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The Business Case for Social-Emotional Learning & EQ

The US economy is as strong as its workforce. To this end, it’s vital we equip students with the skills they need to succeed in an economy with changing and evolving needs. This need to prepare future workers for their careers was the driving force behind the rise of STEM education in the early 2010s. However, focusing solely on technical skills still left a substantial skills gap between what students were learning and what employers needed from their workers. 

Social-emotional learning (SEL) is the way to bridge this gap and teach kids the skills they need to succeed in their careers, as well as lead happier, more fulfilled lives in general.

SEL is the process through which people learn skills to develop healthy identities, manage emotions, achieve goals, feel and show empathy, build healthy relationships and make responsible decisions. 

In other words, social-emotional learning teaches emotional intelligence and how to be happy. 

So what does SEL and emotional intelligence have to do with the current skills gap faced by recent graduates and the companies looking to hire them?

The Current Skills Gap

The National Network of Business and Industry Associations has identified a set of skills someone should have to be considered employable. These “common employability skills” fall into four categories

  • Personal skills
  • People skills
  • Workplace skills
  • Applied knowledge

You were probably quick to notice that three of those four skill  groups are what many would consider “life skills”. Meaning, they’re skills that aren’t related to technical knowledge or competence. 

These personal, people and workplace skills are, instead, related to a person’s ability to function as an individual, as part of a team and as part of a larger organization. 

However, many US businesses are struggling to find candidates for open jobs that possess these skills. In fact, in one survey, half of employers struggle to find qualified recent graduates to fill their job vacancies. Despite possessing the necessary technical skills, these recent grads lack the ability to communicate, adapt, make decisions and solve problems. 

We are not doing an effective job of preparing young Americans to start their careers and many of these prospective workers are ill-equipped for the workplace:

  • 31% of employers find it difficult to find qualified workers
  • More than half of manufacturers and business CEOs have serious problems finding workers with skills necessary to succeed in the workplace
  • According to manufacturers, the number one skill deficiency is problem solving

What’s more, the number of skills required to be successful upon entering the workforce has grown over the past half decade and will likely continue to grow.

  • In 2016, a survey sponsored by Microsoft of online jobs boards identified 62 skills required for “high opportunity” (high-growth/high-wage) jobs
  • This is up from 37 skills needed in 2013
  • “Oral and written communication skills” and “problem solving” are most sought-after skills for high opportunity jobs
  • Of the top 20 skills identified, only two (Microsoft Office and Microsoft PowerPoint) are technical skills or applied knowledge

All of these stats and figures add up to one simple conclusion: 

Our education system is not preparing students to be successful personally or professionally upon graduation. 

In order to prepare students to meet the needs of employers, we need to ensure:

  • They are equipped to work and communicate with a diverse range of customers and coworkers
  • They are able to self-motivate, self-direct and adapt to changing employer-employee relationships
  • They see beyond specific tasks to the “bigger picture”
  • They work well independently and as part of team and often with limited guidance from higher-ups
  • They are willing and able to take initiative to function effectively in a complex business organizations and structures

SEL Offers Benefits for Employers & Employees

Fortunately, if we look at all of the most in-demand skills employers want from workers, as well as the needs of graduates as they enter the workforce, we see a significant overlap between those skills and the five core competencies taught by social-emotional learning.

Let’s take a look at the five core competencies of social-emotional learning:

  • Self awareness: Can you recognize your emotions and their impact on your behavior?
  • Self management: Are you able to regulate your thoughts, feelings and behaviors in different situations?
  • Social awareness: Do you understand social norms for behavior? Can you empathize with people from diverse backgrounds? Are you able to recognize sources of support in your life?
  • Relationship skills: Are you able to establish and maintain healthy relationships with different people? 
  • Responsible decision-making: Can you realistically evaluate the possible consequences of an action and make decisions based on social and ethical norms? Do you consider the impact of your actions on the well-being of others as well as yourself?

Now, let’s consider some the key skills identified by the Department of Education as necessary for success in the workplace:

  • Sound decision making: Students differentiate and assess multiple approaches and options.
  • Understands teamwork: Students are able to work with a partner or in groups, contributing fairly to the assignment and showing respect for team members by listening to and considering all ideas. Students negotiate to resolve conflicts.
  • Demonstrates self-discipline and responsibility: Students actively participate, asking and answering questions and completing assignments.
  • Responds to customer needs: Students help others understand tasks, find resources and fulfill roles.
  • Respect individuals: Students respond supportively to team members’ ideas and contributions and work well with others. Students engage in active listening.

