I’m coming at this with an elementary lens, so I would say that the most bang for your buck in an elementary setting is to use morning meeting to introduce these concepts and have discussions with your students. I would often use read alouds as a powerful way to introduce these concepts as well so that they could have a discussion on how things were being handled in the book and relate it back to their own life. Lastly, I would suggest to use lunch and recess time to just discuss things with kids. I think that this is one of the most powerful ways to talk to kids. It may not be a whole group lesson but those conversations make more of a difference than you know!

In our intervention groups we do a very quick check-in and check-out. We also mark the results in our logs to track patterns and needs etc. We do ask students if they would like to share their "why" - and if topics lead to areas of concern I note it and refer them to the right people in the building that can help.

In our school, we use Concious Discipline strategies and there are a few things that you can do daily to weave in SEL without specific lessons.
1. Greetings at the door each morning.
2. Breathing techniques allow students to identify their feelings and emotions while giving them tools to regulate and return to learning quicker.
3. Morning meetings with simple non- instructional questions help to develop classroom community and can be done in 10 minutes or less.
You can learn more about Concious Discipline here:
https://consciousdiscipline.com/

We use second steps as our SEL curriculum, and the first year I taught it, I exclusively talked about the concepts we were learning during our morning meeting and reinforced them throughout the day. That worked well, but it felt like it was forced.

So now what I do is find opportunities throughout the day when I see something happening and I will stop the class and do a quick 2 to 3 minute teach on whatever I see happening and that way the children have context for what the skill is we are learning and how we put it into practice. Since doing it this way, it has felt less forced and more natural, and I think the children understand the skills I am trying to teach them better, because they are seeing the “thing” happen right in front of them rather than us role-playing it.