As a teacher, your training may have focused more on academia than teaching social skills. Now in the classroom, you face the challenge of implementing Social Emotional Learning (SEL) to help children build the Social Emotional Skills needed to be “ready to learn.” But how can you embed SEL skill-building into existing classroom routines and lesson plans with efficiency? How do you know if your efforts are working? How do you make adjustments? We all want to support student learning from a position of safety, responsiveness, inclusion, and connectedness. Strong social emotional skills, including our own, provide the foundation. In this article, we will navigate through the skills we as teachers need, social emotional learning activities that can make a difference, and assessments that can show if we are on track. Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Emotional Intelligence Exercises for free. These science-based exercises will enhance your ability to understand and work with your emotions and will also give you the tools to foster the emotional intelligence of your clients, students, or employees.