Soéle: A Tool for Teachers to Evaluate Social Awareness in Their Learning Designs

Abstract

Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) has been found to positively affect academic performance and student behaviour. Nevertheless, the consideration of SEL is regularly omitted from teachers’ learning design processes. Soéle is a web-based application aiming to facilitate teacher inclusion of SEL-oriented components to their lessons – with an initial focus on fostering student social awareness competencies. Soéle functions as an interactive evaluation form that allows educators to quickly and easily evaluate their learning designs and, with the help of data analytics, receive suggestions on how to improve their learning designs from a SEL perspective. Further, Soéle offers a feedback form through which students can share their impressions of the SEL tasks. This student-teacher feedback loop encourages teacher reflection and aims to establish a habit of keeping SEL skills in mind when developing new learning designs.