Decisions, Decisions: Thoughts about Integrating Social and Emotional Learning Opportunities in the Language Classroom
By: Heather Kretschmer
Imagine the following scenario in a second-grade classroom:
Charlotte Schollmeyer recently started working with a group of seven- and eight-year-old English Language Learners in the US. She was subbing for their regular teacher who was on leave until the end of the school year, which meant she’d be working with these students for another five months. The children were beginning to warm to her, and all seemed to be going pretty well.
“Mrs. Schollmeyer, can we use the virtual reality headsets today?” asked one of the kids eagerly.
Charlotte glanced over at the station with the class set of virtual reality (VR) headsets. When giving her a tour of the school, the principal had proudly informed her that each classroom was equipped with VR headsets, and teachers were using them to give the children additional social and emotional learning (SEL) opportunities. The VR headsets in Charlotte’s room were currently set up with a story designed to help the children train their empathy skills. When the children wore the VR headsets, they were immersed in a fairy tale, interacted with different characters, and experienced the virtual world from each character’s point of view. Since the story was in English, it was also a good practice opportunity for the kids to develop their language skills.
However, Charlotte was hesitant about using virtual reality to help the children learn empathy. While she certainly wasn’t adverse to having students use technology in the classroom, she still had a lot of questions about using this tech to develop empathy. But the children seemed to really like using the VR headsets, and some of the other teachers at her school were very much on board with using them as supplemental SEL opportunities. What should Charlotte do?
Let’s pause Charlotte’s tale for a moment and briefly examine what social and emotional learning is.
Social and Emotional Learning (SEL)
According to the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), an organization in the United States, social and emotional learning (SEL) is a key part of our development as humans (link). SEL is not merely relegated to classroom learning but takes place in other domains as well, including at home and in the local community, and covers five broad areas of competencies (link):
- Self-Awareness: How we see and understand ourselves
- Self-Management: How we regulate our emotions and behavior to reach goals
- Social Awareness: How we understand other people and empathize with them
- Relationship Skills: How we connect with other people, including building and maintaining relationships with them
- Responsible Decision-Making: How we make informed, thoughtful, and intentional choices that take into account the potential impact of these choices on ourselves and others
SEL is a process that begins in childhood and continues into adulthood. In our more podcast episode, educator Wendy Turner encourages teachers to show our students what SEL is through our own behaviors and interactions with other people:
[I]t starts with modeling the competencies we wish to see in our students every single day. It means looking deep inside ourselves and identifying what we are good at and what we need to work on, and engaging in that work right before our students’ eyes.
In the podcast episode, Wendy Turner explains each of the five competencies and describes classroom experiences in which she authentically modeled SEL for her students, for example, how she cooled down after a heated discussion with an irate colleague who unexpectedly barged into her classroom. She also gives practical advice on ways teachers can naturally weave SEL into learning opportunities in and outside the classroom.
Back to Charlotte’s VR Headset Dilemma
Charlotte wondered if having the children using VR headsets would be a wise choice to help them develop empathy. On the one hand, having students experience a story on VR headsets could be a playful, no-stakes way for them to interact with virtual characters who have different perspectives and goals. Is that any different from learning about other people’s perspectives by reading or listening to stories? On the other hand, isn’t SEL about developing a deeper understanding of ourselves and others, and learning how to interact with real people in a way that is respectful and empathetic? Perhaps real interactions and conversations with peers, family members, and teachers is a more appropriate way to help students develop social and emotional competencies.
The VR headset scenario with Charlotte illustrates one of the many decisions teachers are faced with making every day. Through the choices we make for our classes, we can model for students what responsible decision-making looks like. That said, if the use of VR headsets to train SEL skills is mandated by Charlotte’s school, then she has no choice but to use them. Even so, if she’s skeptical of using VR headsets as supplementary SEL opportunities, perhaps she still has some leeway in how often she allows her students to use them. In addition, maybe she’s able to offer an alternative for students who don’t like using the headsets or react poorly when using the headsets. The tasks she has students do before and after VR activities may also give students a better overall experience.
The Reality of VR in SEL Contexts
If you assumed that using VR headsets to help children develop their social and emotional competencies is far off in the future, think again. The scenario with Charlotte and her students was inspired by the work of Ekaterina Muravevskaia, a human-computer interaction scientist, who conducted research on this topic during her graduate studies (link). Muravevskaia collaborated with other grad students and children to create a VR empathy game, which was tested with elementary school children. The researchers found that the children reacted to the VR empathy game in similar ways as they would with humans. While some children understood the characters’ emotional states and tried to help them, others experienced the characters’ emotions themselves and at times even stopped playing the VR game because of negative emotions coursing through them. Still other children preferred to focus on the VR environment rather than on their interactions with the characters. Therefore, Muravevskaia believes VR empathy games could be used to augment current SEL practices in schools, but not replace them. To her credit, she asks tough questions to which there are currently no answers:
Should VR characters express emotions at full intensity, or should we tone them down for sensitive children? If children treat VR characters as real, how do we make sure those lessons carry to the playground or dinner table? And with headsets still costly, how do we ensure empathy technology doesn’t widen digital divides? (link)
Virtual reality is not only being used to support elementary school children as they develop social and emotional competencies. It’s also being used with adolescents and adults in a wide variety of contexts, for example, helping Malaysian adolescents regulate their emotions (link), and helping new managers in American companies learn how to give critical feedback to underperforming employees (link).
Takeaways
Should teachers run for the hills, screaming, “Save me from SEL VR?”
No.
Should teachers blindly jump on the SEL VR bandwagon?
Nope.
Instead, teachers must think carefully about their learners’ needs and desires and make careful decisions about how they can best support their social and emotional learning so that language learning can occur. This is equally true for people in leadership capacities in educational contexts. Before paying a lot of money for a SEL program or SEL technology and then forcing it on teachers and students, administrators and program directors need to consider whether it might be better to let their highly-trained teachers decide themselves how to integrate SEL into their classroom culture.
No matter whether we teach children or adults, with or without tech, I believe it is important that teachers deeply engage with social and emotional learning. Self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making are not nice “add-ons” in learning. They are the foundation of learning, necessary for our students’ growth and our own personal growth. Read on to discover the myriad ways our Think Tank authors have experienced and integrated SEL inside and outside the language classroom.
Heather Kretschmer has been teaching English for over 20 years, primarily in Germany. She earned degrees in German (BA & MA) and TESL (MA) from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Currently, she teaches Intermediate English and Business English at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany.