Social Awareness: SEL Competency #5
Governor Mifflin Middle School believes that social awareness is an important skill for living and working productively and collaboratively in a school and community setting. Social awareness skills provide people the ability to approach problems from different perspectives, and understand others' thoughts and feelings.
“Awareness is about improving social intelligence. If you can't see, hear, or feel the dynamics of a conversation, you can't manage them.”
― John Stoker
Friday, March 26th is PA Social Emotional Learning Day, so it is fitting that we close out our discussion on SEL with this week's communication. In this, the last piece of our examination of the CASEL SEL framework, we will look at the fifth and final CASEL competency, social awareness. CASEL defines social awareness as the ability to understand the perspectives of and empathize with others, including those from diverse backgrounds, cultures, & contexts. This includes the capacities to feel compassion for others, understand broader historical and social norms for behavior in different settings, and recognize family, school, and community resources and supports. This could look like: taking others’ perspectives, recognizing strengths in others, demonstrating empathy and compassion, showing concern for the feelings of others, understanding and expressing gratitude, identifying diverse social norms, including unjust ones, recognizing situational demands and opportunities, and understanding the influences of organizations/systems on behavior. The video below demonstrates the benefits and implications of teaching children social awareness skills.
The Life Skills Group, in this 2018 article, identifies the benefits of social awareness as allowing for the formation of strong friendships and relationships, promotion of compassion and empathy when interacting with others, helping to understand strengths and weaknesses, and improving social and emotional well-being. The article also identifies three Strategies to Improve Social Awareness in Children. They are summarized below.
1. Challenge Your Child to Understand Everyday Situations - Have discussions with children about reading and showing facial expressions, body language, and non-verbal cues, the messages they send, and how they may be perceived by others.
2. Encourage Children to Participate in Group Physical Activity - In addition to helping manage stress and anxiety, engaging in group physical activities, like yoga or martial arts can also help kids gain a compassionate and healthy perspective towards their peer’s strengths and weaknesses.
3. Be a Role Model - Demonstrating compassion and empathy for others is likely the best strategy for helping children build capacity in emotional intelligence and social awareness. This is most effective when children are young, but can be learned at any time during cognitive development.
As we wrap up our look at the five CASEL SEL competencies, it is important to understand that there is a strong relationship between the cognitive processes that control social and emotional development and intellectual development. Thus, students who are exposed to meaningful social and emotional learning are much more likely to have successful academic and professional careers, positive relationships, and beneficial life skills. Simply put, the more we explicitly teach children social and emotional skills, the greater we build their capacity for success in life.
