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SEL in Pennsylvania for Neurodivergent High-School Students: A Teacher's Guide

Social-emotional learning (SEL) can support students as they develop self-awareness, navigate relationships, respond to challenges, understand different perspectives, and make decisions in school and beyond.
However, states do not all have a dedicated statewide SEL standards framework.
For educators in Pennsylvania, understanding what the state does and does not provide can be a useful starting point. This guide identifies relevant state guidance, frameworks, competencies, or related education resources and considers what they may mean for supporting neurodivergent high school students.

Pennsylvania SEL at a Glance

Pennsylvania addresses social-emotional learning through the Pennsylvania Career Ready Skills (PA CRS) framework, developed by the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) and housed within the state's Standards Aligned System (SAS). PDE explicitly connects SEL competencies with workforce readiness, post-secondary success, and school climate initiatives.

Official Framework & Core Terminology

Framework Name: Pennsylvania Career Ready Skills (PA CRS).
Structure & Terminology:
Organized into 3 Domains containing sequential learning progressions aligned with CASEL’s 5 core SEL competencies:
  1. Self-Awareness and Self-Management (Intrapersonal)
  2. Establishing and Maintaining Relationships (Interpersonal)
  3. Social Problem-Solving (Cognitive / Decision-Making)
Key Terminology:
PA Career Ready Skills (PA CRS), Standards Aligned System (SAS), Career Education and Work (CEW) Standards, Future Ready PA Index, and School Climate and Well-Being.

Grade Ranges & High School Applicability

Grade Bands: PreK–12 continuum structured across five grade bands (PreK–K, 1–2, 3–5, 6–8, and Grades 9–12 / High School).
High School Relevance: For secondary students (13+ / Grades 9–12), PA CRS focuses on workforce readiness, self-regulation in independent environments, navigating post-secondary transitions, and satisfying graduation pathway indicators under Pennsylvania Act 158 and Chapter 4 regulations.

Core Competencies Overview

  1. Self-Awareness: Identifying personal strengths, understanding internal emotional and physiological states, and recognizing personal identity within career and academic pathways.
  2. Self-Management: Regulating stress, executing independent tasks, managing time, and demonstrating goal-directed behavior.
  3. Social Awareness: Understanding diverse perspectives, interpreting social environments, and recognizing community and workplace norms.
  4. Relationship Skills: Communicating effectively, collaborating in teams, resolving interpersonal conflict, and establishing productive social networks.
  5. Social Problem-Solving (Responsible Decision-Making): Evaluating choices, analyzing consequences, applying ethical reasoning, and solving complex problems in school, workplace, and civic contexts.

Educator Mandate: State Explanation & Interpretation

PDE interprets the PA Career Ready Skills not as an isolated curriculum, but as essential employability and life skills embedded across all academic disciplines, Career Education and Work (CEW) standards, and Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS). PDE emphasizes that PA CRS skill progressions are developmental targets designed to model, teach, and reinforce positive behaviors. They are explicitly not intended to serve as punitive evaluation metrics or subjective behavioral grading rubrics.

High School Competency Breakdown for Neurodivergent Learners

1. Self-Awareness

  • What the State Identifies: Recognizing personal identity, assessing individual strengths and growth areas, and understanding how emotions and body states impact performance.
  • What This Looks Like in High School: Evaluating career interests, identifying personal academic triggers, and understanding one's neurodivergent profile during post-secondary planning.
  • Neurodivergent Teaching Considerations: High school Autistic and ADHD students frequently experience alexithymia (difficulty labeling emotions) or delayed interoceptive processing. Expecting reflection on emotional states without first addressing underlying body sensations bypasses crucial physiological processing steps.
  • Communication Considerations: Use non-verbal check-ins, visual body maps, or rating scales rather than requiring immediate, on-the-spot verbal descriptions of internal states.

2: Self-Management

  • What the State Identifies: Demonstrating goal-directed behavior, managing stress, executing multi-step tasks, and adapting to changing demands.
  • What This Looks Like in High School: Managing study schedules, handling sensory input in shop/lab classes, and sustaining focus during long exam blocks.
  • Neurodivergent Teaching Considerations: Executive dysfunction (time blindness, task initiation barriers, working memory overload) heavily affects self-management. Avoid misinterpreting executive overload or sensory burnout as a lack of motivation or discipline.
  • Communication Considerations: Provide visual schedules, clear transition warnings, and pre-arranged sensory recovery passes rather than relying on abstract self-management directives.

3. Social Awareness

  • What the State Identifies: Demonstrating empathy, understanding diverse perspectives, and recognizing contextual expectations across school, community, and workplace environments.
  • What This Looks Like in High School: Participating in group projects, navigating diverse peer dynamics, and understanding workplace expectations during CTE/co-op placements.
  • Neurodivergent Teaching Considerations: Apply Damian Milton's Double Empathy Problem. Social breakdowns often stem from mutual communication mismatches between neurodivergent and neurotypical individuals, not a one-sided empathy deficit.
  • Communication Considerations: Present social rules as explicit, objective context to navigate rather than moral imperatives. Validate authentic neurodivergent processing while teaching neurotypical norms as functional tools.

