Social and Emotional Learning Skills Strategy Packet

When utilizing storytelling to teach a social or emotional learning skill, the teacher identifies a personal event from within their life in order to illustrate a particular skill or competency. For example, a teacher may tell of a time when they felt shy about meeting new people, and how they navigated the feeling and the situation. Storytelling can be utilized for two purposes:

1. To teach students how to embrace a particular skill or competency (i.e., how to initiate a conversation or how to share a toy)
2. To normalize uncomfortable feelings or experiences (i.e., sharing an experience that made the teacher mad or sad and letting the child know that it’s normal to be mad/sad.)

Storytelling is most effective when it leverages a strong relationship between teacher and student(s). With a strong relational foundation, students are likely to be very invested in the stories of their teachers and are likely to internalize the messages.

Storytelling can be used for any social or emotional learning objective, but it is especially valuable to use while teaching skills or competencies that can be viewed as challenging, such as emotional regulation, transitioning from one place or activity to another, or resolving conflicts.

Whole Group: This strategy is effective in whole-group settings, especially when introducing a lesson or addressing a need common to the majority of the class.

One-on-One: Storytelling can be very valuable one-on-one because it’s possible to address specific individual student areas of growth. Additionally, one person’s story often leads to another person’s story, and in a one-on-one setting it’s possible to engage in reciprocal storytelling in order to share experiences and thought processes around a particular skill or competency.