Teacher educators’ reflections on supporting pre-service and early career educators’ social-emotional learning

Social-emotional learning (SEL) is crucial for students’ success, and students can best develop SEL competencies when their teachers explicitly and implicitly teach and model these competencies. However, teachers typically receive relatively little training and support in building their own SEL competencies. This limited training, paired with the stress and emotional labor of teaching, can lead teachers’ own SEL and accompanying well-being to suffer. Here, we share our reflections on supporting pre-service and in-service teachers’ social-emotional learning (SEL). We are two teacher educators who strongly value building SEL competencies, especially among novice teachers, but sometimes struggle with how to do so. We share some of our efforts, initiatives, successes, and setbacks in hopes they may help advance the conversation about SEL in teacher education programs.