The purpose of this qualitative study was to better understand the perspectives of teachers' social-emotional competencies, the development of social-emotional competencies, and the practice and implementation of social and emotional learning (SEL). Structured interviews were conducted with ten teachers and four administrators at four different schools (public, private and charter). The teacher participants completed a social-emotional self-reflection tool in order to triangulate the data. The study findings suggested that teachers received insufficient SEL training and limited SEL modeling in their preservice program. Recommendations were made to enable teachers at various stages throughout their career to build social emotional competencies, such as self-regulation and modeling of SEL skills, so that they may teach them to their students.