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SEL in Minnesota 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 Minnesota, 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.

Minnesota SEL at a Glance

Minnesota’s social-emotional learning framework is grounded in the Safe and Supportive Schools Act (Minn. Stat. § 121A.031), establishing social-emotional competencies as a core strategy for fostering safe, equitable, and anti-bullying school environments across the state.

Official Framework & Core Terminology

Framework Name: Minnesota Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) Framework & Competencies.
Structure & Terminology: Organized around 5 Core Competencies adapted from CASEL, supported by Learning Goals, Indicators, and grade-band Benchmarks. Minnesota also incorporates Adult Transformative SEL guidelines aligned with the state's Standards of Effective Practice. Key state terminology includes Safe and Supportive Schools Act, Learning Goals, Grade Band Benchmarks, Transformative SEL, and Whole Child Education.

Grade Ranges & High School Applicability

Grade Bands: PreK–12 developmental continuum structured across grade bands (K–3, 4–5, 6–8, and Grades 9–12 / High School).
High School Relevance: Secondary benchmarks focus on identity formation, evaluating personal assets, self-advocacy, managing post-secondary and workforce transitions, coping with stress during life changes, and engaging in cross-cultural perspective-taking.

Core Competencies Overview

  1. Self-Awareness: Demonstrating awareness of emotions, personal strengths, challenges, aspirations, rights, and cultural assets.
  2. Self-Management: Regulating emotions, thoughts, stress, and impulses while setting, monitoring, and achieving personal and academic goals.
  3. Social Awareness: Showing empathy and understanding for individuals across cultures, recognizing systemic contexts, and identifying community supports.
  4. Relationship Skills: Using communication and interpersonal skills to build positive relationships, collaborate, and resolve conflicts.
  5. Responsible Decision-Making: Applying ethical standards, evaluating consequences, and exercising decision-making skills to solve problems.

Educator Mandate: State Explanation & Interpretation

Under the Safe and Supportive Schools Act, the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) frames SEL as a universal strategy for establishing safe, welcoming learning environments. MDE explicitly interprets SEL as a culturally responsive practice to be integrated across academic disciplines, career readiness programs, and Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS). MDE emphasizes that SEL benchmarks are developmental learning targets to support student growth, not punitive evaluation metrics or behavioral report card grades.

High School Competency Breakdown for Neurodivergent Learners

1. Self-Awareness

  • What the State Identifies: Demonstrating awareness of emotions, personal strengths, challenges, cultural assets, rights, and personal responsibilities.
  • What This Looks Like in High School: Recognizing signs of sensory and cognitive burnout, understanding personal learning styles, and evaluating accommodation needs during IEP/504 post-secondary transition planning.
  • Neurodivergent Teaching Considerations: High school Autistic and ADHD students frequently experience alexithymia (difficulty identifying internal feelings) or delayed interoceptive awareness. Demanding immediate emotional reflection without first teaching physiological body cues bypasses essential baseline processing.
  • Communication Considerations: Use non-verbal check-ins, visual body maps, or digital rating scales rather than requiring immediate, on-the-spot verbal emotional identification.

2. Self-Management

  • What the State Identifies: Regulating and expressing emotions, thoughts, impulses, and stress effectively; setting, monitoring, and adapting personal goals.
  • What This Looks Like in High School: Managing high-stakes academic workloads, coping with sensory overload in crowded halls/vocational labs, and sustaining progress on multi-week projects.
  • Neurodivergent Teaching Considerations: Executive dysfunction (working memory limits, task initiation inertia) and sensory processing differences heavily impact self-management. Do not misinterpret 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: Demonstrating empathy through a cross-cultural lens, respecting diverse cultural identities, and understanding how individuals and groups cooperate.
  • What This Looks Like in High School: Participating in diverse peer groups, understanding differing communication styles in group projects, and navigating high school social dynamics.
  • 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.ion 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: Demonstrating a range of communication and social skills, cultivating constructive relationships, and resolving interpersonal conflicts.
  • What This Looks Like in High School: Partnering on group assignments, asserting personal boundaries with peers, and communicating accommodation needs to teachers and employers.
  • Neurodivergent Teaching Considerations: Forced masking (suppressing natural traits to pass as neurotypical) leads to severe mental health fatigue and burnout. Relationship goals should prioritize authentic communication and mutual clarity over neurotypical conformity.
  • Communication Considerations: Explicitly teach paralinguistics (decoding vocal pitch, cadence, volume, 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: Considering ethical standards, social norms, and safety; evaluating choices and implementing problem-solving strategies.
  • What This Looks Like in High School: Making choices regarding academic accommodations, managing post-secondary planning decisions, and navigating peer dynamics ethically.
  • Neurodivergent Teaching Considerations: High stress and cognitive overload can cause decision fatigue and working memory breakdown in neurodivergent teens. Structured decision-making templates remove cognitive barriers to effective action.
  • 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 Minnesota SEL

Minnesota’s SEL framework, born out of the Safe and Supportive Schools Act, places educational equity and safe learning environments at the forefront. For neurodivergent high schoolers, equity requires affirming neurodiversity as a natural form of human variation rather than forcing behavioral compliance. Developing true self-management and interpersonal skills requires teaching internal bodily awareness (interoception) and objective communication channels (paralinguistics) in real-world contexts without requiring masking.
To align MDE’s SEL framework with practical neurodivergent instruction, explore the Neurodivergent Social & Emotional Learning (SEL) Course curriculum, designed to build internal body regulation and clear communication without forcing masking.

Applying SEL in Practice: High School Classroom Examples

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

  • Scenario: A 10th-grade Autistic student in a Career and Technical Education (CTE) lab experiences intense sensory overload from machinery noise and fluorescent lighting, leading to sudden task shutdown.
  • SEL Strategy: Aligned with MDE Self-Management benchmarks, the student tracks physiological stress markers (e.g., muscle clenching, elevated heart rate) using an interoception check-in scale. The student uses a pre-arranged accommodation pass to step into a quiet library space for 5 minutes before safely returning to complete lab work.

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

  • Scenario: An 11th-grade ADHD student in a social studies discussion speaks rapidly at a high volume when passionate, which peers misinterpret as aggressive or dominant.
  • SEL Strategy: Supporting MDE Relationship Skills benchmarks, the teacher delivers a mini-lesson on paralinguistics (how pitch, volume, and pacing alter message delivery). The discussion group adopts an objective communication rubric 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 MDE Decision-Making benchmarks, the student uses a 3-step self-advocacy framework: (1) Identify the project roadblock 48 hours early, (2) Select an approved IEP/504 accommodation option, and (3) Use a structured email template to send the request to the instructor.

State-Specific FAQs

Are high schools in Minnesota legally required to teach SEL?

  • While Minnesota does not mandate a standalone SEL course, Minnesota's Safe and Supportive Schools Act (Minn. Stat. § 121A.031) requires school districts to foster positive, anti-bullying school climates and integrate social-emotional learning practices into district-wide policies and instruction across K–12.

How do Minnesota SEL competencies accommodate neurodivergent students with IEPs or 504 Plans?

  • MDE treats SEL competencies as flexible developmental learning targets. Accommodations listed in an IEP or 504 plan, such as sensory passes, visual decision matrices, or modified communication formats, serve as essential access points that enable neurodivergent students to demonstrate competence without penalty.

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

  • No. MDE explicitly treats SEL competencies as developmental benchmarks intended to support instructional planning, positive school climate, and student self-reflection, not as subjective criteria for report card letter grades.
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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