In the 2020-2021 school year, teachers and staff were dealing with a new frontier of education delivery. According to data from Panorama Education, more than 20% of the 13,000 educators in their dataset were “quite” or “extremely” concerned about their social-emotional well-being this year. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, a 2017 American Federation of Teachers study found that 61% of educators surveyed said their work was always or often stressful compared to 30% of workers in the general population. This second of a two-part series on social emotional learning will focus on the needs of educators.

Social-emotional learning (SEL) is how people learn and apply knowledge, attitudes, and skills for:

• Self-awareness of emotions, values, strengths, and limitations
• Social awareness and empathy
• Self-management of emotions and behaviors to achieve one’s goals
• Responsible decision-making about personal and social choices and behaviors
• Relationship skills to form positive relationships, work in teams, and effectively resolve conflicts.

While there has been much focus on the needs of our young people, adults in the education system need to consider their socio-emotional learning and skills. To develop students’ social-emotional skills, the adults in the districts need to feel supported and valued too. Student SEL ought to start with adults.  

There are considerably fewer resources for adult professional development compared with what is available for children. Here are a few resources addressing adult social emotional learning and self-care that may be useful for educators:

• A Comprehensive Guide to Adult SEL from Panorama Education
• Advancing Adult Compassion Resilience: A Toolkit for Schools developed by Wisconsin Initiative for Stigma Elimination, Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, and Rogers InHealth
• Take Time for You: Self-Care Action Plans for Educators by Tina Boogren and a related Q&A on YouTube
• An Edutopia blog on Five Social Emotional Learning Lessons for Adults