Emotions Are Central to Learning

Key Points

• 2024 SEL Exchange speaker, founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, professor, and CASEL Board Member Dr. Marc Brackett gives a sneak peek of his session with Dr. Dawn Brooks DeCosta, Deputy Superintendent of Harlem Community School District 5 in Harlem, New York City.
• Emotions are central to attention, memory, and learning.
• Integrating SEL into academic instruction can be done through storytelling, reflections, writing assignments, and classroom discussions that align the feeling that’s being taught with the content area.

At the 2024 SEL Exchange, we were thrilled to hear from Dr. Marc Brackett about the topic of integrating SEL and academics. Here’s what he had to say:

What are some of the most effective, powerful, and/or creative ways to integrate SEL with academics in the classroom you’ve encountered?

Emotions are central to attention, memory, and learning. In our SEL work, we place a strong emphasis on building a rich emotion vocabulary. In fact, we believe it’s a human right for children (and adults) to cultivate emotional self-awareness. Integrating “feeling words” into the standard curriculum is a fantastic way to both teach emotional literacy and academic content. This can be done through storytelling, reflections, writing assignments, and classroom discussions that align the feeling that’s being taught with the content area. We look forward to sharing our methods at the conference.

What are you looking forward to at the 2024 SEL Exchange?

I am very much looking forward to presenting with my colleague, Dr. Dawn Brooks DeCosta. Dawn and I have worked together for the last decade on bringing our Center’s approach to SEL to nearly two dozen schools in Harlem, New York. We will share lots of insights from what we learned from the school that Dawn led for over a decade, including how to support diverse learners in developing the skills of emotional intelligence using culturally relevant pedagogy. 

What are you currently working on?

At the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, we believe in continuous learning and development. Currently we are working on new benchmarks for our curriculum for adults and children (which spans from PreK to high school). We’re combing through feedback from over 5,000 schools that use RULER, our Center’s approach to SEL, and reviewing the most up-to-date research on social, emotional, and cognitive development to ensure that we support schools in integrating the latest science that’s also aligned with our current socio-historical context.

The views in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of CASEL.

Marc Brackett, Ph.D., is founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and professor in the Child Study Center, Yale School of Medicine at Yale University. As a researcher for over 20 years, Marc has focused on the role of emotions and emotional intelligence in learning, decision making, creativity, relationships, health, and performance. Marc is the author of the bestselling book, Permission To Feel (Celadon/Macmillan), which has been translated into 22 languages. Most recently, with Pinterest co-founder Ben Silbermann, Marc and his team co-created the Apple award-winning app, HowWeFeel, designed to teach emotion skills and enhance well-being.

Related Posts:

• 7 Reasons You Can’t Miss the 2024 SEL Exchange
• 2024 SEL Exchange Sneak Peek: Powerful Ways to Integrate SEL With Academics
• 2024 SEL Exchange Sneak Peek: Mathematics and SEL Are a Natural Pair

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