Asking students to dissect the motivations of a character in a book is doing more than teaching them about plot and characterization. This exercise also helps students learn to see different perspectives, empathize, and examine another person’s emotions—as well as their own.
In short, experts and educators say, the English/language arts class can be a powerful forum for developing students’ social-emotional skills at all ages.
Stories connect social-emotional skills that can be abstract in isolation to realistic situations that students can compare their own experiences with, said David Adams, a social-emotional-learning expert and chief executive officer for the Urban Assembly, a nonprofit that works with schools around the country to improve social-emotional learning, college readiness and success, and instruction.
“In education, we talk about mirrors and windows,” said Adams. “A mirror being, ‘how do I see myself in this context?’ And a window being, ‘what can I learn about somebody else?’ The best literature talks about motivation, it talks about feelings, it talks about intent. When kids understand literature, they are also understanding themselves.”
English/language arts classes can also provide a lower-stakes entry point into discussions on tough emotional and moral challenges, such as the death of a loved one or what to do if a friend is using drugs, without requiring students or teachers to reference their personal lives in class.
Students can hone social-emotional skills like social awareness, self-reflection, problem-solving, critical thinking, and conflict resolution through reading, analyzing, and discussing literature in ELA classes, experts say. Getting inside a character’s or the author’s head to discern their intent, for example, teaches perspective-taking.
“Why do you think this person is doing that?” Adams said. “It’s a very important skill, whether you’re reading a newspaper article, or having a conversation with your wife or your colleague.”
These social-emotional competencies are all vital for students’ future success in school and work. While experts say there’s no substitute for explicit SEL instruction, the ELA classroom can give students a chance to apply and reinforce the skills they’re learning. It’s also especially effective in high school, where there are typically fewer SEL resources and programming.
Books can foster empathy and self-awareness
Literature can help support healthy identity formation, Adams said, as students parse out what they care about, what their passions are, and who they want to be.
Students also learn responsible decisionmaking as they track and analyze the consequences of characters’ emotions and interactions, said Klara Aizupitis, a high school ELA and reading teacher. Literature helps her students—who live in a remote part of West Texas—build empathy and broaden their horizons, she said.
Her students have been reading A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, which chronicles author Ishmael Beah’s time in the Sierra Leone Civil War.
One of Aizupitis’s goals in selecting that book is “trying to develop empathy with his decision when he ends up joining the government forces as a 12-year-old boy and starting to fight that war,” she said. “I think recognizing the feelings that these characters or, in the case of the memoir, what this actual person was experiencing, seeing their actions and understanding their emotional motivations, ends up being really helpful for students in their own lives.”
Finally, reading and writing can help students learn to recognize and name emotions—an important first step in managing them, said Marc Brackett, the director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.
“They’re building a much more nuanced vocabulary to describe their own and other people’s experiences,” he said. “And they’re building self-regulation skills because they’re really thinking critically through how that character managed that experience. Did they do it? What was the result of that? Did that work or did not work? Would that work for you?”
Teachers can more purposely integrate SEL into ELA classes
Whether or not teachers consciously intend to incorporate social-emotional learning into their English classes, they’re still reinforcing the associated skills through discussion around plot, character, and theme, said Heather Schwartz, a practice advisor for the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, or CASEL, an organization that promotes research and best practices around SEL.
But to fully realize the English/language arts’ potential to develop positive character traits in students, teachers must be purposeful in how they graft SEL onto their reading and writing instruction, Schwartz said.
“When we’re intentional, we make sure it’s not just a happy accident if students not only engage in the literature, but expand their skills and mindsets,” she said.
How can teachers do that?
One strategy is to do less lecturing and allow for plenty of discussion, said Schwartz. Students can’t exercise social-emotional skills if they are passively listening to their teacher and not actively engaging with peers and ideas.
If there is a schoolwide curriculum that focuses on a social-emotional skill on a weekly or monthly basis, teachers can work that skill into class discussion about a book or character, said Schwartz—but only if it makes sense. Social-emotional learning that is awkwardly shoehorned into a lesson can come off as silly.
“Use the opportunities that feel authentic,” she said. “If it does feel like an add-on, then something needs to shift about how we’re doing this. But if you can make that tie-in in a way that is authentic, I think that’s so beneficial for students to have that kind of integration throughout their day.”
One criticism of social-emotional learning is that teachers might encourage students to share highly personal information in class discussions. To some parents, this can start looking like a therapy session that the teacher is not qualified to lead. It’s a criticism that has been amplified by conservative groups in a push to get schools to jettison their SEL programs.
But literature can provide plenty of meaningful material for discussing social and emotional themes that doesn’t require teachers or students to share personal information, said Schwartz.
Literature also supplies discussion topics that can really stretch students’ social-emotional understanding, she said. Students’ social-emotional learning is stunted if SEL sticks to basic emotions or only happy topics, Schwartz added.
In literature, Schwartz said, “You see people making bad choices and dealing with consequences. You see people in really tricky circumstances. There’s so much to learn by getting a glimpse into someone’s life through literature, and even if the educator’s not asking students to make personal connections, that’s something that happens.”
How different grades can incorporate SEL skills into ELA classes
Exactly how teachers should infuse SEL into their English classes will look different depending upon the age of their students.
Early elementary teachers, for instance, can incorporate social-emotional learning into read-alouds. In the early grades, teachers should focus on the feelings characters have, if students have experienced those emotions themselves, and how characters navigate conflict, said Adams.
In upper elementary, Katrina Sacurom, who teaches reading and writing to 5th grade students in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area, makes sure to incorporate the character trait, such as honesty or self-control, that her school is emphasizing that month into her lessons. She also focuses on character—and by extension, student—relationships. Building and maintaining relationships are key social-emotional skills.
“A lot of the times character relationships aren’t explicitly written in the grade-level text that we read and analyze,” she said. Sacurom asks students to dig into the way that characters express themselves and how that affects the interactions and relationships they have with other characters.
“For example, we used Hoot by Carl Hiaasen in the beginning of the school year to talk about the way that the protagonist was able to make unlikely friendships that then helped him get out of his shell and adjust to moving to a new area,” she said.
As students get older and are developmentally ready for more complex themes and character motivations, ELA class can help them make sense of their own conflicting feelings and sometimes tumultuous inner lives, said Schwartz.
There aren’t many SEL curricula developed with the specific needs of high schoolers in mind. And traditionally schools have invested less in SEL in the secondary level than in primary grades, even though experts say older students also need opportunities to develop their social-emotional skills.
“These skills that we’re talking about, by high school, are much better received through literature or project-based learning,” Schwartz said. “Something that’s asking the students to show up in their wholeness because they already have a lot of life experience. They have a lot to learn, too, but many of them have experienced things that perhaps not all of their teachers have.”
At Oak Park & River Forest High School in a suburb of Chicago, English teachers Rex Ovalle and Avi Lessing had students record a podcast-style interview with an elder—such as a parent, grandparent, or other close adult—as part of a hybrid communication/SEL project.
“The project was very simple: just listen to an adult for a moment, use your language to connect deeper with this person you think you know,” Ovalle said. “The kids were profoundly moved by the experience of having to really exercise listening.”
The project, he said, was an exercise in deep empathy. And it illustrates how ELA class can be a limitless source of social-emotional lessons for students.
“They could have lived a thousand lives, hopefully by the time they graduate high school, having read different stories and learned from different characters,” Ovalle said.
