Social and Emotional Awareness: Communication Between Peers

Abstract

High school students in Hawai’i lack social and emotional awareness skills when transitioning into adulthood. These students tend to base a lot on what they learn in their home life, interactions at school, relationships with peers, social media, etc. Social and emotional learning (SEL) is an integral part of education and human development. SEL is the process through which all young people and adults acquire the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions (CASEL, 2025). Island Pacific Academy (IPA) wants to help its students by creating an advisory curriculum that can help teach students skills like communication between peers, so that they can then apply them in their everyday lives.

An online course was created about social and emotional awareness, specifically communication between peers. Each lesson focuses on a different overall topic: lesson 1 is communicating within my circle; lesson 2 is communicating outside of my circle; and lesson 3 ties it all together and is about communicating professionally. An online course introducing these three topics offers flexibility and accessibility. Online learning platforms also incorporate multimedia tools such as videos and interactive activities that can help them apply these communication skills in real-life situations. Evaluation was conducted with a pre- and post-survey given along with the module. Overall, the instructional module was easy to navigate, but the content was not always applicable to students. Some of the content was not appropriate for the age group, which created disengagement. The instructional module helped some students, whereas other students felt they already knew the information. Rise 360 proved to be effective in keeping engagement up for the students since we could include different embedded videos and interactive knowledge checks throughout the module. The use of Rise 360 was great for the students to have a different way of learning the content asynchronously, but there are drawbacks when it comes to tracking information and receiving results from any knowledge checks. Recommendations for future iterations would include working closer with the subject matter experts to have the most appropriate level of content for the students, as well as making sure that any interactivity was included for a reason. The amount of interactive blocks that can be included in Rise 360 can be overwhelming, so making a well-thought-out plan on how each lesson should be built would be more impactful for future students.