Social-Emotional Learning: Self-Awareness

Adult SEL is an integral part of human development – and it is important to remember that our personal development continues throughout our lives.  Which is why I want to remind people that SEL is not only for our students. We need to engage in growing our own SEL competencies, too!

I mean, there is so much new to learn, every day. And if we stop learning, catching up will be hard. Also, the teaching profession is really REALLY a learning profession - so the day when we stop learning is also the day when we need to stop teaching.

While teaching and learning are not the two sides of the same coin - they are literally two extremely different processes - they are closely related to each other in the future-oriented focus of the actions. And while thinking about the future is important, recalling happy memories from the past is an easy way to grow our own self-awareness because it answers some of the important questions like:

• Who am I? Who do I want to become?
• What is important to me?
• How have my interests shifted over the years

The flowers in the image are wood anemones and I have so many wonderful memories of them from my childhood. They were the first wild flowers to bloom in southern Finland - often emerging just before mother's day. Near our summer cabin the flowers covered huge areas in the forest floor, which made picking them so fun and easy - knowing that having a vase full of them would not diminish the beauty of the forest.