Excellent resources can be found at selarts.org.  

Note that this idea of a gallery can be carried out in any subject area, as an opportunity for students to display, reflect on, and discuss their work. 

At SEL4NJ.org, you can access issue briefs that give specific guidelines for teaching ALL subject areas through an SEL lens, including more about the areas above. 

At Tinc Road Elementary School in Mount Olive, fourth graders decorated puzzle pieces and wrote on them what makes them special.

Get started today! 

When it comes to fostering the social-emotional and character development of our students, it’s never too late to get started. SEL Day 2023 is the launching pad for an epic journey into a better future for all of New Jersey’s schools, educators, and children!  

Onward!  

Maurice J. Elias is director of Rutgers’ Social-Emotional and Character Development Lab (secdlab.org) and co-author of an ASCD resource for teachers, “Students Taking Action Together: 5 Teaching Techniques to Cultivate SEL, Civic Engagement, and a Healthy Democracy.” He can be reached at maurice.elias@rutgers.edu. 

Jennifer Ly, a student at Rutgers University, is a social media intern and the social media liaison for the Social-Emotional Alliance for New Jersey (SEL4NJ). 

SEL4NJ’s Guide to Participating in SEL Day 2023

There are lots of ways to get involved with SEL Day now! 

Live Zoom presentations for educators on SEL Day 

  • On SEL Day, watch SEL4NJ’s live presentation, “Creating Schools of Character and Social-Emotional Competency – Lessons from New Jersey Schools” on Zoom. It runs from 10 to 11 a.m. on March 23. The participants are Dr. William Trusheim, Laurie Coletti, Mary Reinhold, Eileen Dachnowicz, Dr. Nathan Fisher, Sulisnet Jimenez and Doug Stech. To access it on Zoom, go to bit.ly/3W7Y5tc.  
  • Also on SEL Day, watch presentations from educators around New Jersey, sharing their SEL and character innovations. Dip in between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. On SEL day go to bit.ly/3IGQC15 to join whenever you wish. 
  • To register for the SEL4NJ SEL Day Summit and get access to links to the presentations after SEL Day visit bit.ly/3IGQC15.  
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