Social Emotional Skill Lessons and Their Impact on The Self Awareness of 2nd Grade Students

Seminar Title

Social Emotional Skill Lessons and Their Impact on The Self Awareness of 2nd Grade Students

Social Emotional Learning

2nd Grade

Elementary

Other

All Disciplines

Sit down! Stop crying! Stop spanking your friends! Is this tattling or telling? Why did you bite him? Was that a good choice? Where are your pants? Stop licking your neighbor! What is happening? Being a teacher is sometimes a chaotic mess. We catch ourselves saying things we never thought in a million years we would say. How do we prevent ourselves from losing our minds and help our students gain self awareness? How do we help our students apply social emotional skills in the real world? For my action research project I explored social emotional skill lessons and how they impacted the self awareness of students in the classroom. I wanted to see if students would be able to transfer the knowledge they learned into their real life experiences. For my project I focused on the areas of growth mindset, empathy, and self-regulation to help me accomplish my goals.

Abstract (Title) Social-Emotional Skill Lessons and Their Impact on the Self Awareness of 2nd Grade Students (Intro to AR) The questions I wanted to explore for my action research were “How would more structured social emotional learning lessons affect the behaviors in my classroom? Would students actually put the knowledge they learn into practice and become more self aware of their actions? When researching the topic of social emotional learning I found that most professionals agreed SEL lessons were extremely beneficial for children of all ages. Many authors even mentioned how social emotional skills can affect future success in the workforce. After completing my research I chose to focus on the following social emotional topics 1) self-regulation 2) growth mindset and 3) empathy. I implemented lessons on these three topics several times a week for a period of 3 months. I assessed the students’ progress using the following tools 1) weekly clip charts 2) student behavior reports from SWIS 3) parent surveys and 4) teacher observation. (Method and Data) Through my action research I have learned how to manage my time to fit in multiple social emotional lessons a week. I realized that some students need a lot more practice than others to grasp the concepts. However, when a conflict arises I have been able to have conversations that are more clear and insightful for both the students and myself since we understand the same social emotional terms and strategies. I have also noticed that students have been able to problem solve much more quickly than in previous years. (Conclusion) As a result of my research, and seeing how social emotional lessons impact the self awareness of my students, I plan to continue the social emotional lessons throughout the year. I also will be looking into finding more resources for social emotional learning and trauma sensitive strategies for the classroom.