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High schoolers are coming into your classroom with a lot more than assignments on their minds. While maintaining their mental health and checking in with their emotions is vital for teens, most don’t take the time to do it — and some don’t know how to do it at all.

Teach your students important social-emotional skills they’ll use long past graduation, from recognizing and regulating their emotions to forging healthy relationships with peers. These SEL activities for high school work for any subject or class setting and include ideas for implementation, high-quality resources and lessons, and the chance to truly make a difference in your students’ lives.

1. Build relationships with team-building escape rooms

High school students use a variety of social skills every day, whether they’re chatting in the hallway or making plans for the weekend. Help them build and strengthen these interpersonal skills with escape room challenges that inspire collaboration, creativity, and friendship!

• Break students into teams and give them an escape room prompt that fits into your curriculum, such as “Solve the Crime” for physics class or “Survive The Odyssey” in ELA. 
• Add clues that require subject-specific skills, interdisciplinary talents, and connection-building elements between members (such as “What is your team member’s birthday?” or “What is your team member’s favorite food?”). 
• To make this activity even less stressful, tone down the competitive element by removing the time limit and reward for the first ones to finish. If one team finishes first, they can help the others across the finish line!

Working together and asking fun questions can break the ice between unfamiliar students, allowing them to succeed in both the escape room and a new friendship.

Practice navigating common social situations

Take the pressure out of social interactions with in-class lessons that focus on these unseen moments of students’ lives. From practicing taking perspective to making important social inferences, these SEL activities for high school can enhance teens’ understanding of how to act in everyday scenarios.

Social Skills Lessons for Empathy and Perspective-Taking – SEL Activities
By Pathway 2 Success
Grades: 5th-10th
Standards: CCSS CCRA.L.1; CCRA.L.3

This social-emotional resource aligned to CCSS for College and Career Readiness shows students the importance of seeing the other side. With activities on understanding and accepting different perspectives, this unit is a powerful way to show high schoolers how someone else may feel in the same situation.

Social inferences skills TEENS older students scenario activities worksheets SEL
By Miss Dee’s Homeroom
Grades: 7th-10th

Use this high school SEL resource to target social skills for neurodivergent and neurotypical students alike. They’ll learn to correctly read a social situation, determine the expected behaviors, and choose what they would do in that scenario.

2. Infuse emotion vocabulary into your curriculum

Teens can be nervous about discussing their feelings with other people. But when talking about emotions is a part of your classroom culture, no matter your subject area, they’ll feel a lot more comfortable engaging in those harder conversations.

• Add emotional vocabulary to as many parts of your curriculum as you can. In ELA, include emotion words in your weekly vocabulary list, and discuss the way characters feel in students’ literature assignments (or the way historical figures may have felt in social studies class). 
• Display emotion words in your classroom decorations in math and science, and encourage students to reflect on how they feel after exams, group projects, or lengthy assignments. 
• You can also model how to discuss emotions with short SEL check-ins at the beginning of class. Use a feelings wheel or chart to tell students how you feel about different events in the news, in sports, or even just how you’re feeling that day.

Use nonverbal cues to teach about emotions

It’s one thing to know how you feel, but knowing how someone else feels is a whole different story. Teach teens to understand and use nonverbal cues with SEL activities for high schoolers designed to increase student understanding of body language and facial expressions.

Body Language & Emotions Speech Therapy Social Skills Worksheets + Boom™ Cards
By Stacy Crouse
Grades: 4th-12th

Can you tell how someone is feeling based on their body language? Use a specialized social-emotional teaching tool to help teens identify emotions based on a person’s facial expressions, body language, and social contexts.

3. Have students keep a stress journal

If you ask the average teen how they’re feeling, you’re likely to hear the word “stressed.” But how much do your high schoolers really know about their own stress? Do they know how to prevent stress or to de-escalate stress when it comes their way?

Take the mystery out of stress management with journals that track healthy habits and important life events. As students note their daily stress levels alongside the amount of water they drink, nightly sleep, and daily nutrition, they’ll see the inevitable connection between the two. Then they can brainstorm ways to resolve the stress they’re feeling, whether it’s taking a preventative measure (like drinking more water or getting more sleep!) or practicing important stress management tactics, such as meditation, talking to peers, or reflecting on their feelings.

Guide high schoolers through stress management strategies

How can high schoolers handle stress in their daily lives? Use high school SEL activities to instill stress management strategies in teens and to give them ways to talk about their stress without getting more anxious.

Stress Management Activities for Teens | SEL Coping Skills & PowerPoint
By Teachers Resource Force
Grades: 5th-11th

It’s easy to dismiss stress as a normal part of the teen experience, but it’s not as easy to teach students to deal with the stress in their everyday lives. Use a 23-slide digital resource focused on social-emotional coping skills and stress management activities to show your high schoolers how to identify, reflect on, and handle everyday stressful occurrences.

4. Use narrative writing to practice self-awareness

ELA doesn’t have to be the only place where students practice narrative writing! Use narrative writing prompts for high school in any subject to help students recognize current emotions and thoughts, identify interests and talents, and use self-awareness skills to learn more about themselves.

