Ask five educators to differentiate between SEL and character education, and you’ll get five different answers, or one shrug of indifference. They are not the same thing, and understanding the difference is essential for any district considering a character education curriculum for K-12 students, because if you have only one of these two things, you have half a strategy.
Two Real Frameworks, Two Real Purposes
Social emotional learning is about teaching skills: self-awareness, self-regulation, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. It teaches students “how” to manage emotions and get along with others. That’s excellent work, and most K-12 schools have made significant investments in it in the last decade.
Character education asks a different question: “who do I want to be, and why?” While SEL provides the “how,” character education is about the “why,” and is focused on moral formation, being honest, courageous, responsible, respectful, and principled, defining what you’re going to do with the emotional skills you’ve gained. As a comparative analysis puts it, character education gives SEL its why. (Greater Good Magazine, UC Berkeley). SEL teaches kids to manage themselves. Character education focuses on what students should do with that power.
This is not to say one is more important than the other, only that one is not a substitute for the other.
Where the Overlap Actually Helps
The two sets of skills overlap in critical ways, and both are aimed at creating well-rounded students who are self-aware, self-led, and make principled and thoughtful decisions. (Greater Good Magazine, UC Berkeley) In fact the creators of the SEL movement made that a specific priority. When they added “responsible decision-making” as the fifth competency of SEL, they were directly acknowledging that students needed more than emotional management; they needed a set of values to inform the better choices they were now able to make. (Greater Good Magazine, UC Berkeley) In that way SEL and character education are complementary, which is helpful because in the end, the two different approaches work toward the same student.
Where the Gap Shows Up
The gap shows up when you think about what it means to be a leader, and whether a student who has mastered the emotional regulation strategies emphasized in SEL, but has never developed a set of principles that can inform those decisions, is actually prepared to function in that leadership role. A gap also appears in a common classroom scenario. A student does a good job managing his frustration, he’s clearly had some solid SEL training, but he cheats on a test when no one is looking, because managing his emotions didn’t give him the internal motivation to be principled in all things.
That’s where a character education curriculum for K-12 schools can plug right in, by giving students that internal motivation, that reason to choose honesty even when it’s inconvenient. Character education encourages students to make decisions, like being honest and principled, not just because they know it’s the right thing, but because it reflects what kind of person they are. (Greater Good Magazine, UC Berkeley)
A school that has outstanding SEL programming but no character framework ends up with students who are prepared to be calm under pressure, but not necessarily prepared to be good under pressure.
Why Great Schools Run Both
Researchers who look at both fields recognize this, and discuss the fields as if they’re two sides of the same coin, necessary to help students become effective and compassionate leaders. (Greater Good Magazine, UC Berkeley) Neither program is able to succeed without the other, and without a supportive school culture, character education and SEL both fail. As the same article mentions, the climate and the character of a school are completely enmeshed with each other. This is why a school needs more than just one solid SEL program, because it requires an entire cultural shift. No single class can do that. It takes a character education program that’s woven throughout the school’s offerings, at every level, that encourages students to make decisions about what kind of people they want to be, and how to use the SEL skills they have to become leaders who change the world.
How iLead Bridges Both
One of the goals of Growing Leaders’ iLead program is to bridge this gap in character education and social emotional learning, by focusing on values while providing the grounding in emotional intelligence and self-regulation that students need to use those values effectively, especially under pressure.
iLead is values-based, students explore honesty, responsibility, courage, and respect, right along with the personal/social skills emphasized by SEL, in a clear progression from elementary school through high school, reinforcing each other along the way. That is what it means to help students lead from the inside out: not just regulated, and not just principled, but both, self-led, values-driven, and ready to turn influence into world-changing action.
Putting Both to Work in Your District
If your district has made a significant investment in SEL, but gaps in integrity continue to appear, particularly when no one is watching, it’s unlikely that more training in emotional regulation is the answer, and more likely that students need a values framework that will help them understand what their SEL skills are for.
Ready to bridge SEL and character education with one values-driven curriculum? Visit growingleaders.com to see how iLead builds a character education curriculum for K-12 schools that is both emotionally grounded and values-based, from kindergarten through graduation.
