The video below is my favorite commercial right now. If you have a moment, watch the brief clip before you continue with this blog entry.

It’s all fun and games as the two girls giggle when the narrator instructs them to “take a piece of chocolate if you are the tallest” or to “take a piece of chocolate if you love eating your vegetables.” However, the giggles turn to despair when the challenge is to “take a piece of chocolate if you love sharing.” Notice how the girl who’s the best at sharing does what’s natural to her: she shares a piece of chocolate, and they both win. This is a great example showing one part of social-emotional health.

The Collaborative for Academic Social Emotional Learning (CASEL.org) defines social and emotional learning (SEL) as “the process through which children and adults acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.”

Grant Halliburton Foundation’s Thrive Strategy supports schools in developing comprehensive plans for social and emotional learning. Schools are natural environments for developing SEL health. Every day, educators teach students how to increase their awareness of emotions and develop skills in regulating them through goal setting, empathic attitudes, positive relationships, and sound decision making. 

The mission of our Thrive Strategy is to infuse mental health and SEL into the culture of academics. With Thrive, we help school districts plan intentional, strategic practices to support administrators, teachers, students, and families in their SEL development. We know we’re stronger and can accomplish more together, so we brought together several community partners to form integrative layers of SEL programming into schools:

• Okay to Say provides mental health awareness campaigns for districts.

• Grant Halliburton Foundation gives student presentations and adult trainings on mental health, resilience, and suicide prevention.

• Hope Squad is a peer-to-peer program that teaches students to look out for their peers and know how to get them connected to help if they are struggling.

• Communities in Schools of the Dallas Region imbeds a social worker on a school campus to provide social services to students in need.

• Children’s Health School-Based Tele-Behavioral Health Program provides assessments and short-term interventions to students at no cost to the school or the student.

• Rhithm is an SEL app to track student wellness in the classroom and gives teachers, counselors, and administrators the knowledge of how their students are doing daily.

• UTD Center for BrainHealth helps expand curriculum and support teachers through education on brain health.

We’re all on an SEL development journey. SEL learning doesn’t always mean doing more, creating more, or piling more on to already full plates. SEL can happen simply in the way we operate and function in classrooms, playgrounds, living rooms, parks, conference rooms, virtual settings, and all the other places where we interact and connect with people.

Like the two girls in the commercial, when we rely on SEL and know how to empathize and take care of those around us, we get a boost ourselves. If you want to begin the journey and make social and emotional health for your students, staff, and parents a priority at your district, Grant Halliburton Foundation is here for you.

You can learn more about our Thrive Strategy at GrantHalliburton.org/thrive.

By Amy Pool
Thrive Strategy Manager