THE HEART OF THE MACHINE: MAKING THE CASE FOR SOCIAL EMOTIONAL LEARNING.

Mark Sparvell, @sparvell #MicrosoftEdu

One message that has come through clearly from the classroom to the staffroom, has been the significance of the social-emotional aspect of learning... this is, in a sense, no surprise, learning is inherently social, it is something best done together and therefore emotion matters.

Social-Emotional Skills -The Compelling Case

Mental health was an escalating global issue for before the events of 2020 with the WHO noting depression as the number one disability worldwide, many countries note the same alarming 1 in 5 statistic of young people identified with mental health conditions. Social connections provide a preventative factor as we navigate challenge and stress. In our most recent survey (http:/ /aka.ms/SELBlog2021), students were clear, they miss the physical connections made in real spaces with peers and teachers.

When learning is not active, purposeful and engaging they struggle with motivation and attention. School has always been an emotional roller-coaster, the ride recently has just had a lot more unexpected twists and turns.

Emotion, Attention, Cognition and Motivation

Social and emotional skills are critical as they drive our behaviours and where we direct our greatest resource, our attention. These skills can help us to navigate our social and emotional world and directly influence how we build and sustain relationships, make decisions which are ethical and responsible, provide us with the tools and insights to manage ourselves, and navigate others in work, learning and life.

How do we Best Learn Social Emotional Skills?

Words Matter: Building an emotional vocabulary is critical if you want, as Marc Brackett, Director of the Yale Centre for Emotional Intelligence, says, "to tame it, you must name it". Consider that young people learning up to 5000 new words a year, only 10% come from direct experience, the remainder, through hearing and using them.
Be Intentional: The opportunity to observe others' intentional choosing and use of strategies to manage themselves and navigate others in social and even conflict situations is incredibly powerful learning.
Be an Emotion Explorer: We learn by doing and every time we share ideas or resources with others, listen or question decisions, we are social learning. Group work in shared-spaces, both real-world and online, are perfect simulations to explore ways of 'being'.
Take Time to Reflect: Opportunities for mindful-moments to consider our emotions, reflect upon internal and external triggers, responses, and contemplate how they influence cognition, attention and behaviour are powerful ways to develop the cornerstone capacity of self-awareness which leads to self-regulation.

Receive Feedback: We know in education that we "measure what we treasure," so the status of SES needs to be valued as highly as academic learning - there is nothing 'soft' about so-called 'soft skills', they are hard to learn, apply, and more challenging to assess. Students rank the development of SES in their top 5 learning skills which they value and up to 70% suggest that they do not receive sufficient feedback.

How can Technology Help?

Leveraging technology to support SES development is not a new space. The World Economic Forum noted in New Vision for Education: Fostering Social and Emotional Learning through Technology that, "Technology holds enormous promise to help foster 21st Century skills, including social and emotional skills".

Education technology can help teachers connect with and better understand their students, as well as facilitate students' development of social emotional skills.

When we think how technology can support a SEL agenda, research (Class of 2030, McKinsey and Company 2019, Emotion, Cognition in the Age of AI, EIU, 2019) consistently identified 3 key areas:

Provision of immersive learning experiences including VR, AR, simulations, and games.
Use of analytics and AI to listen at scale, recommend, prompt, and provide visibility.
Support profoundly personalised learning by creating inclusive and adaptive environments.

Collaborative environments such as Microsoft Teams (Free for teachers and students as part of Office 365) are social by design, secure, and provide creative and engaging ways for students to express themselves.

Features in Teams such as Praise badges, give teachers and students more ways to recognize and celebrate one another.

Education Insights (https://aka.ms/insights/resources) helps teachers understand and respond to student needs, and the Reflect extension in Teams helps students to identify and label their own emotions.

In addition to Microsoft Teams, there are other best practices, Microsoft partner solutions, and strategies to support social emotional learning. You can visit the

Microsoft Education social and emotional learning page, where you'll find the SEL Learning Path as well as ideas for using products like Flipgrid and Minecraft Education Edition in remote, hybrid, or in person learning environments.

Flipgrid fosters creative discussion and helps students express themselves through video in an engaging social environment. Using Minecraft Education Edition, students identify their strengths, learn to negotiate with others, and develop leadership skills. Mindful Knight, a freely available Minecraft Education Edition world, teaches specific mindfulness strategies in an immersive setting.

The events of 2020 have demonstrated that the future is unpredictable. 3 decades of research suggest that social-emotional skills help us better navigate complexity, ambiguity, and change, and minimise the negative effects of disruption.

The changes of the past year have highlighted the importance of personal connection, accelerated the integration of technology in the classroom, and amplified the role of teachers.

Reflect can build students' emotional vocabulary and improve their ability to recognise and understand how their emotions may impact their learning. In addition, it can help teachers better identify the needs of individual students.

The greatest potential for technology is to humanise learning and not simply digitise the curriculum.

Join :

The Social-Emotional Learning Education community (SELinEdu) was created as a moderated closed community on Facebook after the Salzburg Global Seminar (http://www.salzburgglobal.org/go/566) focussed on Assessment of Social Emotional Skills. As founder and co-moderator, I welcome you to consider joining and contributing.

Join 10,000 educators in this moderated free collective SELinEdu: http://bit.ly/SELinEdu