Kids Before Content: An Educator’s Guide on Social-Emotional Learning Competencies

Kids Before Content provides the context for educators to develop their own and their students’ social-emotional learning (SEL) competencies. The SEL competencies include self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision-making, relationship skills, and social awareness. Educators are provided the resources they need to build up their own SEL skills first, and then their students through this guide. There are suggestions for building professional learning communities and connecting with other like-minded educators who would like to transform the culture of their schools one educator and one student at a time. The book includes information for school leaders to build SEL connections in their schools. With SEL competencies, educators can more readily reach their students, which makes teaching content easier. If educators understand how to use SEL competencies to address SEL in the classroom for themselves and their students, both students and teachers are better served.

Accountability in the Classroom: Using Social-Emotional Learning to Guide School Improvement

SEL has become an important trend in education; however, it is frequently overlooked at the high school level. Arguably, SEL is even more important at this level than other grade levels for the purposes of effective college and career readiness preparation. The inclusion of SEL into school accountability systems and classrooms at all levels of K-12 education will improve SEL’s likelihood of being addressed. When it is, students are better served. This book provides an overview of the like terms for SEL, the state standards in place, and the programs that exist. Furthermore, this book provides improved understanding of SEL assessments in school accountability, practical guidance for SEL usage in the classroom, and new approaches to distance learning with an SEL approach. Specifically, little is known about the usage of SEL in the World Language classroom, so this book is useful for leaders in this content area in particular.