Social and Emotional Learning
Overview
What is Social and Emotional Learning (SEL)?
The aim of this course is to help you to develop your social and emotional learning skills. This involves developing the ability to understand and manage our emotions, establish positive relationships, develop empathy for others, help to set and achieve your goals and help us to feel good about ourselves.
A sense of self, emotional and social skills are at the core of any SEL program.
Let’s explain these terms to you:
Sense of self
Ideally, this involves you feeling good about yourself and what you can achieve. It is important for you to experience success in your efforts to interact with others and explore the world around you. As you do this through the SEL program, you will develop increased self-confidence and feel more capable to tackle challenges. This will hopefully allow you to continue to engage in new experiences and feel optimistic about your future.
Emotional skills
Emotional skills include recognising, expressing, understanding and managing a wide range of feelings. Learning about our emotions helps us to develop the ability to interact successfully with others and the world around you. It is known that young people who can understand and manage their feelings are more likely to develop a positive sense of self and be confident and curious learners.
Social skills
These skills are about getting along with others. As you grow, you begin to understand how your behaviours and actions can impact on other people and that everyone has their own thoughts and feelings. Throughout this course, you will learn how to cope with this.
What do you do?
The course has two learning components:
1. Pre-reading:
In VSV Online, you will be introduced to the topic of the week. You will have a glimpse of what we will cover during the Online Lesson and sometimes there will be a short task for you to prepare before class. This could include chatting to a family member, adding something to a forum or finding a picture to share in class.
2. Online Lesson:
Every week you will attend an Online Lesson with your Learning Advisor and classmates. Here we will deep dive into the topics with discussions, problem solving and collaboration. You will be using a combination of VSV Online, WebEx, and Google Classroom in your SEL program.
Students will cover eight topics:
- Emotional literacy
- Personal strengths
- Positive coping
- Problem solving
- Stress management
- Help seeking
- Gender and identity
- Positive gender relationships.
Each topic will be split in to four-week modules that you will work your way through. You will also notice that in some modules there will be a week dedicated to careers instead of SEL. More information about this will be passed on to you by your Learning Advisor.
What skills do you develop?
Positive outcomes for your future: Social and emotional skills can help you in managing stress, deciding on goals and planning for the future.
Positive outcomes for your achievement: It has been shown that student success and academic engagement, outcomes and achievement increase when students engage in SEL.
Positive outcomes for your mental health: The Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth notes that SEL programs can give students the opportunity to build the resilience to deal with change and unpredictability. This is an essential skill for positive mental health.
This program is required by the Victorian Curriculum and we use the Resilience, Rights and Respectful Relationships curriculum and the Careers Curriculum Framework as the basis of our program.