Building Social-Emotional Skills Through Self-Reflection

Developing social-emotional skills can help students better care for and advocate for themselves and others.

JULIA BROACH

Balancing teaching your curriculum with finding time to discuss with students what they are experiencing and how they are feeling can be challenging. Yet staying connected with them and what they are going through is essential in order to continue supporting them. Students are dealing with many significant life changes and a range of emotions, many of which can be traced back to the shifts they've experienced during the pandemic — worrying about their own health and that of their family members and friends, feelings of loss about missed experiences, navigating a new form of learning, and being confined to their homes with their family members.      

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Supporting self-reflection

Bringing low-tech self-reflection practices into your classroom can be a helpful way to address the social-emotional needs of your students. Developing social-emotional skills can help students of all ages better care for and advocate for themselves and others.

One way of incorporating at least a few minutes of self-reflection into lessons is by using social-emotional prompts (download a full set of our SEL prompts here). Our prompts are organized into several categories, drawn from the core social-emotional competencies identified by the educational research organization the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. Prompts fall into the following categories:

• Decision-making: Making choices by reflecting on how they will impact you and those around you; thinking about the realistic outcome of actions when making choices.

 

• Empathy (social awareness): Imagining perspectives outside of your own; recognizing the support and resources that exist in your community (family, school, neighborhood, etc.).

 

• Relationships: Building and maintaining supportive and fulfilling relationships; being reflective of your relationships.

 

• Self-awareness: Noticing and reflecting on your emotions and thoughts and what causes them to change; identifying how your emotions and thoughts affect how you act.

 

• Self-care: Taking time to reflect on how you are feeling and taking actions to support your overall well-being.

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Using these prompts with your students

These prompts can be sent out over email, posted on a class’s online feed, or shared aloud during a real-time class. Students can respond to them in a variety of ways — using tech-free (drawing or writing in a journal), low-tech (typing in a document, making a video recording, making an audio recording, taking photos), or high-tech options (posting responses to a shared classroom file, such as on Google Drive). 

Before using these in your classroom, give yourself time to engage in your own self-reflection practices (through these prompts or other means) — this will support you in more thoughtfully facilitating social-emotional learning exercises for others.

Take the time to  introduce the idea of the prompts to your students. You may contextualize the prompts by sharing that they’ll help with self-reflection during this strange period of confusion and uncertainty. For students to fully express their answers, they may not be comfortable sharing any or all of their responses — determine what you think would be best for your students. There is still significant value in students responding to each prompt, even if they choose not to share with others. 

Below are a few ways that you can use these with your students in your online classes:

LOW-TECH

• Daily/weekly reflections: Email or text your students a prompt every morning or once a week. Students can answer the prompts at home on their own time. If they would like to share them, they can respond to the email or text message with their responses in document or photo form. 

 
HIGH-TECH

• Synchronous class: At the start of your video classes, read one of the prompts to students and post it on the class chat/feed. Give students 3-5 minutes to respond on their own at home. After the students finish, you can ask for volunteers to share their responses, or use the breakout room feature for students to share in small groups.   

 

• Google Drive: For remote, asynchronous learning, post one prompt in the learning module for that day. Create a folder on Google Drive visible to only you and the student or visible to everyone in the class. Ask for students to respond to the prompt by the end of the day/week. In the folder, they can share some or all of their responses, such as a photo of a drawing or written response, videos, or audio recordings.

 

• Flipgrid: Post one prompt to the learning module, and ask the students to record video responses and post them on your class Flipgrid page. With this platform, all of the students can see and respond to each other’s responses.   ​