Anchoring Post-Secondary Readiness in Social-Emotional Learning

Abstract

Intentional social emotional instruction is often absent from most schools in the United States as students grow older. Few state legislatures have policies in place to mandate the integration of social emotional learning (SEL) into classroom instruction after 3rd grade. Rather than being recognized as a key component of all core content learning, SEL is framed as a set of reactionary interventions that address specific adolescent challenges placing youth “at risk.” It is widely understood that social emotional competencies (SECs) grow with and influence emergent literacy among young learners. The same approach is often absent from approaches to literacy instruction for older struggling readers. This chapter underscores the opportunity to frame post-secondary preparation and texts connected to it as opportunities to explicitly teach social emotional competencies (SECs) as a means to plan for the future and heal from the past.