I have been a student and teacher candidate for the past five months. These have been some of the most rewarding and enjoyable months of my education career. The reason is that I have been allowed – in fact, required – to reflect on my identity and personality. This has informed my understanding about how I relate to others and myself.
Throughout my BCom and MSc degrees, I was academically successful and reasonably satisfied with my path. However, I never formed deep bonds towards subjects or with most of the people in my undergraduate program. I had dual lives: personal and commercial. For over ten years, this was acceptable. After all, I had studied various strands of “the dismal science” and attended an institution named the London School of Economics. I was supposed to dispassionately explain how society organized itself, without fully understanding myself.
Why isn’t everybody given a formal education on themselves?
While exaggerating a little (schools do provide this opportunity to an extent), research shows students want more. Social emotional learning provides a simple framework for meeting this need. It is a rapidly evolving field of education research, but the underlying tenets are not changing.
I am, by no means, an expert on SEL now that this part of my inquiry is complete. In fact, I have more questions than before. For instance, I want to know:
How does SEL help differently-abled / exceptional students? What strategies are most effective given constrained resources?
What are the potential threats and opportunities to SEL arising from high cultural diversity? How can we structure programs so that diversity enhances SEL?
How can we effectively measure SEL outcomes? Should we even try to quantify these, or are there better ways? (Relying on data seems antithetical to the idea of SEL!)
What will the new BC curriculum look like with regard to formal SEL? And particularly for high school students? If students are to be formally assessed on SEL outcomes, how will this be done?
Keep visiting this blog over the next few months and years as I continue to explore these questions.