Paradigm Shift in Education: Weaving Social-Emotional Learning into Language and Literacy Instruction.

Paradigm Shift in Education: Weaving Social-Emotional Learning Into Language and Literacy Instruction This paper first outlines some of the challenges students and teachers are facing in schools around the country. These challenges include social issues such as violence, drugs and bulling. This coupled with the fact that many instructional programs follow the cognitive-only model and the current push for standardized testing has had a negative impact on students and teachers. Students who do not feel excited about school and learning in general tend to do poorly academically. Teachers who are unhappy because of the many state and district requirements imposed on them tend to leave the profession. Thus, the goal of this study was to imbed social-emotional leaning (SEL) into a language course. The intent was to investigate how teacher candidates’ understanding of their own emotions impacted how they taught language and literacy to their students. Overall, the findings of this study yielded positive results in that all of the teacher candidates were successful in integrating SEL into the language arts curriculum. They also felt good about themselves and the relationships they built with others. The limitations of this study were due to time constrains and course requirements.