If you’re not a teacher, you would be baffled that teaching kids to read and do math is the easy part of teaching!! The harder work is helping them figure out how to actually be with each other and develop social awareness. How to notice someone who is different from them, sit with that discomfort, and eventually move toward genuine connection. That’s the real work! It turns out there’s a framework that can help us think about exactly this, even though most teachers have never heard of it.
Milton Bennett developed his Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity back in the 1980s to describe how people grow in their ability to experience and respond to cultural difference. This ties in perfectly with one of CASEL’s core competencies, social awareness. The model lays out six stages, moving from what he called ethnocentrism (where your own experience is the center of the universe) to ethnorelativism (where you understand that all perspectives exist within a larger context). This isn’t just a model about culture – it deeply includes empathy and perspective taking, and basically the entire foundation of SEL. So let’s walk through it, because I think you’re going to recognize every one of your students in here.
Denial: “I Don’t Really Notice Differences”
The first stage is denial, and it looks like what we often call social unawareness. Kids in this stage don’t notice that their classmates have different home lives, different abilities, different ways of seeing the world. Not because they’re unkind, but because they genuinely haven’t developed the capacity to see outside their own experience yet.
You see this in the child who doesn’t understand why their friend is sad about something that wouldn’t bother them at all, or the kid who assumes everyone’s family looks like their own. The SEL skill we’re building here is basic awareness, both self awareness and social awareness. These students need opportunities to notice. Simple, low-stakes chances to observe that people have different feelings about the same thing, and that both can be real.
Defense: “My Way Is the Right Way”
In the defense stage, kids do start to notice difference, but their response is to protect their own worldview. Difference feels like a threat. This is the student who says “that’s weird” when a classmate does something unfamiliar, or who becomes rigid and dismissive when things don’t match their expectations.
From an SEL standpoint, this is where we’re building the skills of emotional regulation and perspective taking. These students need us to validate their feelings while gently widening their lens. Conflict resolution conversations work really well here, as does structured reflection after moments of tension.
This social awareness activity bundle is the perfect way to foster these skills in a communal way with your class.
Minimization: “We’re All Really the Same Underneath”
This stage can feel like progress, and in some ways it is. Kids in minimization have moved past defense and are genuinely trying to connect. The problem is their approach to connection: they flatten differences by insisting that everyone is basically the same. “I don’t see color.” “It doesn’t matter where you’re from.” On the surface it sounds generous, but it actually erases the experiences of classmates who have been treated differently, and it shuts down the deeper conversations we need to have.
The SEL work here is around social awareness, empathy, and responsible decision making. Help these students understand that noticing and honoring difference is not divisive, but what real connection requires. Morning meetings and structured community-building conversations can go a long way in this stage.
Acceptance: “There Are Real Differences, and That’s Okay”
This is where the shift happens. Kids in acceptance begin to genuinely acknowledge that people experience the world differently, and they hold space for that without needing to judge it or minimize it. This doesn’t mean they agree with every perspective, but that they can hold complexity.
This is a meaningful SEL milestone. Students here are showing real social awareness and beginning to practice authentic empathy. Deepen this with activities that ask kids to step into another person’s shoes in a concrete way, like perspective taking through read-alouds, role play, or structured discussion.
Adaptation: “I Can Shift How I Show Up”
Acceptance is knowing, while adaptation is doing. Students in this stage can actually adjust their behavior based on what they know about another person. They might approach a friend who is grieving differently than one who is celebrating. They notice when their usual communication style isn’t landing, and they flex.
This maps directly onto relationship skills, one of the CASEL competencies that teachers often find hardest to teach explicitly. Adaptation doesn’t happen naturally for most kids and requires modeling, practice, and safe chances to try it out. Think peer mediation, collaborative group work with intentional reflection, and explicit coaching around communication.
Integration: “I Hold Multiple Perspectives as Part of Who I Am”
The final stage is integration, and it’s honestly where we hope to guide our most socially mature students. These kids don’t just understand multiple perspectives: they’ve internalized them as part of their own identity. Let’s be clear here that this is hard for fully grown adults. They can move fluidly between ways of seeing. They’re the ones who bridge divides in your classroom without being asked, who sit with the kid no one else is sitting with, who notice inequity before the adults in the room do. This kid is a social awareness model.
In SEL terms, these students are operating from a place of deep responsible decision making and a stable, values grounded sense of self.
What This Means in Reality
Bennett’s model is useful for teachers not just as a way to understand students, but as a reminder that this development is a process. You can’t skip stages. A kid who is in minimization doesn’t need to be corrected so much as gently stretched. A student stuck in defense needs safety before they can be challenged.
The most important thing you can do is meet students where they are, build trust, and keep creating the conditions for growth.
