Social-Emotional Learning is a crucial part of education and human development. It is how children, young people, and adults acquire and apply their skills and knowledge to develop their personalities and healthy identities. Social-emotional learning is a methodology through which students of all age groups learn to comprehend their emotions better, show empathy for others, and acquire the qualities of self-awareness and self-control. Also, search for the best schools in Bangalore.
These behavioral qualities help students to stay positive, make better decisions, and achieve their goals. It has been found that students with better social-emotional skills cope better with everyday challenges and grow up to lead smoother professional and social lives. Critical thinking is significantly connected to social-emotional learning.
What is Critical Thinking?
Critical thinking is a process of expansive thinking, which enables the thinker to differentiate the truth from the superficial. Critical thinking happens when someone thinks outside the box and challenges the biases. Most of the information around us is made for the masses, but critical thinking helps us filter out the truth from the irrelevant. When students learn this skill, they consider divergent perspectives and compare the strengths of multiple angles to any question or theory.
Critical thinking is a self-regulated process. It is a process of reasoning where an individual makes a judgment by questioning, affirming, correcting, and approving their cognitive activities focused on a particular purpose. Critical thinkers are more curious and have credible information about any topic.
They are flexible, open-minded, and responsible in their decision-making. They tend to dive into the depths of subjects, evaluate different opinions, and investigate every relevant information available. It is an essential mindset that should be developed in students in the classroom. Also, read about admission process of the IGCSE schools in Bangalore.
Relationship between Critical Thinking and Social-Emotional Learning
Critical thinking is a reasoning capacity for emotions. It is reasoning with our feelings and emotions, including our beliefs and actions. Social-emotional learning has five main themes – self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. Each of these themes corresponds to critical thinking. Self-awareness includes examining our biases and prejudices and thinking outside the box.
Social awareness includes identifying social norms and showing empathy and compassion towards them. Responsible decision-making is comparing the positives and negatives with an open mind. Self-management also involves being open to new ideas and opinions.
This establishes that social-emotional learning and critical thinking are deeply connected. Qualities of social-emotional learning are essential for critical thinkers too. Together, they make students think based on reasoning and analytical skills opening their minds to deeper understanding.
Critical Thinking in the Classroom
Critical thinking has been use in education for over 40 years. An essential duty of every educator is to nurture critical thinkers because they can analyze different viewpoints and use their perspectives with open minds to reach reasonable conclusions. Every student in the classroom should be inspired to think critically and question the validity of popular thought.
Only a critical thinker can drive a change in society. Educators should encourage curiosity in students as it is an integral part of critical thinking and social-emotional learning. Curiosity feeds a critical thinker’s mind and nourishes a socially aware person. Encouraging critical thinking and social-emotional learning also helps students learn from each other and develop good coordination and cooperative skills.
Critical thinking strengthens the education process as students can connect their classroom learning with their life experiences and observation. Providing moments of reflection and space to consider various approaches and outcomes can help students become better creative thinkers and problem solvers. This also allows them to be at their full selves in the classroom as they learn and derive great satisfaction in arriving at their conclusions.