Exposure to traumatic experiences in childhood is more frequent than uncommon and can have a significant impact on the development and social-emotional health of children and adolescents. A recent national study revealed that approximately 34 million children in the United States had experienced at least one of nine adverse childhood experiences…

There is a growing demand for equal support of social-emotional learning across the globe. In the United States, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning has shed significant light on the power of affective development for school-aged children, indicating that, without it, students are limited in their ability to reach their…

In this article, Michelle DeMeulenaere discusses social/emotional learning (SEL), with a focus on helping preschool children gain knowledge about feelings and getting along with others. SEL is the process in which children are able to acknowledge and recognize the emotions of others, develop empathy, make good decisions, establish friendships, and…

There is a current push to broaden the educational agenda by integrating social and emotional learning (SEL) competencies into the academic curriculum. This article describes how physical education (PE) provides a strong platform for integrating SEL standards into the curriculum. The alignment between SEL and the affective learning objectives of…

Attending to the academic and social/emotional developmental needs of students has and continues to be a significant challenge for teachers and relatively little research examining the impact of teacher empathy exists. Empathy is an important skill for educators to facilitate the creation of a positive learning environment with students and…

Children's and adolescents' cognitive, affective, and behavioral states of engagement enhance or impede enjoyment of, and performance with, educational games. We propose a comprehensive model of engagement states and apply it to research on educational game development and research on the role of various aspects of engagement on game play and…

Through reflection on his years as an enrichment teacher in Schoolwide Enrichment Model (SEM) programs, the author describes significant ways the social and emotional development of his students was shaped by their involvement in enriched teaching and learning. Through portraits of his students engaged in Type II and Type III enrichment, the…

Joint attention involves the organization of attention between oneself, an object or event, and another person with the purpose of sharing interest. Simply put, joint attention requires a child to "socially coordinate the attention with other people." This initiating of joint attention (as opposed to responding to joint attention) is particularly…

Some children, for all manner of reasons, struggle to make friends and fit in socially. "What's the Buzz?" is a unique sixteen-lesson social skills enrichment programme designed to explicitly teach children how to think and relate to others in social situations. This lively, highly practical role-play and play-based programme targets everyday…

This article contains specific planning, partnering, and performing techniques for fully integrating dancers with special needs into a dance pedagogy program. Each aspect is discussed within the context of the domains of learning. Fundamental partnering strategies are related to each domain as part of the integration process. The authors recommend…

Over the past eight years, the author has had the pleasure of facilitating discussion groups with gifted middle and high school students. These groups focus on affective concerns, giving students the opportunity to talk about issues they have in common and how life looks and feels through the lens of giftedness. The best school situation for…

Teachers of infants need a large bunch of key ideas and activities of all kinds to unlock in each child the treasures of loving kindness, thoughtful and eloquent use of language, intense active curiosity to learn, willingness to cooperate, and the deep desire to work hard to master new tasks. Teachers can tune in to each child's special…

Philosophical and psychological opinion is divided over whether moral sensitivity, understood as the ability to pick out a situation's morally salient features, necessarily involves emotional engagement. This paper seeks to offer insight into this question. It reasons that if moral sensitivity does draw significantly on affective capacities of…

In this article, the authors talk about the importance of soft skills for hard-core technical professionals. In many technical professions, the complete focus of education and training is on technical topics either directly or indirectly related to a career or discipline. Students are generally required to master various mathematics skills,…

The social-cognitive problem-solving approach is presented as a means for ensuring social and affective development of handicapped and nonhandicapped children in public schools. A television-based instructional format to facilitate children's social and affective development is described, and an actual example of a television-based instructional…