Compared to the core skills taught by social-emotional learning, it’s easy to see the clear convergence between the two groups. 

In fact, the ability to work as a team is the top quality businesses look for in recent college grads, ahead of analytical and quantitative skills. And since 1980 there has been a strong, steady decline in jobs requiring high math and low social skills. Almost all job growth in that time has been in occupations requiring high EQ and social skills.

These skills that are so key to employability and success in business are directly taught in SEL curricula.

Investing in SEL Brings Success

So how do we support SEL so that students are graduating with the skills businesses need from their workers? 

We do this by treating SEL today like we did with STEM back in 2011. 

In the decade following the US Chamber’s Case for Being Bold report, corporations invested more than $1 billion funding STEM awareness and education. If that money were spent developing SEL programs and curricula, that would return up to $10 billion (more more) in economic growth.

The groundwork for bringing SEL into schools exists today in a developing industry of researchers, technology companies and service providers. Business leaders, like they were in 2011, are in the perfect spot to provide these advocates the resources and support they need to bring SEL education to schools at all levels.

Photo by Charlotte May from Pexels

Social-Emotional Learning Boosts STEM Education. Here’s How.

Back in 2011, the US Chamber of Commerce released a report called The Case for Being Bold. This report famously led to a decade-long effort to promote science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education in K-12 education and a huge investment of resources from governments and corporations:

  • More than $1 billion dollars spent over the next decade funding STEM education and awareness.
  • Business-led campaigns to lead and amplify the effort to support STEM education.
  • Vital Signs metrics track and evaluate students’ academic performance in STEM subjects.
  • The STEM is Cool! campaign highlighted innovative and exciting work in STEM jobs
  • “STEM salons” popped up across the country, selling STEM-centric courses, after school programs and even birthday parties for kids K-12 ages.

However, despite this massive investment of resources, the effort to promote STEM education has fallen short in some key areas.

While the candidate pool for technical jobs increased, overall diversity of people working STEM jobs still lags behind other fields. Moreover, overall scores in math, science and technology in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (known as “the nation’s report card”) haven’t improved over the last 10 years.

Essentially, people and organizations directly involved in STEM activities benefited from this billion-dollar investment, but everyone else saw little profit.

SEL: The Missing Piece of the Puzzle

Social-emotional learning, or SEL for short, is the process of teaching people skills to develop healthy identities, manage emotions, achieve goals, develop empathy, build healthy relationships, and make responsible decisions.

SEL also teaches important life skills such as how to analyze and solve problems, set achievable goals, and embracing challenges as part of growing and learning.

Practically speaking, incorporating SEL into a curriculum has been shown to help improve students’ overall academic performance. According to the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL):

  • 83% of students made academic gains when participating in an academic program with an SEL component.
  • Students improved by an average of 11% on standardized tests after participating in an SEL program.
  • Students increased their GPA by an average of 11% when participating in an SEL program.
  • SEL programs help improve student behaviors and attitudes while preventing substance abuse.

SEL Boosts Skills Important to STEM Success

ntegrating social-emotional learning with STEM education enhances the academic program by teaching five key competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills and decision-making skills.

Self awareness

Self awareness is the ability of a person to identify their emotions and the impact of those feelings on their behavior.

Self management

Self management is the ability to regulate thoughts, feelings and behaviors in different situations. This skill is critical to setting and achieving goals, something that is a real challenge for students as well as adults.

The fact is, in STEM education students will inevitably face numerous challenges and failures. Science is, after all, an iterative process. So strong self management is required to deal with and overcome the feelings of frustration and inadequacy that sometimes come with STEM education.

SEL teaches how to learn from past failures and incorporate those insights into future efforts.

Combining SEL with STEM education allows students to persevere and “fail forward” until they reach their ultimate goal.

Social awareness

Social awareness is understanding social norms and empathizing with people from different backgrounds. Strong social awareness results in students who are more creative and able to incorporate alternate viewpoints to solve problems and overcome challenges.

Social awareness not only makes STEM education more effective through improved teamwork, the ability to empathise and see things from another’s point of view is the most important skill in innovation, invention and design.

Take, for example, the market-leading personal finance tool Quicken, created by Intuit, Inc.

Quicken was created by Intuit founder Scott Cook in the early 1980s after his wife complained about struggling to balance their checkbook and keep their bills organized. Cook realized a product centered around simplifying personal finance would help not only his own family, but others as well.

Quicken’s success, driven by Scott Cook’s ability to empathize with challenges faced by other people, helped establish Intuit as one of the most successful companies in the world.

A second example is a product called The Embrace Care.

embrace backpack
Image from Embrace Innovations

The Care was created by a team of Stanford postgraduate students challenged to invent a new incubator for use in developing countries. However, after meeting with mothers living in remote areas without easy access to hospitals, the team realized that a traditional incubator wouldn’t be practical for these mothers and babies.

The team’s ability to take on the perspective of people with a far, far different background than theirs allowed them to reframe the challenge from “invent an incubator” to “help mothers keep babies warm in far-flung locations without access to hospitals or electricity.”

Without that shift in perspective, the team may have simply created a traditional incubator that cost less, had a rechargeable battery or was more portable. It was their empathy that resulted in the inspiration to design a product that has helped to save thousands of lives.

Relationship skills

SEL teaches critical relationships skills that allow students to build and maintain healthy relationships with a diverse range of people.

STEM activities, projects and challenges usually take place in groups or in a team environment. And nearly all jobs in the STEM field rely heavily on collaboration and teamwork. Strong relationship skills and the ability to listen to multiple different perspectives are an absolute must for any success in a STEM education program.

Decision-making skills

Responsible decision-making relies on the ability to understand and anticipate the consequences of actions and make choices based on social norms as well as the well-being of others.

Social-emotional learning teaches responsible decision-making skills as well as focusing on promoting curiosity, open-mindedness and critical thinking skills.

Success in a STEM setting, either academic or in a related job, relies heavily on a person’s ability to analyze data to make a judgement, identify solutions to a problem, and anticipate the impact of an action. Even “small” decision-making skills, like time management and focus, are key to performing well in STEM subjects and challenges.

Next Steps: Time to Invest in SEL

The benefits of pairing STEM education with social-emotional learning is clear and the steps needed to helping today’s students reach their full potential is evident. The time is now to invest in SEL researchers, publishers, services and program providers just as we did for STEM education in 2011.

Learn how you can help bring social-emotional learning to your community today.

kids reading

It’s Time to Invest in SEL like STEM

Back in 2011, the US Chamber of Commerce released a report called The Case for Being Bold. This report famously laid out the need for not just increased investment in STEM education, but also the need for the business community to take a leadership role in the movement (as opposed to merely providing resources and support).

What happened next was a veritable decade-long explosion in STEM education:

  • Corporations spent more than $1 billion dollars over the next decade funding STEM education and awareness.
  • The business-led Change the Equation launched several campaigns to lead and amplify the effort to support STEM education.
  • Change the Equation created the Vital Signs benchmark to track and evaluate students’ performance in STEM subjects.
  • The STEM is Cool! campaign highlighted innovative and exciting work in STEM-related jobs
  • Privately-owned, for-profit “STEM salons” popped up across the country, selling STEM-centric courses, after school programs and even birthday parties for K-12 students.
social-emotional learning

The business community’s dedicated campaign helped lead to a marked increase in awareness of STEM, the importance of STEM education and opportunities in related fields.

So this brings us to the next big opportunity in education: social-emotional learning and emotional intelligence.

Teaching Happiness: EQ and SEL

Emotional intelligence, or “EQ” for short, is defined as a person’s ability to be aware of, control and express their emotions and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically”.

Social-emotional learning, better known as “SEL”, is the process of learning the knowledge and skills that allow people to develop healthy identities, manage emotions, achieve goals, feel and show empathy for others, build supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions.

social-emotional learning chart

Image courtesy of casel.org

SEL focuses on teaching five “key competencies” identified by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning:

  • Self-awareness: Being able to recognize emotions and their impact on behavior
  • Self-management: The ability to regulate thoughts, feelings and behaviors in different situations.
  • Social awareness: Understanding social norms for behavior, the ability to empathize with people from diverse backgrounds and cultures, and recognition of where there are sources of support.
  • Relationship skills: The ability to establish and maintain healthy relationships with a diverse range of people. These skills also include the capability to not take others’ behavior personally as well as engage in “active listening”.
  • Responsible decision-making: Being able to realistically evaluate the consequences of actions and make decisions based on social and ethical norms and the well-being of others and themselves.

SEL also helps kids learn how to analyze and solve problems, set goals and embrace challenges and setbacks as part of the growth process.

In other words, social-emotional learning equips kids with skills they can use to practice happiness throughout their lives.

The Need for Social-Emotional Learning

girl beek-a-boo

But why do we need to promote SEL and emotional intelligence?

The simple fact is that the overall mental health of Americans leaves a lot to be desired and kids today are exhibiting frighteningly high levels of negative behaviors.

