By Maren Madalyn, contributing writer
Imagine you are a teacher getting ready to welcome a fresh crop of students to your classroom. You know that among your incoming third graders are three students new to the school. But Javier, Lilya, and Benji are especially unique — they and their families are also immigrant students, brand-new to the United States!
Javier’s family arrived last year from Guatemala. They now live close to Javier’s aunts and uncles, as well as family friends they grew up with in their home country. Lilya’s family fled to the U.S. two years ago to escape war, partnering with a refugee resettlement agency to find permanent housing and jobs. Benji is the latest arrival, coming from Thailand only months ago after his father began working for a U.S.-based company.
Your school hosted welcome meetings with each family and translators to learn about their children’s needs and share bilingual resources about basic school expectations like attendance. Each student will also receive additional resources, including enrollment in English-Learner programs and math interventions for Javier and Benji specifically.
But as their teacher, you recognize that academic content is only half of their learning. You know that a safe environment, a positive classroom community, and social emotional learning (SEL) will be just as essential for these newcomers. More importantly, you know that strong relationships with their families are necessary to build these core competencies.
Let’s explore why SEL for newcomers like Lilya, Benji, and Javier matters, and how educators like you can collaborate with families to craft social-emotional support for all newcomers, be they refugee or immigrant families.
SEL for newcomers: An excellent strategy for student wellbeing
SEL is also called “life skills” and refers to how students (and adults) cultivate capabilities that help them thrive in the world. According to CASEL, these valuable skills contribute to:
- Developing healthy identities
- Managing emotions
- Achieving personal and collective goals
- Feeling and showing empathy for others
- Establishing and maintaining supportive relationships
- Making responsible and caring decisions
Research reinforces the value of intentional programs designed to cultivate students’ SEL skills as early as preschool and kindergarten. Among the many benefits of these programs are:
- Improved classroom behavior
- Improved attitudes towards oneself and others
- Gains on standardized testing scores and other academic outcomes
- More positive relationships with peers
- Increased likelihood of obtaining stable employment in adulthood
SEL also offers benefits to educators and the school setting as a whole. In fact, social-emotional well-being is one of the critical components to a whole child education, which research demonstrates can not only improve learning outcomes but also cultivates a positive school climate. SEL skills also support student mental health by equipping students with various stress management and calm-down practices.
For newcomer students, the impact of SEL is even greater.
Families who recently moved to the U.S. often navigate immense changes in cultural norms and expectations regarding education that might vary tremendously from their countries of origin. Newcomers may also need to learn a new language in order to access basic resources to help them settle into their new home.
On top of potential language and culture shock, many immigrant and refugee families also carry experiences of trauma, either from childhood or more recently. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have the potential to disrupt students’ growth and even affect outcomes later in adult life, including addiction rates, substance use, and other risky behaviors.
Life skills development — especially when offered through a trauma-informed lens — can be just the support that refugee or immigrant students need. Core competencies such as responsible decision-making, self efficacy, positive thinking, relationship skills, perspective taking, and many more form a culture of respect that connects students with one another and to the school community at large.
These educator testimonials underscore that the investment of time and effort into SEL for newcomers (and really, all students) is well worth it:
Why engaging newcomers’ families ensures SEL succeeds
In the classroom, there are certain practices that best help school staff set the stage for successful SEL for newcomers. Tan Huynh summarizes several frameworks for teachers to consider as they develop instructional practices to integrate SEL with other curricular requirements. For example, storytime or story-based lessons in elementary school can both cultivate competencies like empathy and problem-solving alongside fundamental literacy such as vocabulary development.
Another educator, Monisha Bajaj, shared four examples of strategies to build a welcoming environment for newcomer students in her 2022 Edutopia article:
- Understanding who students are: Bajaj encourages teachers to track notes about each student as they learn about their families, home country, and more throughout the school year. These notes are useful to reference ahead of parent-teacher conferences to start on a positive, trusting note with families.
- Making students feel welcomed: The Newcomer Toolkit guide from the U.S. Department of Education is an excellent resource for unique strategies to set up a welcoming learning environment for kids of all backgrounds.
- Adopting a trauma-informed approach to classroom activities: As alluded to in this blog, trauma-informed strategies are designed to minimize reactivating students and create a safe space for them to grow. Adopting these methods into instructional practices and classroom-based social-emotional support is highly beneficial for newcomers.
- Engaging newcomer families: Healthy, meaningful relationships with families means focusing on building trust and ensuring families’ basic needs are met is one way to kickstart the process. As Bajaj puts it, “Families invest their time and energy in school as a pathway to a better future; as educators, it is our duty to ensure that students have every opportunity to learn, thrive, and succeed.”
And educators need families on their team to fulfill this duty!
