Social-emotional Learning through Play activities for adolescents

Nikhit, am I right to assume that the developmental tasks of standing out, fitting in, measuring up and taking hold are fundamentally social and emotional by nature? Yeah, Carly. If you think back a few weeks to when we first talked about social and emotional learning, we talked about it as the development of the skills, competencies, values and perspectives that are important for success in life in. Work in studies and play and those skills and competencies are important for adolescence as well, so if you think about adolescence, the four main developmental tasks, or require adolescence to have social, emotional, and cognitive skills and be able to use them.

Emotional skills, like being able to identify the emotions of others, an understand how they affect us and how we affect them. Social skills like making friendships and relationships and keeping them and cognitive skills like. Understanding how to bring in a lot of different information and make decisions based on that information, but what’s more important during adolescence is that it’s not just about learning those skills, it’s about understanding the values and perspectives that affect how, when, and why we use those skills. Adolescents need to understand what they value and what the society and community around them values, but also their own perspectives, their identity, and how that affects how, when, and why. They use those skills.

So what does this mean for us as adults as parents or caregivers or educators? So I think there are a couple of things for us to think about first of all, and this was definitely true for me. As an adolescent. I did not like being told what to do, what to learn, what I was missing in some sense, and so similar for the adolescents like we work with and live with it might not be very successful to tell them that they are lacking certain skills. Rather, I think it’s important for us to work with them to understand what skills they want to build.

And what’s meaningful for them and what this means for us as adults is that we’re slowly shifting roles from instructing adolescents about the skills they need to learn to facilitating adolescence experiences while they’re learning while they’re trying to find meaning in the different experiences that they’re going through with social and emotional learning. What facilitation means is that we’re keeping an eye on the end goal where adolescents want to go, but we’re also helping them navigate different parts in getting to that end goal, that might mean finding different opportunities for them to learn using creativity, using different learning styles and methods, and also helping them navigate disagreements or things they don’t understand when they get confused.

So in the next step, what we have is a short survey whether you’re a teacher or a parent or a facilitator, you have different levels of experience working with and living with adolescence. Take a look at the survey and fill it out and reflect on your own experience. Experiences working with adolescents.