The need for improved emotional intelligence is simply undeniable:

  • Violence: In 2015, 22% of students reported bullying and 10 million children experienced domestic violence. The US suffers the highest rates of murder and violent assault among developed countries.
  • Mental health: In 2015, an estimated 3 million adolescents experienced at least one major depressive episode. That represents 12.5% of kids aged 10 to 17 years old, and rates of reported depression and anxiety are increasing. And half of surveyed parents have described their kids as “over stressed” since the start of the COVID-19 lockdowns.
  • Suicide: Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for people between the ages of 10 and 24 years old, and suicide rates have been increasing each year over the last decade. And the COVID-19 pandemic increased the rates of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts even higher.
  • Academic performance: In 2013, 65% of all US fourth graders tested as “below proficient” in literacy, with 80% of low income students falling into that category. After years of intense focus on reading, those results remained largely flat as students suffer high rates of disengagement and lack motivation.
  • Criminalized behavior: Though popular, “zero tolerance” rules have served mostly to fill a “school-to-prison” pipeline as schools suspend, expel or prosecute students for relatively minor offenses – 2 million students are incarcerated each year. Communities of color bear the brunt of these outcomes.
  • Chronic stress: The chronic stress and trauma growing up in poverty or near-poverty takes a major toll on the academic climate and performance of more than 20 million kids each year.

The fact is, many kids today are unhappy. And these children carry this experience into adulthood.

Today’s adults report high levels of worker disengagement, on-the-job bullying and harassment, loneliness, domestic violence and lack of civic engagement.

Simply put, we are not teaching kids the skills vital to becoming happy, well-adjusted adults.

Practical benefits of social-emotional learning

young people on laptops

Investing in SEL to boost emotional intelligence brings benefits that  support society. That much is clear. This investment pays practical returns on investment to corporations and businesses:

It’s Time to Invest in SEL Like STEM

The need to boost investment in social-emotional learning is apparent and business leaders, much like they were with STEM education a decade ago, are in prime position to provide the necessary resources and support.

A broad ecosystem of SEL researchers, publishers, technology companies and service providers already exists. What they lack is a strong base of demand for their services.

Corporate demand and investment will drive schools to adopt comprehensive SEL programs, just as business demand and dollars drove them to adopt a comprehensive STEM curriculum.

And the best part is that we won’t need to wait 10 years to start seeing returns on this investment. High school students with just one year’s experiencing social-emotional learning will be better prepared to enter the labor force than workers without any SEL experience.

Just like with STEM education in 2011, the infrastructure for improving EQ through social-emotional learning is there. What’s needed now is the support from the business community that will lead schools to adopt SEL education at all levels.

Photo by Yan Krukov from Pexels

Happiness is a Skill Kids Can Learn & Practice

A parent’s job is to teach their kids life skills. Skills such as self care, how to read and write, what to do in an emergency, tying their shoes or how to play an instrument or sport. 

But can parents also teach their kids happiness?

Many people think of happiness as a matter of innate personality traits (such as temperament, cheerfulness and outlook) and life circumstances. Basically, if you have a positive attitude and you catch a couple of lucky breaks in life you’ll be happy. Conversely, if you go through a series of external challenges and are more of a “glass half empty” person, you’ll be miserable. 

But, as it turns out, happiness comes down to a set of skills you can teach to your kids and help them practice until they become routine habits.

Why Teach Happiness

In short, the happier we are, the more successful we become.

Research has long shown that happy people are more successful across a multitude of life domains:

Happy people are also better able to multitask and endure boredom and are more creative, trusting and helpful.Teaching happiness to kids has protected students against the decline in self satisfaction, satisfaction with friends and positive emotions that are typically reported by kids starting their middle school years.

In other words, teaching happiness is one of the best things you can do to set your kids up for success in both the short and long term.

The RULER Framework for Teaching Happiness

As you can likely tell, “RULER” is an acronym for five skills that can be taught and practiced to increase happiness:

  • Recognizing emotions: How am I feeling right now? Physical cues such as posture, energy levels, breathing and heart rate, can help children identify what emotions they’re feeling throughout the day and how their feelings have affected their interactions with others.
  • Understanding the causes of emotions: What happened that led me to feel this way? Figuring out possible causes behind feelings can help kids anticipate and manage uncomfortable feelings and help them consciously embrace things that lead feels we want to foster.
  • Labeling emotions accurately: What words best describe how I’m feeling right now? Both adults and children have access to more than 2,000 words in the English language that can describe emotions. However, most of us stick to a limited vocabulary (“good”, “fine”, “sad”, “mad”, etc.). Cultivating a rich emotional vocabulary allows children to pinpoint and communicate exactly how they’re feeling.
  • Expressing emotions appropriately: How can I express myself in this time and place? Explaining to kids what we are doing and why when it comes to expressing our feelings gives them models they can follow when they express their own emotions at home, with friends or at school.

