As educators, we are always looking for ways to improve our students’ learning experience. Social and emotional learning (SEL) has become an integral part of the curriculum in many schools. The five core social and emotional competencies of the CASEL SEL framework are self awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making. Since its inception in 1997, SEL research has proven an overwhelmingly positive impact on academic performance and student well-being (Zins & Elias, 2007).
In this blog, we will explore five ways to incorporate CASEL’s five core social and emotional competencies using ScreenPal.
🪞Self awareness
Self-awareness refers to the “ability to understand one’s own emotions, thoughts, and values, including one’s own strengths and limitations” (Chowkase, 2023). To aid students in understanding their strengths and weaknesses, track their progress, and develop strategies for improvement, we should practice self-reflection in our classrooms.
By utilizing our interactive poll and rating response options, educators can use ScreenPal to create videos that encourage self-reflection.
💡How to use ScreenPal quizzes to promote self awareness and reflection:
- Start by uploading your video lesson to our ScreenPal hosting site.
- Click on ‘My Content.’
- Click on ‘Quizzes’ then select ‘+ New Quiz.’
- Select the video for your quiz.
- Add a poll or rating question focused on self reflection.
🧘 Self-management
Self-management refers to the ability to effectively manage one’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviors (Chowkase, 2023). To practice self-management, many practice mindfulness exercises. These short, meditative exercises ultimately help students regulate their emotions, reduce stress and anxiety, and improve concentration.
ScreenPal allows educators to record and share mindfulness exercises with their students. Teachers can take their students through a guided exercise, allowing them to focus on the present moment and control their breathing. These exercises can be recorded once and shared with students so that they can practice mindfulness at any time.
💡How to use ScreenPal to record and share mindfulness exercises:
- Use ScreenPal’s screen recorder to guide students through a mindfulness exercise.
- Try starting with something simple like box breathing. Use a GIF (similar to the one from MindfulDevMag below) as your visual aid and narrate the box breathing technique for your students.
Self management: box breathing by Sarah Eiler
🤗 Social awareness
The third social and emotional competency is social awareness, which “refers to the ability to understand the perspectives of and empathize with others.” (Chowkase, 2023) Empathy is a core component of social emotional learning and promotes understanding of others’ perspectives.
Why not use ScreenPal to create videos that showcase various emotions and encourage students to practice empathy?
💡How to use ScreenPal videos to teach empathy:
- Start by creating a Story using the blank storyboard option.
- Use ScreenPal’s stock library to find videos of people who are feeling happy, sad, or frustrated.
- Add a different emotional video representation for each section of your storyboard.
- Add text overlays, image overlays, and music to match the emotion of the section.
- Turn the video into an interactive quiz with an emoji poll.
- Check out our example!
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🤝 Relationship skills
The focus of the fourth social emotional learning competency, relationship skills, is the ability to develop healthy and supportive relationships. To promote supportive relationships and a sense of community in the classroom, encourage students to tell their stories through video comments using the ScreenPal Chrome extension. This allows students to learn from each other and bond over shared experiences.
💡How to use ScreenPal’s video messenger to build relationships:
- Create a slide presentation with various prompts. (Feel free to use our example!)
- Ask students to record video comments answering the question with the video messaging Chrome extension.
- Each slide contains the directions for recording a video comment.
- Students click ‘Insert’ then ‘Comment,’ and click on the ScreenPal logo in the comment box to start recording.
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🧭 Responsible decision making
The fifth social emotional learning competency is responsible decision making. Responsible decision making “refers to the ability to make caring and constructive choices about one’s own behavior and interactions with others” (Chowkase, 2023). This competency focuses on both one’s self and others as students are asked to evaluate the impact of their decisions on themselves as well as their classmates and greater community.
🗣️Discussion prompts paired with anecdotes are a great way to evaluate decision making skills. Since students often feel uncomfortable discussing personal topics in front of their peers, create a video lesson with the anecdote and include a short answer prompt at the end of the video.
💡How to add short answer questions that evaluate decision making to your ScreenPal lesson:
- Start by uploading your video lesson to our ScreenPal hosting site.
- Click on ‘My Content.’
- Click on ‘Quizzes’ then select ‘+ New Quiz.’
- Select the video for your quiz.
- Add your short answer question focused on responsible decision making.
- Wondering what this looks like in practice? Check out our example quiz made using our royalty-free stock media.
In conclusion, incorporating videos in social emotional learning is an effective way to help students develop their social and emotional skills. With ScreenPal, teachers can create and share videos that help students develop self awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision making skills. These activities not only support the five CASEL social emotional learning competencies, but also develop critical social and emotional skills, leading to improved academic outcomes, decreased anxiety, and increased resilience.
