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SEL in Massachusetts 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 Massachusetts, 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.

Massachusetts SEL at a Glance

In Massachusetts, social-emotional learning is guided by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) through its Social, Emotional, and Academic Development (SEAD) guidance, the Safe and Supportive Schools Framework, and the Comprehensive Health and Physical Education Framework.

Official Framework & Core Terminology

Framework Name: Massachusetts Guidelines for Social and Emotional Learning and Academic Development (SEL/AD) & Comprehensive Health and Physical Education (CHPE) Framework (Social and Emotional Health Strand).
Structure & Terminology: Organized around the 5 CASEL competencies integrated into a Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS). Key terminology includes Social, Emotional, and Academic Development (SEAD), Safe and Supportive Schools, Culturally Responsive Pedagogy, Self-Efficacy, and Universal Tier 1 Instruction.

Grade Ranges & High School Applicability

Grade Bands: PreK–12 developmental continuum.
High School Relevance: Secondary SEAD guidance focuses on managing complex academic and vocational stressors, preparing for post-secondary transitions, evaluating institutional and social structures, establishing healthy boundaries, and building adult self-advocacy skills.

Core Competencies Overview

  • Self-Awareness: Identifying personal emotions, values, strengths, and limits; understanding internal body signals and personal/cultural assets.
  • Self-Management: Regulating stress, managing impulses, setting goals, and practicing personal and collective agency.
  • Social Awareness: Empathizing across diverse identities, analyzing systemic/situational context, and recognizing community supports.
  • Relationship Skills: Communicating effectively, negotiating conflict, collaborating constructively, and seeking/offering support.
  • Responsible Decision-Making: Evaluating choices considering safety, ethics, and well-being, and solving complex problems systematically. oices based on ethics, safety, consequences, and personal/community well-being.

Educator Mandate: State Explanation & Interpretation

DESE interprets SEAD as an integrated approach embedded across academic subjects, MTSS Tier 1 classroom environments, and school climate initiatives, rather than a standalone, scripted curriculum. Under the Safe and Supportive Schools Framework, Massachusetts explicitly directs educators to use SEL to build welcoming, trauma-informed learning environments. DESE cautions against using SEL as a tool for behavioral compliance, forced assimilation, or subjective report card grading.

High School Competency Breakdown for Neurodivergent Learners

1. Self-Awareness

  • What the State Identifies: Recognizing emotions, identifying personal/cultural assets, understanding bodily states, and developing self-efficacy.
  • What This Looks Like in High School: Recognizing signs of sensory and academic burnout, exploring neurodivergent identity, and evaluating personal accommodation needs.
  • Neurodivergent Teaching Considerations: High school Autistic and ADHD students frequently experience alexithymia (difficulty naming internal feelings) or delayed interoceptive awareness. Demanding immediate emotional reflection without teaching physiological body signals skips a necessary baseline step.
  • Communication Considerations: Use non-verbal check-ins, visual body maps, or digital mood-tracking tools rather than requiring immediate, on-the-spot verbal emotional identification.

2: Self-Management

  • What the State Identifies: Regulating emotions, managing stress, executing multi-step goals, and demonstrating personal agency.
  • What This Looks Like in High School: Managing high-stakes academic workloads, coping with sensory overload in crowded halls/labs, and maintaining focus on post-secondary goals.
  • Neurodivergent Teaching Considerations: Executive dysfunction (working memory, task initiation barriers) and sensory processing differences heavily impact self-management. Avoid misinterpreting sensory overload or executive burnout as willful non-compliance or laziness.
  • Communication Considerations: Offer predictable visual schedules, pre-arranged sensory recovery passes, and structured transition supports rather than relying solely on abstract "self-control" prompts.

3. Social Awareness

  • What the State Identifies: Taking diverse perspectives, empathizing across differences, recognizing situational demands, and understanding systemic contexts.
  • What This Looks Like in High School: Participating in diverse peer groups, understanding differing communication styles, and analyzing social contexts in academic courses.
  • Neurodivergent Teaching Considerations: Apply Damian Milton's Double Empathy Problem. Social friction is often a bi-directional mismatch in communication styles between neurodivergent and neurotypical individuals, not a one-sided neurodivergent empathy deficit.
  • Communication Considerations: Present social norms as explicit, contextual rules to navigate rather than moral imperatives. Validate authentic neurodivergent interaction styles while offering functional tools to decode peer dynamics.