Regulating emotions: How do I continue feeling emotions I want to feel or shift my feelings if I’m not? Strategies to manage emotions both in the moment and in the long term are critical to overall happiness.

Tools and Activities that Teach Happiness

In addition to modeling behaviors and actions that demonstrate the RULER framework in action, parents, teachers and other adults can promote emotional intelligence and happiness skills through activities and games.

Mood meters

The mood meter is a simple and concrete tool that helps shift conversations about feelings away from the rote “good” or “fine” to more nuanced responses like “curious”, “excited”, “scared” or “confident”.

Mood meters have two axes: 

  • The horizontal axis represents how pleasant or “good” it feels to experience this emotion. The far left represents the least pleasant you can imagine feeling and the far right represents the most pleasant. 
  • The vertical axis represents how much physical energy we feel while experiencing an emotion. The bottom of the range represents feeling drained of all energy, as if you can hardly move. The top of the axis represents feeling essentially the maximum amount of energy possible in your body.

When plotted out, these axes form 4 color-coded quadrants

  • Red: The top left quadrant containing high-energy and unpleasant feelings
  • Yellow: The top right quadrant represents energetic and pleasant emotions
  • Blue: The bottom left quadrant is made up of unpleasant feelings that rob us of physical energy
  • Green: The bottom right quadrant has higher energy and more pleasant emotions

Image by: Solutions for a Better Day

By using the mood meter, kids learn how to recognize their emotions based on what they’re feeling physically and emotionally. 

As children learn to use the mood meter they learn more and more feelings words to describe emotions that fall into each quadrant, helping them to label their emotions with more nuance and depth than before. 

Perhaps the greatest benefit of the mood meter tool is that it teaches kids that there are no “good” or “bad” feelings.

There are feelings that are more pleasant or energizing than others, but all emotions are valid and ok to feel. And for less pleasant feelings, they can use the mood meter to recognize, understand and label those feelings and use that information to better express and respond to those feelings.

Read-alouds

Read-alouds activities involve reading a story or scenario and then having children discuss and answer questions about the characters thoughts and emotions over the course of the narrative. These stories can be anywhere from just a few paragraphs for younger kids, all the way up to full chapter books as they get older. 

Read-Aloud Sample Questions
RecognizeWhat is the character feeling in this moment? How do you know they’re feeling that way?
UnderstandWhat happened in the story to make the character feel this way? What makes you feel this way in real life?
LabelWhere would this character’s feeling fall on the mood meter? What color would you give this feeling?
ExpressWhat did the character do or how did they act when they felt this emotion? What else do people do with they feel this way?
RegulateWhat could the character do to help them feel something more pleasant? What do you do when you feel this way? What would you do for a friend who was feeling this way?

For younger kids, pairing a read-aloud with the mood meter helps them practice applying emotional intelligence to the story’s character in a context with which they are familiar and experienced. 

Printing out pictures of characters from the story and moving them around a mood meter as their feelings change helps kids better prepare to deal with their own range of emotions.

Read-alouds are great activities to expand children’s knowledge of feelings and introduce them to new vocabulary for expressing their emotions. Parents and teachers can choose specific stories that are relevant to certain vocabulary they want to teach. 

A story about a visit to the dentist can be used to teach words like “nervous”, “anxious” or “confident”.

Sharing personal experiences with emotions

Parents and teachers can share short and simple stories about a life experience and describe the emotions they felt during this experience. Hearing about the feelings and experiences of adults helps children understand helpful ways to express and regulate their emotions. 

By openly talking about their own feelings and describing how those emotions looked and felt and how they expressed them, parents and teachers can foster an environment where children feel safe and supported in sharing their own feelings. 

Like a read-aloud, personal stories should involve a discussion surrounding your feelings and actions. 

Conclusion

Parents, teachers and other caregivers can help children develop and practice the skill of happiness through a whole slew of games and activities. Embedding the RULER framework and tools such as mood meters and read-alouds, we can help kids develop the EQ foundation necessary for lasting happiness. 

Whichever tools and activities you use, what matters is taking the time to help kids recognize and understand their emotions so they can express them in an appropriate and constructive manner. 

By taking these few, simple steps, you can boost you children’s EQ and help better prepare them for long-term successful outcomes in all facets of their life.