The Social-Emotional Learning Playbook
A Guide to Student and Teacher Well-Being
- Nancy Frey - San Diego State University, USA
- Douglas Fisher - San Diego State University, USA
- Dominique Smith - Health Sciences High & Middle College (HSHMC)
Teach skills and foster the dispositions of social and emotional learning in yourself, your students, and your school.
Social and emotional learning (SEL) is like any academic subject students learn in school—their learning expands and deepens, year after year. As an educator, what can you do to support not only your students’ well-being and SEL development, but your own?
The Social-Emotional Learning Playbook: A Guide to Student and Teacher Well-Being provides the language, moves, and evidence-based advice you need to identify and nurture social and emotional learning in yourself, your students, and your school. Sparking deep reflection and transformative growth, this highly interactive playbook profiles six tenets of social and emotional learning—building resilience, belonging and prosocial skills, emotional regulation, relational trust and communication, individual and collective efficacy, and community of care. Each module features
- Reflection prompts and self-awareness resources that help teachers identify strengths, target areas for growth, and engage with colleagues over social and emotional development.
- Strategies for teaching and reinforcing SEL skills that are proven through effect size to increase your impact on students, both academically and socially.
- Ideas for creating a school culture that manifests social and emotional learning in policies, procedures, and interactions with families and the community.
- Vocabulary self-assessments, word clouds, and a “Case in point” feature that allows you to analyze a situation, cognitively reframe it, and decide a course of action.
With this actionable playbook in hand, jumpstart your social and emotional development journey, reduce compassion fatigue, and create alliances and opportunities for the children and adults in your school community to thrive.
Free resources
Emotional regulation continues with students
Emotional regulation for students begins with learning the names of emotions and matching those labels to how they are feeling; the zones of regulation and the wheel of emotion in The Social-Emotional Learning Playbook can aid this process.
Module 1: Building on Strengths for Resilience
Module 1 of The Social-Emotional Learning Playbook, Building on Strengths for Resilience, includes background, important vocabulary, and beginning with the self.
Invest in your students' ability to learn about their strengths
Use this strength-focused question list from The Social-Emotional Learning Playbook to ensure students are able to learn about their own individual strengths.
Nancy Frey, Douglas Fisher, and Dominique Smith believe that we must nurture ourselves first before we can nurture students and the school: if we do not nurture ourselves, we will have compassion fatigue. Each section of this book supports self-care so that we are prepared to develop a plan for students. This mantra remains true in every chapter. The Social-Emotional Learning Playbook will certainly engage teachers while discussing the challenging and important work of improving social-emotional learning within the classroom and community.
Including the social and emotional component in schools is vital, and the relevance of the book is clear: it is designed to be incorporated into a school or district’s SEL initiative. The topic is so very important, especially now, after and continuing the recovery after the pandemic.
This book is an excellent professional development resource, filled with examples that are culturally relevant and grounded in real-world contexts to
help readers understand how SEL can be applied or practiced. I work closely with faculty and students in teacher education and early childhood education programs, and I would recommend this book to them.
Sample Materials & Chapters
Chapter 1. Building on Strengths for Resilience
Chapter 2. Identities, Belonging, and Prosocial Skills