Using Invention Education to Support Social-Emotional Learning

Supporting Students’ Social-Emotional Development

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.

Defined by the Collaborative for Academic Learning (CASEL) as the process through which students learn and apply positive goalsetting, understanding and managing emotions, showing empathy for others and making responsible decisions, SEL represents an essential collection of characteristics that today’s students can use and apply throughout their lives.

At the National Inventors Hall of Fame^®, we believe that invention education, learning through the act of hands-on innovation, is the ideal way to learn SEL skills. 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.