From needs to design: teachers' perspectives on core components of culturally responsive SEL in Türkiye

Social and emotional learning (SEL) is increasingly recognized as culturally situated rather than universally uniform. In Türkiye, SEL was integrated into the national curriculum for the first time in 2024 through the Türkiye Century Education Model (TCEM). Yet this reform was launched without a systematic needs assessment grounded in teachers' perspectives, despite teachers being the primary actors who encounter students' social, emotional, and behavioral challenges in everyday classroom life. This study aimed to examine how Turkish primary school teachers conceptualize students' SEL needs and to interpret these understandings within a culturally responsive framework. A qualitative design was employed, with 12 focus groups involving teachers from 26 cities across Türkiye (N = 171). Data were analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis, supported by strategies of credibility, dependability, and confirmability. The findings reveal that teachers view SEL not as abstract skill lists but as interdependent capacities enacted within daily school practices. Four interconnected clusters of need were consistently prioritized: (1) emotional awareness, expression, and regulation; (2) communication, cooperation, and adaptation; (3) self-regulation, responsibility, and problem-solving; and (4) empathy, compassion, and respect. Teachers further underscored systemic preconditions for effective SEL, including teacher capacity, alignment between home and school expectations, and whole-school coherence. The study contributes to global SEL scholarship by offering contextualized evidence from a non-Western setting and by demonstrating how teachers actively negotiate between universal SEL discourses and local educational realities. Implications are discussed for the design of culturally responsive SEL curricula, teacher professional development, and policy initiatives in comparable contexts.