Creative SEL: Using Hands-On Projects to Boost Social-Emotional Learning

By Michele Haiken and Mark Gura

This collection of creative lessons offers ideas for integrating design thinking, literacy and STEAM to drive SEL skills including self-awareness, self-management, mindfulness, responsible decision-making and social awareness.

Research shows that creativity can be beneficial for mental health and can help build critical skills such as empathy and introspection, while social-emotional learning (SEL) is an integral part of education and human development.

This book bridges these two ideas with a series of creative projects that foster SEL learning by promoting growth mindset, supporting mindfulness, offering ways to cope with anxiety and stress, and encouraging and guiding positive social activism.

Opening with an overview of research behind the integration of SEL and creativity, the book then features a variety of lessons based on the above themes, illustrating how to deepen SEL by integrating the arts and STEAM learning in creative and authentic ways. The activities are drawn from the work of the authors and a diverse group of educator contributors to provide engaging, insightful and culturally responsive learning opportunities appropriate for traditional or online/blended learning environments.

The book:

• Highlights a diverse array of educators, innovators and design-thinkers who share their insights on SEL, STEAM and creativity.
• Offers an accessible and fun approach to teaching SEL, which is critical to education and human development.
• Guides teachers in implementing the following ISTE Standards for Students: Creative Communicator, Innovative Designer and Knowledge Constructor.

This book invites teachers to consider a variety of formats — print and digital, audio, video games and more — and shows how helping students become creators and design-thinkers can foster SEL.

Audience: K-12 educators

• Language: English
• Publisher: International Society for Technology in Education
• Release date: Mar 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781564849502

Michele Haiken

Michele Haiken (@teachingfactor) is an English teacher at Rye Middle School in Rye, New York, and an adjunct professor at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York. She’s a frequent speaker and has written or co-written multiple ISTE books, including Creative SEL, New Realms for Writing and Personalized Reading. For Gamify Literacy, Haiken collaborated with a range of game and literacy experts, including top game developers, teachers, librarians and technology coordinators.

Book preview

Considerations for Teaching Social-Emotional Learning

This book’s approach to teaching SEL themes focuses on supporting students so they’re able to reflect on themselves and their relationship to the world. Research shows that students’ learning is impacted by their environment and emotional states. If a student feels anxious or threatened, they will struggle to learn. The activities in this book—and the background information provided to understand them—will enable teachers to easily, effectively, and meaningfully engage their students in SEL. It does not offer indoctrination in political beliefs and positions or take positions on partisan social issues.

Further, we have avoided including trendy ideas about self-discovery and holistic care. In these pages, we offer activities and goals that are the result of many years of experience of working directly with students. Mark has spent more than 45 years in education, and Michele has been teaching for more than a quarter of a century. We are both still teaching in the classroom (in person and remotely) today. We have used many of the activities in this book with our own students to foster learning, curiosity, and creativity.

Importantly, in organizing this book we have chosen activities that fit into the existing instructional organization and culture of the class and school. These activities do not require that teachers and students take on new and foreign practices, reorganize themselves in ways that are challenging to the schedule, or locate and use a special physical space. In this sense, these activities are good to go or can easily be adapted by the teacher for an even better fit to their unique classroom.

Creativity and SEL

The title of this book is Creative SEL, and creativity is key to the activities in its pages. Creativity excites the spirit; it is a way of thinking, of responding, and of expressing oneself. When focused on a particular theme, creativity can foster insight and reveal meaning. It is strongly associated with feelings: emotions spur creativity, and the creative act is associated with a salutary state of mind. It is common to feel curious, fascinated, inspired, and highly pleased while engaged in a creative activity. In short, creative activities are fertile ground in which to plant the seeds of SEL.

Henriksen, Richardson, and Sacks (2020) report: There is solid evidence to show a generally beneficial and supportive relationship [between mindfulness and creativity], in that practicing mindfulness can support creativity. Creativity builds empathy and critical introspection: when looking at a creative piece, the viewer is offered a mirror, door, or window into another perspective and another world. Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop coined the term mirror, window, or sliding glass door in the 1990s to explain how people see themselves in texts and learn about others. Newbery Award–winning author Grace Lin gave a TED Talk on The Windows and Mirrors of Your Child’s Bookshelf (2016) with more details about this concept (youtu.be/_wQ8wiV3FVo).

When creating something, the artist reveals something about themselves to others. Research also shows that creativity might be beneficial for mental health. Creative activities are multimodal pursuits, in that they combine many different types of engagement and associated cognitive, behavioral, and emotional responses (Fancourt and Steptoe, 2018). While creativity may involve communication and expression in ways that engage the cognitive dimensions of the mind, it simultaneously appeals to and engages the mind’s affective dimensions.

Creativity resonates with our higher, loftier aspirations and is recognized by humans as being something special. Thus, creative learning experiences are highly engaging, meaningful, and can result in lasting learning. Creativity is a key enabler of problem-solving and is therefore something all students should develop. From the perspective of the Universal Design for Learning framework, creativity can be seen as a pathway to social-emotional learning; by engaging the affective network, the student has a more complete and varied learning experience and may be enabled to learn when other approaches may not work.

Creative communication activities can focus students on important facets of literacy that they can learn in tandem with STEAM content and life skills. Access to a broad range of digital resources can support and facilitate this, while making the use of technology more relevant for students and providing focus and context for learning technology skills.

Creative projects are engaging, give students a focus for reflection, and help students associate a feeling of inspiration and satisfaction with their learning experience. Creativity is not simply doing something with materials associated with the arts; this book offers a far deeper level of creative work: the activities found in this book are intended to foster creativity and creative communication across the curriculum, illustrating and modeling for students how creativity can manifest itself in a broad variety of human activities, especially those not commonly thought of in that way.

