Social Emotional Learning (SEL) for Primary Education

The Compassion Project was created in partnership with a leading private-label, digital course platform dedicated to delivering a suite of content and services focused on scalability, activation, and multi-medium storytelling for learners from kindergarten through retirement.

This eLearning program was created to provide teachers with the tools they need to teach and reinforce Social Emotional Learning (SEL) concepts such as compassion, empathy, and mindfulness to their second and third grade students. Classroom ready lessons that educators can integrate effortlessly into instruction. The digital portion of this project includes web based games and activities that help teach students skills they’d otherwise not learn in the classroom setting.

This course is a first-of-its kind national initiative to provide compassion education to elementary schools students across the US. The mission is to ensure that every primary school student in the US understands compassion and how to practice it in their lives.

The ethos behind this project is that:

1. compassion can be taught
2. starting young matters
3. technology can help

This course has reached over 400,700 students in 21,907 schools. 91% of the educators said that this course was an easy fit into their curriculum. 3 out of 4 teachers said that this course covered topics that students would not have otherwise seen. The average knowledge increase was 76% after the completion of this course.

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Learners take on the role of a student whose goal is to bring emotional awareness to a group of characters. Each of the 3 modules focus on one emotional skill: compassion, empathy, or mindfulness and each follows a similar flow. Introduction to the concept, the main activity, a final mini activity and conclusion slides to lock in the concept. Each activity was designed and built differently depending on the ultimate message meant for the student. Digital lessons are self-paced or presented to the whole classroom. This gamified approach lets educators teach concepts such as empathy, emotional awareness, and mindfulness in a fun and engaging way.

The Compassion module takes place on a school playground. There are 3 sets of students that appear to be in conflict. It’s up to the player to understand who needs compassion the most.

The Empathy module takes place in between the classroom and recess. The player is asked to look through three different sets of goggles in order to see three different points of view of a conflict that has taken place. It’s up to the player to collect the clues from each point of view in order to see what each person sees and feels about the conflict presented.

The Mindfulness module takes place over the course of one school week. The players start off by selecting the things that stress them out the most. Each day, the player is given specific tasks they need to complete, all while avoiding the “stressors” that roam the hallway and doing their best to stay calm when things get too stressful. The more calm the player is at the end of the day in the game, the better they do.

This course also includes a video wall, where all the lesson videos are stored for students and teachers to rewatch at any time. Each conflict presented allows students to explore and make mistakes but ultimately leads them to resolution. Students are asked to connect these fictional scenarios with personal and real life situations. These connections become building blocks for dealing with real life social conflicts, teaching the students skills necessary for developing emotional connections they would not otherwise learn from a textbook.