4. Relationship Skills (Establishing & Maintaining Relationships)

  • What the State Identifies: Communicating constructively, collaborating in diverse teams, negotiating conflict, and building supportive professional and personal connections.
  • What This Looks Like in High School: Partnering on group assignments, communicating with employers or teachers, and asserting personal boundaries with peers.
  • Neurodivergent Teaching Considerations: Masking (suppressing natural traits to blend in) causes severe mental fatigue. Focus relationship goals on clear, authentic communication and mutual respect rather than forcing neurotypical social behaviors.
  • Communication Considerations: Explicitly teach paralinguistics (decoding vocal pitch, speed, volume, and body posture) as objective information channels. Avoid mandating eye contact or suppressing natural self-regulatory movements (stimming).

5. Social Problem-Solving (Responsible Decision-Making)

  • What the State Identifies: Identifying problems, analyzing situations, evaluating ethical and practical consequences, and implementing solutions.
  • What This Looks Like in High School: Making decisions regarding accommodation needs, balancing work/school commitments, and advocating for support when facing academic roadblocks.
  • Neurodivergent Teaching Considerations: High stress and cognitive overload can cause decision fatigue in neurodivergent teens. Structured decision-making templates eliminate executive function barriers.
  • Communication Considerations: Frame self-advocacy as a primary problem-solving skill. Provide written communication templates and choice matrices so students can request accommodations with minimal social friction.

Neurodivergent Interpretation of Pennsylvania Career Ready Skills

Pennsylvania links social-emotional competencies directly to career readiness and post-secondary success. For neurodivergent high schoolers, true career readiness does not mean suppressing neurodivergent traits; it means developing self-advocacy, internal interoceptive regulation, and clear communication strategies.
To connect PA CRS standards with practical neurodivergent instruction, explore the Neurodivergent Social & Emotional Learning (SEL) Course curriculum, designed to teach internal body awareness and real-world communication without forcing masking.

Applying SEL in Practice: High School Classroom Examples

Example 1: Interoception & Stress Management in Career/CTE Labs (Self-Management)

  • Scenario: A 10th-grade Autistic student in a Career and Technical Education (CTE) automotive lab experiences sensory overload from loud machinery and bright lighting, leading to shutdown during safety tasks.
  • SEL Strategy: Aligned with PA CRS Self-Management progressions, the teacher helps the student track physiological stress markers (e.g., increased heart rate, muscle clenching). The student uses a pre-approved pass to step into a low-stimulation area for 3 minutes to reset before resuming lab tasks safely.

Example 2: Paralinguistic Decoding in Collaborative Projects (Relationship Skills)

  • Scenario: An 11th-grade ADHD student participating in a history group project speaks rapidly with high volume when excited, which peers misinterpret as dominant or argumentative.
  • SEL Strategy: Supporting PA CRS Relationship Skills, the educator delivers a mini-lesson on paralinguistics (how pitch, speed, and volume affect message delivery). The group establishes visual cues to help all members monitor speech rate and volume without singling out the neurodivergent student.

Example 3: Self-Advocacy Matrix for Graduation Pathways / Act 158 (Social Problem-Solving)

  • Scenario: A 12th-grade student with executive function challenges struggles to request extra time and modified testing formats for graduation pathway requirements, causing extreme anxiety.
  • SEL Strategy: Aligned with PA CRS Social Problem-Solving, the student works with their counselor to implement a 3-step decision template: (1) Identify upcoming deadlines 5 days early, (2) Match the barrier with an approved IEP/504 accommodation, and (3) Use a structured email template to request accommodations from teachers.

State-Specific FAQs

Are high schools in Pennsylvania required to teach social-emotional learning?

  • Pennsylvania mandates that high schools address career readiness through the Career Education and Work (CEW) standards and track indicators via the Future Ready PA Index. The Pennsylvania Career Ready Skills (PA CRS) serve as the state's official social-emotional learning framework designed to fulfill these requirements.

How do PA Career Ready Skills integrate with IEPs or 504 Plans for neurodivergent students?

  • PA CRS are designed as flexible developmental learning progressions. Accommodations in a student's IEP or 504 plan, such as modified communication channels, sensory breaks, or executive function scaffolds, provide the access points necessary for neurodivergent students to demonstrate competence without penalty.

Are Pennsylvania Career Ready Skills graded on student report cards?

  • No. PDE explicitly treats PA CRS as developmental skill progressions for modeling, practice, and formative growth, rather than subject matter for summative letter grading.
Go Deeper

Want to explore these communication skills further?