4. Relationship Skills

  • What the State Identifies: Communicating clearly, collaborating in diverse teams, negotiating conflict, and asserting personal boundaries.
  • What This Looks Like in High School: Partnering on group assignments, asserting boundaries with peers, and communicating accommodation needs to school staff.
  • Neurodivergent Teaching Considerations: Masking (suppressing natural traits to pass as neurotypical) leads to severe mental health fatigue and burnout. Relationship goals should prioritize authentic communication and mutual respect over neurotypical conformity.
  • Communication Considerations: Explicitly teach paralinguistics (decoding pitch, volume, speech rate, and posture) as objective context signals. Never demand forced eye contact or suppress natural self-regulatory movements (stimming).

5. Responsible Decision-Making

  • What the State Identifies: Analyzing choices, evaluating ethical/practical consequences, practicing critical thinking, and promoting personal and community well-being.
  • What This Looks Like in High School: Making choices regarding academic accommodations, managing post-secondary planning decisions, and solving personal problems systematically.
  • Neurodivergent Teaching Considerations: High stress and cognitive overload can cause decision fatigue and working memory breakdown in neurodivergent teens. Structured decision-making models eliminate executive function barriers.
  • Communication Considerations: Frame self-advocacy as a core decision-making skill. Provide choice matrices and email templates so students can request accommodations from instructors with minimal social friction.

Neurodivergent Interpretation of Massachusetts SEAD

Massachusetts’ SEAD guidance is explicitly grounded in creating Safe and Supportive Schools and advancing educational equity. For neurodivergent high schoolers, equity means treating neurodiversity as a natural form of human variation rather than a behavioral deficit. Developing genuine self-management and interpersonal skills requires teaching internal bodily awareness (interoception) and objective communication channels (paralinguistics) without forcing behavioral masking.
To align DESE’s SEAD framework with practical neurodivergent instruction, explore the Neurodivergent Social & Emotional Learning (SEL) Course curriculum, designed to build internal body regulation and real-world communication skills without requiring masking.

Applying SEL in Practice: High School Classroom Examples

Example 1: Interoception & Stress Management in Secondary Science Labs (Self-Management)

  • Scenario: A 9th-grade Autistic student experiences intense sensory overload and shutdown during noisy physics lab experiments.
  • SEL Strategy: Aligned with DESE self-management competencies, the student tracks physiological stress markers (e.g., muscle tightness, shallow breathing) using an interoception check-in log. The student uses a pre-arranged accommodation pass to step into a low-stimulation library space for 5 minutes before returning to safely complete the lab work.

Example 2: Paralinguistic Decoding in Academic Seminars (Relationship Skills)

  • Scenario: An 11th-grade ADHD student in a humanities discussion speaks rapidly at a high volume when excited, which group members misinterpret as aggressive.
  • SEL Strategy: Supporting DESE relationship skills competencies, the teacher delivers a mini-lesson on paralinguistics (how pitch, volume, and pacing alter message delivery). The discussion group adopts an objective communication checklist to evaluate ideas based on content rather than vocal inflection.

Example 3: Self-Advocacy Matrix for Post-Secondary Transitions (Responsible Decision-Making)

  • Scenario: A 12th-grade student with executive function challenges struggles to ask teachers for extended deadlines on senior capstone projects, risking graduation credits.
  • SEL Strategy: Grounded in DESE decision-making competencies, the student uses a 3-step self-advocacy framework: (1) Identify the project roadblock 48 hours early, (2) Select an approved accommodation option, and (3) Use a structured email template to submit the request to the teacher.

State-Specific FAQs

Are high schools in Massachusetts legally mandated to teach SEL?

  • Massachusetts does not require a standalone SEL course. However, high schools must incorporate social-emotional health standards under the updated Comprehensive Health and Physical Education Framework and demonstrate alignment with the state's Safe and Supportive Schools Framework.

How do Massachusetts SEAD guidelines accommodate neurodivergent students with IEPs or 504 Plans?

  • DESE frames SEAD within a Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS). Accommodations listed in an IEP or 504 plan, such as sensory recovery passes, visual decision templates, or modified communication options, serve as essential Tier 1 and Tier 2 access points to allow students to build competence without penalty.

Should Massachusetts high schools assign report card grades for SEL competencies?

  • No. DESE treats SEL competencies as developmental guidelines to support instructional design, safe school climate, and student self-reflection, not as criteria for summative letter grading or behavioral discipline.
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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