SEL Guide

Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) helps children and adults build the skills to understand and manage emotions, develop empathy, form healthy relationships, make responsible decisions, and pursue positive goals. For educators, these skills are essential to managing stress, building strong connections, and creating classrooms where students feel safe, supported, and ready to learn.

This guide helps educators strengthen their own social and emotional skills and apply them to their practice. It introduces the Mood Meter, a core RULER tool, and shows how it can be used to build emotional intelligence through recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing, and regulating emotions.

Written by Marc Brackett and Karen Niemi, this guide draws on decades of leadership in emotional intelligence and SEL. Marc Brackett is founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, a professor in the Yale Child Study Center, author of Permission to Feel, and lead developer of RULER. Karen Niemi is executive director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and former president and CEO of CASEL.