This is Part I of a three-part series on Real SEL. Part II will address how one develops SEL skills and Part III will tackle how one retains those skills under a variety of circumstances.

The answer depends on whom you are asking. An administrator might respond with, “SEL is a school curriculum on specific course material for teaching social and emotional skills.”  A parent might state,” SEL is a program for helping my child build and maintain friendships.”  A teacher might define SEL as “a class held once a week for students to learn to self-monitor and self-manage their internal feelings.”  A researcher might describe SEL as “a set of tools for improving the learning environment.”  A psychologist might get very specific and say the following, “Emotion has a substantial influence on the human cognitive processes in humans, including perception, attention, learning, memory, reasoning, and problem-solving.  Emotion also facilitates encoding and helps to speed the retrieval of information efficiently” (Chai Tyng, Fafeez Amin, et. al, 2017).  Or, a curriculum developer might describe SEL as, “a set of activities for improving character development or developing a conscience.”  Business writers Cooper and Swarf (1997) might define SEL as, “a set…