How We Do It?
SOCIAL EMOTIONAL LEARNING
Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) aims to explicitly promote skills in children that will support positive outcomes for a student's learning and engagement at school, emotion regulation, mental health and long-term positive capacity building (Durlack et al., 2011). For children with unmet social-emotional needs there are a set of developmental skills and competencies that can be challenging for them to learn.
The Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) identifies five broad competencies under which SEL falls; self-awareness, self-management, social-awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision-making. Adopting a "taught and caught" approach to SEL, the YarraMe staff use the SSIS-SEL framework (Gresham & Elliott), to embed the five competencies within the teaching and learning opportunities throughout the day. YarraMe's Social and Emotional Learning Curriculum Toolkit allows teachers to develop SEL plans for each student. The toolkit contains long-term, annual and sub-goals along with a range of strategies and accommodations to assist in setting and measuring SEL progress for each student.