Why do many educators feel ill-equipped to teach social-emotional learning? An EdWeek Research Center survey names the dilemma plainly: The leading challenge is that students’ emotional needs feel “beyond the scope” of what schools can handle. Close behind are the difficulty of integrating SEL into academic subjects, limited bandwidth, insufficient materials and professional development, and the pressure of standardized testing.
I hear this all the time from educators. And I believe them. Teachers are being asked to do more than ever. They are managing classrooms filled with anxiety, disengagement, impulsivity, and chronic stress. Many are exhausted themselves. And when we tell them, “Now teach SEL, too,” it can sound like one more thing added to an already impossible list.
But this is where we get caught in the chicken-and-egg problem.
We say students’ emotional needs are too much to handle, so we do not teach the skills. But because we do not teach the skills early, intentionally, and systematically, those needs grow larger, louder, and more disruptive. Then we say the needs are too much to handle. That cycle is costing us.
When students do not learn how to deal with their feelings, those emotions do not disappear. They show up as distraction, defiance, bullying, disengagement, and absenteeism. They show up in the nurse’s office, the counselor’s office, the principal’s office, and eventually in test scores, school climate, and teacher burnout.
We do not need to question whether emotions belong in school. They are already there. The question is whether we will give students and adults the skills to work with them wisely.
In my own work with educators, I often ask, “How many of your students receive a comprehensive education in emotions from pre-K through high school?” The response is usually stunned silence. Then I ask, “How much did you learn about emotions in your own schooling?” Silence, again.
That is not a criticism of teachers but an indictment of how little we have prepared the adults who are expected to support children.
Parents are in the same position. Most never received an emotion education themselves. They are trying to help their children navigate anxiety, peer conflict, phones, academic pressure, and loneliness while often lacking the language and tools to do so. So, schools cannot simply say, “This belongs at home.”
That is why SEL must start early, involve families, and be built into the daily life of school. Not as therapy. Not as a replacement for academics. As education. And it does not have to be burdensome. SEL loses people when it becomes everything but the kitchen sink. It works best when it is focused, concrete, and teachable, helping children and adults build concrete emotional intelligence skills they can use in everyday moments: recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing, and regulating them effectively.
In fact, time spent developing emotional intelligence will ease the burden on teachers—reducing behavior problems and enhancing classroom climate.
At its best, emotional intelligence is not another subject squeezed between science and lunch. It is a way of improving the conditions for teaching and learning. In RULER, the evidence-based approach I co-developed, we begin with adults.
To ensure that evidence-based SEL is integrated into learning environments in ways that are focused, practical, and effective, school and district leaders, in partnership with educators, must:
- Take a proactive rather than reactive approach in school. Do not turn teachers into therapists. School leaders must work with staff to build emotionally safe environments and embed evidence-based curricula so students learn skills before problems escalate.
- Encourage teachers to discuss how emotions already live inside the curriculum with students. Literature is full of jealousy, courage, grief, and hope. History is filled with fear, pride, humiliation, empathy, and moral outrage. Science requires curiosity and the ability to tolerate frustration. Math requires persistence. Writing requires vulnerability. Emotion is an inherent part of learning and is what makes learning engaging and meaningful.
- Teach educators how emotional intelligence is foundational to learning. Leaders should help teachers understand that students’ attention, memory, decisionmaking, motivation, and persistence are all shaped by emotion. When students are dysregulated, they are not fully available for learning. The ability to manage frustration, sustain attention, ask for help, and make responsible decisions is what allows academic learning to happen.
- Offer teachers science-backed tools that are simple, usable, and adaptable. For example, in RULER, the Mood Meter gives students and adults a shared language for emotions. Our free How We Feel app extends that work by teaching hundreds of feeling words and offering research-backed strategies to help people manage emotions in everyday life.
- Provide professional development to teach educators skills that were never taught. Emotion skills are learnable, not fixed personality traits. But school and district leaders must provide teachers with the time, coaching, modeling, and support. One workshop will not do it. SEL works best when professional learning is ongoing and when school leaders are part of it.
The most common mistake we see is treating social-emotional learning as a burden placed on educators rather than a support for them. Done poorly, teaching SEL can become one more manual, one more initiative. Done well, it reduces the emotional chaos that makes teaching harder.
Children should not have to reach crisis before they are taught how emotions work. We teach reading before students are expected to analyze novels. We should teach emotion skills before students are overwhelmed by anxiety, conflict, rejection, and failure.
And families must be invited into the process, not blamed. Parents do not need to become experts. It provides a common language.
The fact that teachers feel unprepared is the clearest argument for improving SEL. Students’ social-emotional needs are at the center of education. If we want children to learn, belong, persist, collaborate, and thrive, we have to teach them the skills that make those outcomes possible.
The chicken-and-egg problem ends when we decide that social-emotional skills are how we begin, not what we teach after everything else is handled.
