Social-emotional learning (SEL) has taken a front seat in many of our classrooms, coming down as district initiatives in response to the large number of students who are facing serious social challenges: not to mention the trauma of a global pandemic. At times, I would teach, and the class would seem lifeless: little to no reactions to jokes and just a general sadness among the students. Sometimes I blame the masks. But something else is at play here.
“SEL is the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions.”
https://casel.org/fundamentals-of-sel/
How can we help as teachers? In my class, I believe in educating the whole student, so I start every lesson with a social-emotional related warm-up, usually through Pear Deck. It took some time, but now laughter fills the classroom and there seems to be a mutual trust between the students and me. I love Pear Deck so much because it allows for interactions that you can moderate–they can be anonymous; you can read the names (with consent, of course); or you can have them participate in real-time, using Pear Deck as a workspace to organize their thoughts.
Pear Deck has SEL slides built-in, but after extensive digging on their blog, I found additional slides! I did the work of translating many of them into Spanish for the WL classroom. Interested in downloading a swipe file? Click on the image below (or click here). Let me know how you enjoy them!
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