Maurice J. Elias

This booklet is about the social-emotional skills students need for success in school and in life. In any classroom in the world, from the simplest, with no walls, to the most elaborate, teachers must get along with students and students must get along with one another if learning is to take place. Social-emotional skills, or ‘emotional intelligence’, is the name given to the set of abilities that allows students to work with others, learn effectively, and serve essential roles in their families, communities and places of work.

Research shows that social-emotional skills can be taught to students and that their presence in classrooms and schools improves academic learning. When academic and social-emotional learning both become a part of schooling, students are more likely to remember and use what they are taught. They also incorporate into their education a sense of responsibility, caring, and concern for the well being of others, as well as themselves. Learning thus can be said to touch both the ‘head’ and the ‘heart’ and the result is classrooms that are run better and students who are more inspired. Academic and social-emotional learning are therefore connected
in every school, worldwide.

Much also has been learned about how to enhance academic and social-emotional learning in ways that are more likely to work well. This booklet gives the principles that have been shown to lead to success. It contains important guidelines for building academic and social-emotional skills, and sections in each chapter on practical
applications that can be brought into classrooms and schools without difficulty. In addition, there is an extensive section on resources, including international resources that are accessible via the Internet.

This booklet has been prepared for inclusion in the Educational Practices Series developed by the International Academy of Education and distributed by the International Bureau of Education and the Academy. As part of its mission, the Academy provides timely syntheses of research on educational topics of international importance. This booklet is the eleventh in the series on educational practices that generally improve learning.