Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) is the process by which students develop the skills to manage their emotions, cultivate empathy for others, and navigate interpersonal situations with confidence and understanding.
Research suggests that the emotional and relational skills developed through SEL are essential for success, not only in academics but in all areas of life. Increasingly, schools are adopting SEL practices to boost students’ academic performance while also helping them navigate challenges in their personal lives.
In this article, we’ll provide examples of how schools, including Fusion Academy and other popular SEL institutions, teach SEL material to children both directly and indirectly.
We’ll cover these topics:
- What is SEL? (5 Core Competencies)
- The benefits of a dedicated SEL curriculum
- How smaller classes facilitate SEL development
- How schools can build SEL into student objectives
- Remedial classes that use SEL
- Post-secondary counseling that uses SEL
- Intentionally planning the social aspect of school
- Encouraging responsibility for the community
- How to find a suitable SEL school
A quick note: Fusion Academy is a private school serving both middle and high school students. We utilize a 1-to-1 teaching approach, where one student works with one teacher, providing a personalized learning experience. This method supports all types of students, including those with learning differences, those gifted in specific areas, and students facing anxiety or emotional obstacles. You can learn more about Fusion Academy here.
What is SEL? (5 Core Competencies)
One of the most popular SELs frameworks is the wheel created by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, or CASEL wheel for short.
The center of this wheel depicts the five most important SEL competencies, namely:
- Self-awareness: Recognizing and understanding one’s emotions, strengths, and limitations.
- Self-management: Managing one’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviors in different situations, and working toward personal goals.
- Social awareness: Understanding the perspectives of others, showing empathy, and respecting differences.
- Relationship skills: Building healthy relationships, resolving conflicts constructively, and collaborating with others.
- Responsible decision-making: Making ethical, constructive choices regarding personal behavior, relationships, and social interactions.
Students can practice SEL skills in the classroom, at school, at home, and in the community, building their competencies in meaningful ways.
The Benefits of a Dedicated SEL Curriculum
In many cases, schools teach SEL competencies indirectly rather than through dedicated programs. This means SEL is integrated into lessons and teaching methods rather than being the sole focus of standalone courses, for example:
- When a staff member breaks up a conflict between two students and asks them both to think mindfully about the feelings of the other person.
- Classes that explore various religions which promote understanding of different faiths and encourage respect for diversity.
- When a teacher assigns a personal project and students have to develop the discipline to work responsibly on that project in their own time.
All these approaches have their merit. However, there are significant benefits when a school has a dedicated SEL curriculum, designed explicitly to teach these skills.
Fusion Academy has three dedicated SEL courses:
- Community Minds: Students work one-on-one with a social coach to develop practical social skills, including understanding cues, managing interactions, building relationships, and recognizing their actions’ impact.
- Wellness: This course focuses on enhancing emotional, physical, and creative wellness through art and music expression.
- Life Skills: Students develop resilience and personal growth by focusing on academic, career, and personal aspects of life.
We can see benefits to our students in real-time, and also have students expressing how much they gained from our SEL programs.
- 93% of students surveyed felt listened to and treated with respect by their teachers.
- When new students arrived at Fusion, only 48% of them said they felt they were receiving the emotional support they needed at their previous school. After 3 months at Fusion, 86% of these same students reported they were getting the support they needed.
- The benefits of SEL are also apparent to those in a student’s life. 86% of parents reported that their child is more confident overall since attending Fusion.
You can learn more about Fusion Academy’s social and emotional learning here.
For another example, at Nueva School in California, SEL specialists deliver designated SEL sessions to all students from elementary school onwards. These can be larger classes, small groups or one-to-one sessions.
As the students get older, more complex elements are added to Nueva’s SEL program, including psychology and neuroscience. For example, middle school students are taught the difference between passive, aggressive and assertive communication.
How Smaller Class Sizes Facilitate SEL Development
One pattern we’ve noticed here at Fusion is that smaller class sizes make social-emotional learning easier.
When a teacher is responsible for 20+ students at once, it becomes nearly impossible to effectively monitor and support the emotional development of each individual.
Even in a class of 10, it can still be challenging for a teacher to address each student’s individual needs, though it becomes more manageable. This is a key reason many families choose private schools — smaller student-to-teacher ratios allow for more personalized attention to each student’s growth and development.
Fusion’s 1-to-1 classes take this principle to its logical conclusion. With one student and one teacher in every class, the teacher is 100% focused on the academic and SEL needs of their student — to the point that they can design the entire learning experience around them.
For example:
- If a student with ADHD feels calmer when they play with a fidget item, they can do that — without fear of distracting other students.
- Teachers check in with students at the start of each class to see how they’re feeling and where they can best be supported.
- We’re constantly looking for ways in our lessons to upgrade our students’ emotional skills, like time management, self-awareness, and critical thinking.
- If a student athlete would be stressed by having a typical Monday-Friday school schedule, we can be flexible and build their schedule around their athletic commitments.
Brightmont Academy is another example of a school with 1-to-1 classes that takes SEL seriously. For example, they offer one-to-one executive functioning coaching through their ECHO program. Since the teacher only has to focus on the one student, they can take a deep dive into that student’s schedule and assignments, and use the information they find to create a personalized strategy to help them stay on top of homework.
How Schools Can Build SEL Into Student Objectives
Your typical public school might set academic goals for each year group as a whole. At a private school, you could expect your child to have personal academic goals, with a tutor that holds them accountable.
SEL schools also have academic goals for their students, but they build an element of SEL into student objectives as well.
