Social-Emotional Learning in the Waldorf Classroom

Today was one of those “tangent conversation” days. It started innocently enough. We noticed that the answer to a math problem was 537 — three prime numbers. That led to a conversation about our favorite kinds of numbers. I shared that my preference for even numbers goes back to when my sister and I took turns riding in the front seat (the even days were mine, odd days hers.) It was fun to find out that many of my students have a favorite times table (9’s were the most popular, but some even liked the 7’s!), favorite numbers, and some even associate colors with the different numbers.

I love these little random conversations, and I have to be careful that we don’t spend too long getting lost in the sharing (it takes a long time to give everyone a turn!). This is especially true now that half of our lessons are happening on Zoom. So usually, when I notice that we’re straying too far from the lesson plan, I pull us back on task. But for whatever reason, today, I let the conversation wander. I’m glad I did.

“The number I hate the most is 13 because March 13 was our last day of school. Friday the 13th is truly a bad luck day.”

I heard a little bit of a quiver when she said it, and it felt like an opening.

“You know, you all have had to be really strong this year. I’m sure it hasn’t been easy. Do you want to talk about it?”

I was so surprised to see that that was all they needed. Hands shot into the air and kids started talking. It was quite sweet. And their comments were very 4th grade.

“You guys might make fun of me for this (“no we won’t”), but I get really stressed out about school and I want to help my family so much, at least once a week I just cry for no reason.”

“My parents got a divorce right before covid and the only thing that was normal and stable for me was school. Without school I have emotional breakdowns all the time.”

“Listening to you all and thinking about this I feel like I could cry. I won’t, but I feel like I could.”

What struck me most about their comments was how vulnerable they were. These poor kids! As if dealing with the challenges of covid wasn’t enough, they’re also worried about their peers judging them (and judging themselves!) for how they handle it. Almost all of their comments came with a little apology or disclaimer.

It really made me think about our classroom culture and wonder what I can do to help kids share those vulnerabilities without worry and how I can help them learn how to support each other through them.

The Social-Emotional Classroom

Social-emotional work is such an enormous part of what we do as Waldorf teachers. I’ve never considered myself very strong at actively meeting and guiding those conversations directly. I tend to address emotional stuff through the back door, but this is one aspect of teaching that I want to learn more about.

In many ways, we Waldorf teachers are lucky. There is something about being with the same group of students for so long that ensures the development of a healthy social-emotional environment. I’m grateful for the strong connection I have with my students and their families, but I want to learn more about how to help my students grow through those challenging moments.

The Five Components of Social Emotional Learning

Usually, when I think about social-emotional learning, I think about helping students get along with others. Building relationship skills is one of the most challenging things we do at school and, really, our greatest opportunity for growth. But social awareness is just one part of social-emotional learning. Students need to learn so much more, and if you ask me, those other aspects are a bit less tangible and require more intentional guidance. These are the five core competencies of social-emotional learning.

• self-awareness
• self-management
• social awareness
• relationship skills
• responsible decision-making

There’s so much to be said about each of these, and I want to explore all of them eventually, but I want to make sure this post includes some solid implementation strategies, so let’s focus on the first one — self-awareness.

Self-Awareness: The First Social-Emotional Skill

According to the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), self-awareness is the ability to accurately recognize one’s own emotions, thoughts, and values and how they influence behavior.

When I first considered the idea of self-awareness, I thought of the 3- or 4-year-old who has a tantrum because they’re over-tired or hungry. They might be able to identify how they’re feeling, but they don’t understand how that feeling is influencing their behavior.

But truly, self-awareness goes far beyond this kind of scenario. Self-awareness also means exploring one’s identity, understanding emotions and their impact, examining prejudices and biases, having a growth mindset, and developing a sense of purpose. Clearly, self-awareness is a life-long journey. The struggle is real — and not just for the 4-year-old.

There are many ways that we can help our students gain greater self-awareness, but, as always, I find it helpful to actively plan experiences that I know will address learning goals — even those in the social-emotional realm. I can’t imagine creating a set of self-awareness benchmarks, like a handy little list of tick boxes that we can mark off when complete. But we can make sure that we’re providing our students with activities and experiences that address this development.

This set of self-awareness skills comes from the CASEL website. They’ve got a great interactive tool that lays out a full framework for social-emotional learning.

