Do We Oversell SEL?

Yong Zhao’s “Another education war? The coming debates over social and emotional learning” is worth taking some time to read and reflect on. Zhao explores claims from champions and challengers of social emotional learning. For me, Zhao’s thoughtfully documented article basically shows that SEL has potential benefits when modestly and wisely used, but it can also distract educators from effective education by becoming a “nonacademic common core,” as one of his sources asserts. That sounds like just about every trend in education. I wanted to share more reflections on this important topic and its relevance to my current context, but I needed to wrap up my courses for an extremely short straight-block quarter, so that’s it for this short take.