SEL Starts At The Top

IDEAS

SEL starts at the top

By Melanie Stefanovic, Daniel Reyes-Guerra and Dana Zorovich-Godek

Categories: Leadership, School leadership, Social & emotional learning

February 2021

Emotional intelligence is good for business. That’s the growing consensus across sectors in recent years. Anyone who has been on the receiving end of a physician’s detached delivery of upsetting news would be glad to know that empathy training is gaining increasing traction in medicine. CEOs in a range of other fields increasingly consult emotional intelligence coaches to develop upper managers’ so-called soft skills because they know that happy employees are more productive than unhappy ones. In schools, we call this focus on people’s well-being and interpersonal skills social and emotional learning (SEL). The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) defines SEL as the process through which children and adults understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy

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References

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Melanie Stefanovic

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Melanie Stefanovic (mstefanovic2013@fau.edu) is research and professional development coordinator at Florida Atlantic University.

Daniel Reyes-Guerra

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Daniel Reyes-Guerra (dreyes@fau.edu) is associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Research Methodology, program coordinator in the School Leaders Program, and project director and primary investigator of the Principal Preparation Initiative at Florida Atlantic University.

Dana Zorovich-Godek

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Dana Zorovich-Godek (dzorovic@fau.edu) is policy and research manager at the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) and an adjunct faculty member in the School Leaders Program at Florida Atlantic University.