CINCINNATI – To attend R-5 High School in Grand Junction, Co., students are required to have a job, attend a community college or a university, volunteer or attend work experience classes. While these requirements may seem non-traditional to some, High School Principal Donald Trujillo believes they are an incredibly important aspect of preparing his students for work and life beyond school.
He’s right.
Mastering learning material is only one part of ensuring that students are college- and career-ready: social-emotional learning (SEL) opportunities are a must-have in today’s schools.
A recent Bloomberg report found that only 35 percent of employers are confident that new hires will have the soft skills they need to succeed. With an ever-changing cultural and business environment, students must be prepared to persist through challenges, seek help when needed and develop empathy and understanding of others.
R-5 High School’s story, along with other schools that are prioritizing learning SEL skills in the classroom, are shared in KnowledgeWorks’ new resource, “Four Strategies for the Successful Integration of Social-Emotional Learning and Personalized.” These strategies are designed to help schools think about ways to integrate social-emotional learning into their daily practices in the classroom.
KnowledgeWorks has also provided answers to frequently asked questions about social-emotional learning. These FAQs, formatted both for online reading and for sharing with school and community members, cover the definition of social- emotional learning, how educators can integrate social-emotional skill development in the classroom and how to measure its growth in in students.
“By factoring in social and emotional intelligence into the way that we prepare students, we are accounting for individual students’ multiple intelligences and, at the same time, molding them into the graduate most likely to take on the team- and thinking-based jobs of tomorrow,” said David Prinstein of Windsor Locks Middle School in Windsor Locks, Conn., another school highlighted in the resource.
