SEL Resources for Teachers

It’s no secret that teen mental health is a major concern for parents and teachers, especially post-pandemic. Providing opportunities for social-emotional learning (SEL) has become part of every classroom teacher’s job, and yet very few districts are actually training teachers in mental health or providing well-thought-out SEL resources for teachers.

By not taking the time and allocating resources toward training teachers in mental health, districts are putting teachers into positions they are not qualified for, which adds to the burden teachers already feel and fails to accomplish what’s best for our students. When districts don’t provide, at the very least, a library of quality SEL resources for teachers to pull from, we risk taking a haphazard or insultingly repetitive approach that doesn’t feel meaningful to students (at best) or provides inaccurate and harmful information to students (at worst).

Published in February 2023, Lisa Damour’s The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents is one valuable resource for parents and teachers of middle school and high school students, whether read independently or as part of a group (staff or parent book club, anyone?).

Damour, a practicing clinical psychologist, has provided a comprehensive and practical guide that aims to help parents and teachers better support their children or students as they do the hard work of adolescence. While no substitute for actually directly training teachers in mental health practices, Damour’s insights have a lot to teach educators about not only our own classroom management and relationship-building with students but about effective ways to encourage social-emotional learning at our sites.

Key Elements of Good SEL Resources for Teachers

A key premise to Damour’s insights is a correct understanding of the goal: “Mental health is not about feeling good. Instead, it’s about having the right feelings at the right time and being able to manage those emotions effectively” (27). Managing emotions effectively includes both expressing them in a healthy way and knowing when and how to rein them in.

So often, SEL resources for teachers emphasize techniques for stress relief, the dangers of anxiety and depression, and resources for students struggling with suicidal thoughts. These things are good and right; however, they can lead students to the false perception that if they feel bad, they’re doing something wrong. But, as Damour emphasizes repeatedly, being human means experiencing the full range of emotions, including the negative ones.

It is important, then, that any SEL lessons we use at our schools or in our own classrooms teach students about the whole range of emotions and encourage them to express those emotions in healthy ways, regardless of gender identification. Damour devotes an entire chapter to describing the ways in which cultural norms consciously and unconsciously shape the way we respond to emotions in teenagers of different genders and races, and awareness of these shaping influences can directly affect the way we as teachers, and trusted adults, approach and speak to our students.

It is also helpful for students to understand the biology behind what we teach in SEL lessons. Adolescence can feel overwhelming and scary, especially when teenagers don’t understand the massive rewiring going on in their brains and the imbalance between their emotional development and cognitive development (which isn’t complete until around age 25). Not only can understanding the biology help students better understand their own surges of emotion, it provides a basis for discussing things like sleep, technology, journaling, and deep breathing in ways that come across as more palatable to students.

Classroom Management Implications

While the book is largely directed toward parents, Damour emphasizes that “teenagers benefit from having high standards set for their behavior” as well as “clear rules or expectations” (92). Having and enforcing classroom rules is good for our students and, in many ways, protects them from their impulsive selves. As tempting as it may be for us to give up on well-thought-out classroom management in exhaustion, it does benefit our students, whether they fully appreciate it or not.

It’s also important that we don’t avoid conflict but teach our students to engage in constructive conflict. Reading Damour’s book provides a lot of food for thought when it comes to listening to our students and trying to understand the emotions behind their behavior rather than jumping directly to punishment in frustration. And during the busiest times of the school year, it can be tempting to avoid conflict entirely because we just can’t do it anymore, but what our students need most is for us to address our concerns and conflicts with them in calm and constructive ways.

Curriculum Implications

Countering the myth that experiencing difficult emotions is harmful to teenagers, Damour points out that “reading helps to foster empathy . . . build[ing] compassion and the ability to take another person’s perspective,” which “is achieved only when young people become emotionally engaged with what they are reading” (16).

This is good news to us as English teachers (and nowhere close to new information)! When we encourage our students to read about difficult experiences, we are teaching them valuable lessons, and if the texts we select encourage an emotional reaction, even better. Discussion questions and activities that encourage students to take another character’s perspective may seem minimally important when it comes to meeting content standards and preparing students for high-stakes exams, but they can have a powerful impact on emotional development.

Similarly, journaling can be an invaluable way to help students express their emotions on a regular basis, and it may be worth making this part of our routine without worrying about giving grades or credit for it. Research has shown that teenagers (and, you know, humans) often feel better merely by expressing an emotion.

Damour also highlights the need for teenagers to become more precise in the way they express their emotions. We often model and teach this precision when it comes to writing in general or describing characters, and the more we do this, the more it can help our students to develop their understanding and expression of their own emotions in healthy ways.

Damour also offers approaches for students who dislike school, all of which include acknowledging that it’s okay to not like school and that what we ask students to do at school on a daily basis often runs counter to their growing need for independence. Most importantly, we need to remind our students that mental health means not obsessing about top grades and that there is a benefit in doing activities purely for enjoyment rather than as a means to build their resumes to get into college.

Technology Implications

The section on technology was impactful to us in that it made us rethink our attitude toward technology in the classroom. Especially after months of remote learning during the pandemic, there has been a push to get students off computers and interacting in person. This is a good thing, but Damour points out that teenagers often benefit from using technology to communicate; it’s mindless scrolling, not purposeful use, that tends to be more damaging (and teenagers could use far more education on the power of algorithms to manipulate us).

She provides an example of a student who was far more willing to open up about his feelings in a text exchange with his mom than face-to-face, which mirrors our own experience chatting with students on GoGuardian.

Damour also cites music as an essential part of expressing emotion for teenagers (even more so than for adults). We’ve all bemoaned the ever-present white earbuds in our students’ ears, and there are certainly times when those earbuds need to be removed. But this section confirmed for us the value of allowing students to listen to music at appropriate times, like when they are working independently, because it’s doing something for them beyond just providing entertainment or distraction.

Damour’s book is full of practical tips and strategies to help parents and teens communicate more effectively with teenagers as they learn to better navigate their emotions. Unsurprisingly, that includes taking care of our own emotional and mental health so we can be good models for our students. By practicing, not just preaching self-care, we are better equipped to create a safe environment and offer a calming, patient presence in students’ moments of turmoil.

While it may feel like yet another letdown that teachers are scrambling to find their own sources for SEL resources, or searching the Internet for solutions because we are in frustrating or troubling classroom situations, it might be helpful to think of this as part of your own practice of self-care: you are taking steps to create a healthy environment for people and in a place where you spend a great deal of time. (That doesn’t mean passing along the link to this book to your principal, administrator in charge of counseling, or Title One coordinator isn’t merited.) We highly recommend this resource to help you better connect with and support the adolescents who come through your doors each day.

Have you received any training for teachers in mental health? What SEL resources for teachers have you found most helpful? Reach out to us at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works to share or ask questions. And if you’ve read Damour’s book, let us know what insights stood out to you!