In recent months, there’s been a rallying cry against the teaching of social-emotional skills. This pushback flies in the face of research that demonstrates that students need to feel secure and emotionally stable to learn and perform at their best. It also ignores the trauma and stress that many young people continue to experience, as a result of factors beyond their control.
For years, employers have made it clear that soft skills—those that are developed through the work of social-emotional learning—are critical to workforce development. In the view of the resistance to SEL, how should school and district leaders best promote the kind of learning that will serve their students well beyond their K-12 years?