While these activities are focused on fostering students’ awareness of self, society, and the world around them, they also support the development and expansion of students’ creative abilities, so that they learn skills required for creative endeavors and at the same time, apply those skills to important, standards-based subject area content.

Creativity, Technology, and ISTE Standards

Creativity comes in all shapes and forms. Although creativity has traditionally been associated with the arts, including painting, theater, poetry, ceramics, and photography, it has been broadened and enhanced by technology, which provides digital platforms and tools that offer new possibilities for communicating images, sound, and story. In this book, we offer projects and activities that are creative in the traditional sense of painting, collage, illustration, photography, theater, and poetry, and we have also incorporated technology-based creative activities, including infographics, digital storytelling, multimedia mashups, and podcasts. The activities include options that are low-tech to no-tech, while also offering adaptations that use technology tools and platforms. For example, in the Who Am I? Body Biography Posters activity, students might create their poster by physically drawing it, or they might create their poster digitally using an illustration tool such as Google Drawings, Canva, or Adobe Express (formerly Adobe Spark).

The ISTE Standards

We want our students to use technology in meaningful ways that will enhance creativity while at the same time supporting their social-emotional learning. The ISTE Standards are a set of competencies that provide a roadmap for the effective use of technology in schools. The student section of the ISTE Standards addresses learner empowerment, digital citizenship, knowledge construction, innovative design, computational thinking, creative communication, and global citizenship. (You can learn more about all the ISTE Standards at iste.org/iste-standards.)

FIGURE I.2 The student section of the ISTE Standards describes seven different categories of skills and qualities students need to develop to thrive in a connected, digital world.

The activities in this book encompass many of the skills and knowledge described in the ISTE Standards for Students. As students leverage technology to demonstrate their learning and explore emerging technology, they adopt the role of Empowered Learners (ISTE Student Standards 1.1c and 1.1d). As they make meaningful learning experiences for themselves and others while selecting digital tools to meet the learning objectives, they adopt the role of Innovative Designers (ISTE Student Standards 1.4a-d) and Knowledge Constructors (ISTE Student Standards 1.3c and 1.d). In addition to using technology options for the learning process, students can also use them to share and showcase their understanding, including with a wider (even global) audience through websites, blogs, podcasts, and digital newsletters. When students share creative projects in this way, publishing and presenting content for their intended audience, they become Creative Communicators (ISTE Student Standards 1.6d). While presenting and sharing the artifacts they produced to represent these creative projects, they practice digital citizenship (ISTE Student Standards 1.2b and 1.2c).

Progressive Learning Connections

The activities in this book are intended to support:

active learning

student collaboration

development of the class and/or school as a creative/reflective community

student voice, choice, and agency

student-centered, student-driven learning

authentic learning experiences with real-world connections

project-based and problem-based learning

critical thinking

Student Voice, Choice, and Collaboration

One of the most powerful approaches to engaging students in learning activities like those offered in this book is voice and choice. When students can choose what they want to study and learn, their interest in the activity understandably increases dramatically. According to eSchool News, Research shows that giving students agency and influence in their learning makes them more engaged and invested in their education. It also empowers them to take control, show initiative, and adopt leadership roles. Giving students voice and choice helps them feel valued, encourages them to realize their interests and potential, and can improve their academic outcomes. The project-based social-emotional learning activities shared in this book offer opportunities for students to showcase their voice and agency through discussion, reflection, and cooperative learning.

Teachers can balance their mandated instructional goals with student interest by offering options within a unit of study. For instance, if the teacher is required to teach the subject of biomes as part of Earth Science, students may be given their choice of which biome to investigate, favoring those things that interest them personally; a student might choose to investigate oceans and coral reefs, and doing so will enable them to gain the content knowledge and insight required by the unit of study. In a very real sense this becomes a win, win, win situation: the teacher covers required areas of study, the student learns the standards-based content while enjoying material that is personally interesting, and the student acquires skills and insights into learning itself. Thus, choice can be a powerful motivating and focusing factor in learning.

Students also want to take an active role in their world. They want to be involved in real things and have their voices heard. Creative projects can offer students a platform from which they may engage with their world and make statements. Students may have the opportunity to present their statement to real audiences and draw reactions and feedback from those audiences as well. For instance, when the student described above finishes their exploration, analysis, and reflection on the biome they’ve chosen, they may produce a short video or narrated slideshow, in which opinions supported by data are presented to their peers at a school assembly. When students know they have the opportunity to make a statement that will be heard, it can bring a highly focusing, motivating, and potentially satisfying new aspect to their learning.

In each of the activities presented in this book, students produce an authentic learning product. The instructional design of the activities embraces voice, choice, and in many of the projects, cooperative learning as key to the learning experience. K–12 Dive reports that collaborative work is a cornerstone of social-emotional learning where students learn how to develop relationship skills. This skill set can include knowing how to resolve conflicts within group settings and learning how to listen, hear, and absorb different perspectives than their own. Students also strengthen their ability to self-regulate. Woven together, these skills can lead to successful and cohesive work as a group (2022). Many of the activities described are collaborative in a variety of ways and we invite the reader to adapt them so that they take advantage of cooperative learning to practice building interpersonal skills.

Project-Based Learning

The activities throughout the book are project-based. They set before the student a challenge to focus and reflect on, and through that process, students can see themselves and the world from a fresh and hopefully deeper and more mature angle. The authors strongly believe that SEL is best taught through project-based learning and active learning, and this book’s activities are intended to be presented to students in project format. Further, the learning products that students create can give them a vehicle to demonstrate what they’ve learned. In the simplest terms, we see learning projects as comprising a challenge; the discovery of information and meaning through working on and satisfying the challenge; and the creation of a product and/or performance, to show what has been