• Integrating personal and social identities
• Identifying personal, cultural, and linguistic assets
• Recognizing and identifying one’s emotions and their impact
• Demonstrating honesty and integrity
• Linking feelings, values, and thoughts
• Examining prejudices and biases
• Experiencing self-efficacy
• Having a growth mindset
• Developing interests and a sense of purpose

As I look at this list, right away ideas for classroom activities, conversations, and stories come to mind. Putting together a social-emotional curriculum could be as simple as sitting down and generating a list of activities that would give students practice working with all of these. CASEL has put together this document that gives sample activities to support the development of some of these core competencies. They even have outlined four different approaches.

1. Free-standing lessons that explicitly teach students skills across the five core competencies.
2. General teaching practices that work towards establishing a classroom and schoolwide culture that supports social-emotional development.
3. Integration of SEL skills with academic curriculum.
4. Establishment of school policies and organizational structures that support SEL.

For the sake of my own planning, I’d like to focus on the first two. I know that I need to work with greater intention towards building my students’ social-emotional skills. Though I’m sure there will be opportunities to integrate this learning into our academic lessons, I’ll allow those moments to arise naturally. It’s the intentional work that I want to focus on.

Social-Emotional Lesson Planning

So let’s start by looking at one of the skills and think about some activities that can help strengthen it. These ideas are inspired by the CASEL chart you can find here. I highly recommend reading through this chart and seeing what ideas come to mind for you and your students.

Recognizing One’s Own Feelings and Thoughts and Their Influence on Behaviors

We want students to be able to state how they’re feeling, what they’re thinking and how these thoughts and feelings impact their behavior. Part of this is understanding that their thoughts and feelings will change, that they have an impact on themselves and others, and that it is possible for behavior to have an effect on emotions (including improving them.)

Lesson Ideas for Recognizing and Articulating Feelings

• Vocabulary work. Make a list of words for the week and let students role-play using the words. Post charts of the vocabulary words—brainstorm lists of emotional vocabulary words with older students. Integrate into academic work by using a thesaurus or dictionary. You can also do word searches and fill-in-the-blank activities.
• Drama. Ask students to act out how they might feel in different situations. You can have the entire class act it out by using only facial features or body language. You can also call on individual students to stand up and act it out using words.
• Reading. Use a piece of literature with a difficult, relatable scenario and have a class discussion about times when students have had similar feelings and how they handled them.
• Art. Have students create a watercolor painting or free-drawing that depicts a particular emotion.
• Class conversations. Ask students to describe a time when they felt a particular emotion. Let students share how they felt and what they did about it. Brainstorm things students can do to improve the way they feel. Create a list of these activities and post them on the wall. Have these conversations as a full class or in small groups.
• Stories. Any Waldorf teacher knows the power of a good story. Find stories and characters that allow you to explore the realm of feelings. Ask students how they would have responded in a similar situation.

Ongoing Teaching Practices

Of course, managing a classroom is much more than creating specific lessons. There are plenty of ways to set up your classroom practices to help students strengthen their ability to recognize and work with emotions.

• Create a space in the room that is dedicated to reflecting and processing feelings.
• Listen and reflect when students talk about their feelings.
• Talk about emotions and the physical and emotional cues that tell us how we’re feeling (“You must be really excited about recess. I can see you’re jumping up and down.”)
• Talk about your own feelings, how you recognize them, and how they influence your behavior.
• Encourage students to journal or draw about their feelings.
• Ask students how they’re feeling and what they can do to change their emotions.
• Encourage pretend play that allows students to explore feelings.

Social-Emotional Learning Recommendations

I imagine coming back to this topic in the future and exploring some of the other core competencies that we want to help our students develop. Until then, here are some recommendations, if you want to learn more.

• Kimochis. This is a website with tools and downloads to aid with social-emotional learning. I can imagine their tools useful for both parents and teachers.
• Responsive Classroom. I’ve been recommending Responsive Classroom for years. Their trainings are fantastic and they’ve got lots of articles, videos, and books to support teachers in developing a healthy classroom culture.
• Teaching Children to Care. By far, my favorite teaching book. I give it to new teachers all the time.
• Fly Five. This is a SEL curriculum I came across in my research that looks pretty good. It reminds me of Responsive Classroom so I think I’ll be taking a closer look. Speaking of which . . .
• They’re offering a free introductory webinar on Tuesday, May 11. It looks like this webinar is an overview of the Fly Five curriculum. I’m excited to learn more.

I hope you’ve found this helpful and that you’ll explore how you can implement some social-emotional learning practices in your classroom. I think we Waldorf teachers sometimes feel that because of our multi-year relationship with our students that we’ve got the social-emotional realm covered. But our students will benefit if we address this area of their learning with direct, intentional instruction.

❓ What social-emotional learning challenges have you faced in your classroom recently? Share in the comments. Let’s learn from each other.