SpeechScape’s Neurodivergent SEL course provides a practical way to explore the communication skills behind SEL, including tone, facial expressions, emotional awareness, and social context. With structured lessons and real-world audio examples, it can complement SEL teaching for neurodivergent teens and adults.
100+ audio examples | 33 topics | Lifetime access
explore the course

Understanding SEL in High School

SEL does not end in elementary school.
For high school students, social and emotional learning may intersect with increasingly complex situations involving friendships, group work, classroom participation, conflict, communication with teachers, employment preparation, further education, and greater independence.
For neurodivergent students, these situations can involve communication and social demands that are not always obvious.
A student may:
  • understand a literal message but not an implied one
  • find tone of voice difficult to interpret
  • communicate differently from peers
  • need more explicit information about an interaction
  • find it difficult to recognize or describe changing internal states
  • communicate less effectively when stressed
  • need alternative ways to participate
These differences do not automatically represent a lack of social or emotional competence.
The goal is to support students in understanding themselves, understanding different communication styles, and developing strategies and choices that are useful to them.

What Are the Core SEL Skills?

SEL is often described through five broad areas: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. CASEL uses these as five interconnected areas of competence, although states do not all adopt the CASEL framework or terminology directly.

Self-awareness

Understanding emotions, thoughts, preferences, needs, strengths, and internal experiences.

Self-management

Managing emotions, thoughts, and behaviors in ways that support a student's goals and circumstances.

Social awareness

Understanding other people's perspectives and recognizing that people may communicate, respond, or interpret situations differently.

Relationship skills

Building and maintaining relationships through communication, listening, cooperation, problem-solving, boundaries, and repair after misunderstandings.

Responsible decision-making

Considering context, possible consequences, and available options when deciding how to respond.

SEL and communication

Communication is one of the many ways students apply SEL skills.

SEL area

Communication connection

Self-awareness
Recognizing emotions, internal signals, communication preferences, and personal needs.
Self-management
Managing communication when stress, frustration, or strong emotions affect an interaction.
Social awareness
Interpreting tone, pacing, facial expression, body language, context, and different communication styles.
Relationship skills
Navigating conversations, misunderstandings, disagreement, collaboration, and communication repair.
Responsible decision-making
Considering possible interpretations and choosing how to respond.
For neurodivergent learners, making these communication patterns explicit can provide a practical bridge between broad SEL goals and everyday experiences.
Read more: SEL and Communication: Supporting Neurodivergent Learners

Communication Beyond the Words

Some information in a conversation is communicated through more than the words themselves.
Tone of voice, pitch, pacing, volume, pauses, facial expression, body language, and context can all influence interpretation.
For some neurodivergent learners, these features may be difficult to interpret or may be interpreted differently from the people around them.

Educators can explore questions such as:

  • How does the same sentence sound when the tone changes?
  • What role does context play?
  • What can a student do when they are unsure what someone meant?
  • How can different communication styles coexist?

Interoception and Self-Awareness

Interoception refers broadly to awareness of signals originating within the body.
In a communication-focused learning context, discussing interoception can provide one way to explore connections among internal states, emotions, communication, and everyday experiences.
A student might notice that they are becoming tense, that their heart is beating faster, that thinking has become more difficult, or that an interaction suddenly feels uncomfortable.
Rather than assuming that a particular physical sensation always has one meaning, educators can encourage students to explore:
SpeechScape incorporates relevant interoception concepts in the context of communication and emotional awareness. It is not a sensory therapy program; rather, these concepts are used to support communication awareness and understanding of internal states in everyday situations.

Supporting Communication Without Teaching One "Correct" Way to Communicate

SEL instruction for neurodivergent students should not automatically become instruction in how to appear more neurotypical.
A student does not necessarily need to change a natural communication style simply because it differs from the style expected by another person.

Instead, educators can help students:

  • understand different communication patterns
  • recognize that communication can be interpreted differently
  • identify their own preferences and needs
  • ask for clarification
  • communicate boundaries and needs
  • repair misunderstandings
  • consider different response options
  • choose strategies that are useful in particular situations
The goal is greater understanding, flexibility, and communication choice—not compliance with a single social norm.

Practical SEL Applications for Neurodivergent High-School Students

SEL becomes more meaningful when students can connect concepts with situations they actually encounter.

Tone and meaning

Compare different ways of saying the same words and explore how tone, pacing, or volume can influence interpretation.

Communication preferences

Explore what makes communication easier or more difficult for individual students and what support they may need.

Recognizing internal signals

Identify physical or emotional changes that students associate with stress, frustration, excitement, discomfort, or other experiences.

Communication breakdowns

Discuss what students can do when they are unsure what someone meant or when someone has misunderstood them.

Relationship skills

Explore conversations, collaboration, disagreement, boundaries, perspective-taking, and communication repair.

Real-world communication

Connect learning with group projects, teacher interactions, workplace preparation, interviews, friendships, and other situations relevant to life beyond school.

Explore more SEL activities for neurodivergent students

A Practical Communication Focused SEL Resource

SpeechScape's Neurodivergent Social & Emotional Learning (SEL) Course explores communication skills that can intersect with SEL, including paralinguistic communication, tone of voice, direct and indirect language, nonverbal communication, social context, relationship skills, and interoception-related emotional awareness.
The course uses practical examples and professionally recorded audio to help learners explore not only what people say, but how communication can be expressed and interpreted.
For educators, it can provide a resource for exploring communication-related aspects of SEL with neurodivergent learners in high-school, transition, and other settings.

Explore SpeechScape's SEL Course

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