Why is SEL Important?

---

The focus on Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) in the classroom plays a crucial role for children who have faced severe adversity, including poverty, displacement and violence. Crisis and conflict have direct and profound effects on children’s physical safety, well-being and ability to learn.

Neuroscience has shown that children who experience the types of adversity common in crisis settings can have a physiological ‘toxic stress’ response that inhibits their brain development, affecting their physical and mental health, cognition, behavior and relationships. However, this can be reversed. Children are remarkably resilient.

SEL has been shown to mitigate the effects of adversity, by providing children with the tools to focus, regulate their emotional responses, interact with others, and cope with stress and challenges. It has also been found to rebuild or build for the first time healthy brain structure and neurological connections. Long-term benefits of SEL include improved academic performance, pro-social skills, positive self-image, and decreased aggression, emotional distress and conduct problems.

References: The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL)

Young children learn by imagining and doing. But dramatic play is not as simple as it may seem. The process of pretending or acting out a role builds skills in many essential developmental areas.

Social-Emotional Skills

When a child engages in dramatic play, they are actively experimenting with the social and emotional roles of life. Through cooperative play role play, and specifically scripted scenarios, children learn life lessons, such as how to take turns, share responsibility, and creatively problem-solve.

When a child pretends to be different characters, it gives them the experience of "walking in someone else's shoes," which helps teach the important moral development skill of empathy. It is normal for young children to see the world from their own egocentric point of view, but through maturation and cooperative play, a child will begin to understand the feelings of others. 

Thinking Skills
Pretend play provides children with a variety of problems to solve. Whether it's two children wanting to play the same role or creating recycled or homemade props and costumes for a class play, children call upon important cognitive thinking skills that they will use in every aspect of their life.

Language Skills 

Dramatic play helps children understand the power of language. In addition, by engaging in dramatic play with others, it gives children the means to reenact a story or organize unstructured play. This process helps children to make the connection between spoken and written language — a skill that will later help them learn to read.

References: Scholastic.com