If you’re at all familiar with ParentPowered, then you know how important family engagement is for student success. Research indicates that when families have trusting relationships with educators, it boosts everything from academic achievement to attendance rates to a positive school climate. Students’ life skills development is no exception.
That’s why each of the frameworks behind our family engagement programs includes a domain specifically focused on cultivating social, life, and emotional skills, from birth all the way through high school.
For helpful resources to help teachers promote SEL for newcomers and English language learners generally, explore Colorín Colorado’s comprehensive guide and resources.
3 tips for effective home-school collaborations around newcomers’ SEL
It’s clear that newcomer parent and caregiver engagement is critical to boost SEL. But practically speaking, how do educators partner with caregivers from different cultural backgrounds to nurture life skills in their children? ParentPowered offers three approaches for school teams to cultivate collaborative relationships with their refugee and immigrant families.
1. Focus on caregiver and student strengths
In her latest version of the Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School Partnerships, Dr. Karen Mapp specifies that one of the essential conditions for successful engagement is an assets-based approach. Also referenced as a strengths-based approach, it emphasizes putting “the strengths and resources of people, communities, and their environments — rather than their problems and pathologies — at the center of the helping process.”
In practice, focusing on strengths is all about creating access points for newcomer immigrants or refugees to build their confidence and utilize their existing skill sets to drive both academic and social-emotional learning.
Importantly, this approach gives educators an opportunity to cultivate trust while building relationships with newcomers, who face unique hurdles as they enter into a school community.
ParentPowered’s family engagement curriculum is designed from a strengths-based perspective. Each activity is accessible for families of all cultural and language backgrounds. Examples such as these activities below enable multilingual students and caregivers to take advantage of materials readily available in most homes, resources in their neighborhoods, and even their own experiences to grow social and emotional skills.
To learn more about strengths-based family engagement practices, explore these recent articles:
2. Use culturally-responsive communication and engagement strategies
The language that educators use with families and students holds immense influence. When working with newcomer families, it is especially important for educators to be aware of their words and to ensure information is as clear as possible. Taking a culturally-responsive approach to communication can greatly aid teachers and school staff.
For example, terms like “mental health” may be activating or hold negative connotations for some families. A teacher may want to use a phrase like “student wellbeing” when offering additional resources to a student and their caregivers to build SEL strategies for healthy stress management.
Of course, cultural responsiveness can guide so much more than just family communication. From highlighting families’ backgrounds as part of academic lesson plans, to hanging visuals around campus that celebrate cultural or linguistic diversity, educators can create a welcoming environment for their newcomers that honors cultural nuances found within the community.
Explore our step-by-step guide to culturally responsive family engagement or read our recent article about tailoring family engagement for refugees and immigrants.
3. Adopt a trauma-informed approach to whole-family SEL
As explored earlier, trauma can leave long-lasting effects on a student’s ability to thrive as they grow up. When educators embrace a trauma-informed approach, using tools such as the protective factors framework to guide school procedures and more, they give students and families a leg up in overcoming these effects.
And is anyone surprised that, among the five factors known to reduce harm caused by trauma, is the social and emotional competence of children?
But SEL isn’t just invaluable for students. Building parental resilience and parents’ knowledge of child development and parenting are also critical protective factors. For newcomer parents, resilience is especially important to help them navigate a myriad of major changes with relocating a new country.
But SEL isn’t just invaluable for students. Building parental resilience and parents’ knowledge of child development and parenting are also critical protective factors. For newcomer parents, resilience is especially important to help them navigate a myriad of major changes with relocating a new country.
Extending trauma-informed resources on social and emotional wellbeing to the adults in a student’s life helps ensure that the home environment can promote all of these factors. That’s why ParentPowered’s programs always include tips specifically focused on the caregiver, offering stress management strategies to build self-awareness, nurture supportive relationships, and simply breathe deeply as a form of parental self care.
Get inspired by the Montana Migrant Education Program’s collaboration with ParentPowered to bring trauma-informed support to immigrant families across the state.
Cultivate successful SEL for newcomers with ParentPowered
It takes a village to raise a child and cultivate those critical SEL skills for their future success. In our increasingly diverse school communities, that village relies on parental involvement from newcomers, bringing their insights and strengths to the table. When families, schools, and local community partners collaborate together around mental, social, and emotional learning, all students have the opportunity the thrive
Looking for high-impact social-emotional learning resources to set your newcomer families and students up for successful SEL? Join an upcoming info session to discover why ParentPowered is beloved by caregivers and educators alike.
About the author
Maren Madalyn has worked at the intersection of K12 education and technology for over a decade, serving in roles ranging from counseling to customer success to product management. She blends this expertise with fluid writing and strategic problem-solving to help education organizations create thoughtful long-form content that empowers educators.
