HOMEROOM VS. SEL

Which one do students need?

Right now, every Monday, we have SEL time. SEL stands for Social Emotional Learning. It is a time required by the district to help students with being social and with their mental health. Character Strong is the curriculum teachers use during these 30 minutes of valuable class time. But, is this really helping students? Let’s talk about SEL time and a good replacement for it.

First, let’s break down SEL. Social Emotional Learning is a time set apart every monday. During this time, teachers use the Character Strong curriculum to help students learn about their emotions. They learn about keeping courage, how to deal with sadness, and who they look up to. But, why does everyone think it is bad then? Well, let’s get into our interviews with students. I interviewed our student body and was able to get down to three points. One, it is very repetitive. Many SEL lessons are very similar, and use the same starting and end. Two, it is a waste of class time. Many students have work to do! They need the class time to talk with their teacher or get homework done. Three, it is boring. Many students are forced to socialize when they just want to talk to people they know.

The lessons are also not very interesting and don’t give students many reasons to even listen.

So, this lesson time obviously isn’t working very well. If you walk into any 3rd period class during SEL time, you may find disengaged students, students doing other work, or the class not even doing SEL time! So we sent out an anonymous survey to the teachers at our school to find out what they think about SEL time.

The responses were as expected. 37% of our teachers responded that they think SEL needs to be replaced with something else, for a variety of reasons. Some think it’s not relateble, others think that time can be better used elsewhere. Let’s talk about one option that many people agreed would be a good idea.

The lessons aren’t very good. They always drag on too long, and half of the students can’t even relate to what is being said. This leads to 0 impact.

BY CRISTINA MARTIN

Why is Homeroom a good option instead?

Homeroom time/ periods are used to make announcements, conduct general administrative tasks, and do activities. Homeroom is often a safe space for students to open up and be in a judgment free zone. This time of period is usually used as well to make sure students have an understanding with the school’s expectations and objectives for its students. Recommending curriculum and other various things can be a good use for the time homeroom would be presented with.

Homeroom can be used as a time and a room without academic rating and can be a place for students to experience academic success and have a supportive home base environment. Homerooms can present ideas and have activities to do in a more proactive manner. It can be time for students to plan with teachers, someone to ask general questions to, and time for the teachers to check up and make sure all of their students are OK. It’s a very multi use time, and is way more time effective that SEL ever would be.

65% of teachers at our school want a homeroom period. Many of them think it would be a good idea, and all of them agree with the activities and plans of what they would do that I listed above. So, why not. Maybe it’s time to convince the district to replace SEL with the better alternative, Homeroom.