Using Invention Education to Support Social-Emotional Learning

Supporting Students’ Social-Emotional Development

Date: February 22, 2021

As our challenges continue to grow ever more complex, so too does the need to collaborate in order to solve them. Across the country, educators have increasingly prioritized social-emotional learning (SEL) strategies as a way of teaching our students to do just that.

At the National Inventors Hall of Fame^®, we believe that invention education, or learning through the act of hands-on invention, is the ideal way to develop essential life skills, including setting positive goals, considering others’ perspectives and needs, and making responsible decisions. This paper explains why we believe this and how educators can implement these ideas in their classrooms.

Highlights include:

• An exploration of why empathy is an essential ingredient to creating impactful inventions.
• Research that explains why collaboration and teamwork will become increasingly important in the workplace.
• Best practices when it comes to implementing an authentic invention education experience.