What if social and emotional learning are seen as just as important as academic curriculums?

You learn your best when you are comfortable with yourself and have some self-awareness, as well as the ability to self-regulate. If you are struggling at home, you are thinking about those problems all of the time and are, therefore, not present to your learning. However, imagine this: What if in school you learned to know yourself, the kind of person you are, the kind of learner you are, your emotional triggers, strategies to help you cope in difficult situations, ways of expressing yourself to get your needs met, where to share your troubles? If your class role-played problems to discover multiple solutions imagine how socially savvy you’d be! You’d be confident, self-aware, and able to see the big picture, act as a leader, and take care of yourself. And then you’d be in a place where you could do your best learning. There are some curriculums and sources for this kind of learning already out there: Responsive Classroom, Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility