Hoodies and Hats: What Dress Codes Can Teach Us About Social Awareness

Key Points

• A middle school science teacher is confronted by an informal dress code that discourages students from wearing headwear such as hoodies.
• She pushes back, questioning why the unspoken rule is in place and enforced, and calls upon her colleagues to apply the SEL competency of social awareness to the question.
• This kind of adult SEL takes courage because it requires us to question existing practices, and that can feel risky, but that is the work of social awareness.

At a middle school known for valuing SEL, an unstated dress code persisted for years: hoods down, hats off, shoulders covered. “This is just how we do it here” was the message. 

Alexandria, a skilled seventh-grade science teacher at the school, wasn’t interested in making clothing a focus. She was concerned with inquiry-based lessons, relationships, and student engagement.

Her colleagues, who engaged in daily power struggles over headwear, expected her to get on board with this informal “policy.” When she didn’t, they asked the principal to speak with her about being more consistent with staff expectations.

The principal acknowledged that this guidance wasn’t a formal dress code; it was only a shared staff preference. But they framed the conversation as a request for consistency. In other words, the issue was Alexandria’s problem to fix. So, the principal actually reinforced the expectation, signaling to Alexandria that she was out of step. 

This is one way adults miss the work of social awareness: when maintaining staff harmony takes priority over examining how a practice impacts students.

Social Awareness and Dress Codes

Social awareness is the competency that requires us to shift our attention beyond ourselves to truly see, hear, and understand one another. It allows us to empathize, recognize power dynamics, and question whose voices are centered or silenced. For adults, it also means noticing how identity, context, and institutional norms shape our interpretation of behavior and students’ experience of our decisions.

In my coaching work, dress codes come up more often than people might expect. On the surface, they are framed as common sense: no hoods, hats, or headwear; specific strap widths; skirt or shorts length requirements. The stated reasoning is usually about focus, order, safety, fairness, or professionalism. But dress codes often become a source of tension among staff, and between staff and students, because they signal adult beliefs about what is “appropriate” without fully accounting for student perspectives.

Clothing is more than functional; it can be an expression of identity, culture, beliefs, or comfort. When we mandate dress codes, we may intend to set guardrails for safety, but we are often imposing our own beliefs about what is respectable. As adults, we assign meaning to what students wear. Noticing that requires social awareness.

Turning Awareness Into Action

Back to Alexandria, our science teacher. When confronted, she felt a familiar rush of defensiveness, and with it the urge to comply to lower the tension. But she recognized this as a moment to anchor in her values rather than give in to that pressure. Instead of defending herself, she asked that the staff examine the meaning they were assigning to students’ clothing and headwear.

This is where social awareness can begin to shift into practice. Alexandria did not accept the question as “How do we enforce this more consistently?” because being “consistent” in enforcing a biased or unexamined norm only ensures that we are consistently pushing certain students away. 

The goal of her inquiry wasn’t to declare who was right or wrong, but to invite her colleagues to look at the impact of their choices: Why were they enforcing these rules on some students and not others, and how were these practices functioning in school culture? Instead of settling for compliance, she pushed the conversation toward a harder set of questions:

• What are we enforcing?
• Why are we enforcing it?
• What happens when we do?

The Courage to Shift Practice

That kind of adult SEL takes courage because it requires us to question existing practices, and that can feel risky. Sometimes it is risky. But that is the work of social awareness: noticing our reactions, assumptions, and patterns by asking who we correct, what we interpret as disrespect, and what we believe “appropriate” should look like.

This awareness must then translate into action: acting even when it creates discomfort, staying steady in difficult conversations, naming what we notice, and changing practices so that they serve students well. Social awareness only becomes meaningful when it stops being a concept we teach and starts being the way we choose to show up.

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

Gianna Cassetta (she/her) is a school founder, ICF-certified coach, and equity-centered consultant dedicated to helping educators build schools where adult and student social and emotional development move on parallel paths. In her work at The Plain Red Horse Coaching and Consulting, Gianna draws on her experience as a school leader to help educators interrogate institutional norms and build cultures that foster genuine student belonging. She is the author of The Social and Emotional Core of Equity Leadership: A Guide for Driving Change in Schools and co-author of Classroom Management Matters: The Social and Emotional Learning Approach That Children Deserve, No More Taking Away Recess and Other Problematic Discipline Practices, and The Caring Teacher: Strategies for Working Through Your Own Difficulties with Students.

Related Posts

• “We teach who we are, not just what we know.” What Top Researchers Had to Say About Adult SEL
• What We Learned From Focusing on Adult SEL
• In Olympia, We Shifted Gears to Focus on Adults 

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