For example, at Fusion, students are encouraged to set goals for themselves at the beginning of each year. These goals will align with the School-wide Learner Outcomes (SLOs), which relate to SEL practices like critical thinking, compassion, resourcefulness, and emotional security. Students are assigned a Lead Teacher who helps them work toward goals and reflect on their progress.
Brighthouse Academy is a school for neurodivergent learners that also sets SEL objectives for every student. They do this because they believe that there is more to a student than their level of academic success.
To ensure these objectives are met, they organize regular 1-to-1 counseling sessions for each student to help them process emotions, learn problem-solving skills and build the habit of healthy communication.
Students are also taught an SEL class each week, ensuring they accomplish vital learning objectives such as understanding how to deal with stress, building relationships, and developing mindfulness.
Remedial Classes That Combine Academic Elements with SEL
When students fall behind their peers, good schools typically try to provide extra support to help them catch up. Conventional educational wisdom suggests that this support should be academic in nature. For example, if a student is behind in science, give them extra science lessons, or access to an extra science tutor.
While there is nothing inherently wrong with this approach, an SEL-focused school takes it a step further by integrating social-emotional learning into the remedial support process. SEL support is particularly important for skills like reading, writing and math, since these skills are so foundational that being behind in them can lead to feelings of shame, anxiety, and depression.
At Fusion, for example, we have a remedial reading class called Structured Literacy that uses an evidence-based, multi-sensory approach to help dyslexic children learn the sounds of different letters and words, including techniques like knocking sounds and gel boards (pictured).
It’s extremely beneficial for these students to develop the self-awareness that they have a different learning style — and adjust their approach to their studies accordingly.
Mathnasium’s remedial math interventions use a similar approach. Students are taught using a combination of mental, verbal, visual, tactile and written methods. As they gain experience of the program, students develop an understanding of which of the methods works best for them — valuable self-awareness that will help in the rest of their learning journey.
Post-Secondary Counseling with SEL Focus
Given what the research says about the value of social-emotional learning, it’s critical that students continue to develop in this area over the course of their lives, even after formal schooling ends.
Where most schools’ post-secondary counseling focuses solely on academic achievement and the typical college pathway, you’ll find that SEL schools also take social and emotional outcomes into account when helping your child to plan for their future. For example, at Fusion, our post-secondary counselors:
- Support students into gap years that involve character-building activities like volunteering at an animal welfare center, or immersion into another culture.
- Encourage students with learning differences like dyslexia and ADHD to select colleges that make specific accommodations for their unique learning styles.
- Support with non-academic preparation for college including executive functioning, wellbeing, and more.
- Recommend transition programs designed to help students with intellectual disabilities find a rewarding career in the local area.
Likewise, Bottom Line’s college counseling is unusual in that it focuses on emotional competencies such as time management and self-awareness, not just academic-focused skills like writing essays and creating a college list. This support continues during college itself, for up to 6 years in total. Perhaps it is no surprise then, that Bottom Line students are 23% more likely to graduate in four years than the average student.
Intentionally Planning the Social Aspect of School
All schools are social environments. What sets SEL-focused schools apart is how intentionally they plan the social aspect of school so that it helps students build the sorts of relationship skills that will set them up for life.
At Fusion, we have two unique social spaces called Homework Cafés. One provides a quiet environment to complete homework on campus, while the other serves as a space for students to relax and socialize with their peers.
Both are run by the same Director of Student Life, who is responsible for planning social programming around SEL themes, and both contribute to SEL in different ways. For example:
- In the quiet Homework Café, students learn to collaborate with peers on homework, while maintaining a respectful environment for others who need a calm space to focus.
- The fact that students do homework in the quiet Homework Café instead of at home means that home can remain a restorative place of family time, connection, and rest.
- In the social Homework Café, they can connect with peers over similar hobbies. We go out of our way to organize clubs like yoga, photography, student government, and video games.
Fusion also offers field trips, community action programs, virtual and in-person events, and more. You can learn about student life at Fusion here.
LiFT Academy in Florida also takes a proactive approach to planning the social aspect of life on campus. This school caters to neurodivergent students, who, sadly, are 63% more likely to be the victims of bullying nationwide than neurotypical students.
To ensure that all students can enjoy a wholesome, inclusive social environment, LiFT has implemented a comprehensive Anti-Bullying Policy. Beyond this, staff also go out of their way to model healthy social behavior like respect, consideration, and kindness.
Encouraging Responsibility for the Community
A large part of SEL is learning what constitutes responsible action. Most schools do this to some degree on an individual level by encouraging students to work hard, get good grades, and do their homework. But SEL schools take this a level further and encourage responsible action towards the broader community, as well as just yourself and fellow students.
Each Fusion campus has a Community Action Program that encourages students to be engaged citizens of their community. These programs are student-led, and each student is required to participate in one such program annually.
Lick-Wilmerding High School in San Francisco is known for its Center for Civic Engagement, which provides opportunities for students to live out their values in the local community. For example, freshmen participate in a year-long workshop about community and volunteerism, culminating in days of service at the end of the year. Sophomores are required to volunteer 40 hours of their time to local causes.
Find a Suitable SEL School for Your Child
We’re confident that Fusion Academy can provide an optimal social and emotional learning environment for every student. We do this through a combination of:
- A dedicated SEL curriculum
- 1-to-1 teaching
- Setting SEL objectives for each student
- Building SEL skills into remedial classes and post-secondary planning
- Encouraging responsible social behavior towards other students, staff, and the broader community
Fusion has campuses in 18 states across the country, plus an online school, making our SEL-based model accessible no matter where you are.
Check out a list of our campuses and contact us to schedule a visit to the one that’s most convenient for your family.