Narrative writing can also be a good way for teens to reflect on their own learning and find out where they can improve. Students can write about their feelings on their grades, discuss how they could have done better, and track their improvements throughout the year. Additionally, high schoolers can project self-awareness into the future while writing about goals leading up to graduation and into the rest of their lives.

Focus on self-awareness with reflection activities

Get past the getting-to-know-you stage of self-awareness with high school SEL activities that focus on really knowing yourself. Students will appreciate and enjoy the opportunity to think about what they really like, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and how they’ve grown since the beginning of the school year.

Self-Awareness Activity Worksheets | Self-Awareness Activities | All About Me
By Queen’s Educational Resources
Grades: 7th-12th

How well do your high schoolers know themselves? Use 20 self-awareness activity worksheets to demonstrate the importance of interpreting one’s emotions, responding to those emotions, and reflecting on the experience to grow in the future.

5. Leave assignments open-ended to teach decision-making

No one likes to be told exactly what to do, and that goes double for teens. Shift a teacher-led classroom into a student-led learning environment with life skills activities that let students make responsible decisions based on their own needs and abilities.

Whether it’s adding “Would You Rather?” questions to your daily warm-ups or letting students choose their own research paper topics, opportunities to make decisions can go a long way in building high school social-emotional skills. For struggling students, scaffold the decision-making process by allowing them to make choices between equally beneficial options, then encouraging more open-ended decisions in the future.

6. Encourage self-management in long-term projects

While classroom management may be one of your stronger skills, encouraging self-management strategies for high schoolers can be beneficial for everyone involved. This social-emotional skill allows teens to feel more in control of their environment and their learning while strengthening valuable study skills for high school students, including time management and organization.

When you assign a long-term project, guide high schoolers through the process of managing their own study schedule. They can decide how much of the project they’d like to do in class versus at home, and pace themselves based on their own comfort and work habits. Incorporate their self-management success into the project grade, and have students reflect on what they learned from the process!

7. Set goals to foster a growth mindset

The term “growth mindset” is popular in professional development seminars and classroom posters, but what does it really mean? Infuse a growth mindset mentality into your curriculum and in your students’ social-emotional understanding with a goal-based perspective on their own learning.

• Brainstorm attainable goals with students at the beginning of the year, such as “Do my homework every night” or “Score over 90% on tests and quizzes.” 
• Have them note their progress toward the goal as the quarter progresses, and reflect on how much they’ve grown since the beginning of the year. 
• You can even have them track goals for other classes or areas of their life, such as sports, friendship, family interactions, or health.

8. Practice friendly arguments with class debate topics

The average teen encounters plenty of conflict in their daily life, but they may struggle with managing and resolving those interactions. Give them the opportunity to build lifelong conflict resolution and social awareness skills with high school debate topics that are sure to get them arguing — but in the best way possible!

Discuss and model the norms of friendly arguments and debates at the beginning of the school year. Students can practice with low-stakes issues that aren’t likely to raise emotions, then move on to topics about which they may care more deeply. If you’d like to bring even more structure into this SEL activity for high school, try Socratic seminars to encourage active listening and increased participation.

It’s a myth that high school students don’t care about anything. In truth, they care quite a bit about a lot of things, and channeling this high level of interest can be beneficial to both their sense of efficacy and their success in your class. That’s where high school passion projects come in!

Let your students choose the topic they’d like to pursue in their passion project, whether it’s a community service project or a research presentation on a subject they’re interested in. They can then decide how they’d like to complete the project, what the finished product will look like, and whether they’ve met their personal goals for the assignment. This feeling of efficacy can shape the way students feel about themselves and their own learning, and can carry them through any number of challenges in their academic and everyday lives.

Quick SEL Activities for High School

Studies show that social-emotional programs can increase student skills in many areas, including academic, cognitive, and relationship skills. If you don’t have the time or funds to implement a full social-emotional program at your school, these quick SEL activities for high school can be helpful ways to ensure that teens are getting the skills they need.

• Greet students at the door and monitor anyone who seems especially quiet or down before they start class.
• Add brain breaks for high school students into your everyday curriculum, especially during challenging instruction days or testing periods. (Who says you can’t do yoga in calculus class?)
• Include emotion-focused journal prompts in learners’ weekly homework or classroom assignments, and invite volunteers to share what they’ve written.
• Allow opportunities for students to socialize within the parameters of your curriculum, whether it’s short partner work or long-term group activities.
• Set up a “Caught Being Kind” program for high schoolers to write down moments when their peers helped them out.
• Write positive affirmations on your board every day, and repeat them at the end of class. For some students, that may be the nicest thing someone says to them all week.

Strong Social-Emotional Learning Leads to Resilient Adults

Between the standards set for your subject and the demands of everyday teaching,  social-emotional learning may feel like just one more item on your instructional to-do list. But SEL activities for high school may be the most important lessons you teach your teenagers, and what they learn from you could help them in the most challenging moments of their lives.

Find more high school SEL activities to use in any high school subject or language level. You’ll discover new ways to set up your classroom expectations and rules, introduce new concepts in stress-free ways, and foster relationships between students to create a learning environment that everyone can enjoy.