"Attention" is one of the main features of SL, and one of its great strengths. By attention, SL advocates imply that students will be attracted to certain behaviors that lead to good and useful results, and, in the process of learning them (or more accurately, absorbing them), they will spend a great deal of attention in imitating the actions involved.
Like attention, "motivation" is central to the SL approach to education. Here, a student is not given a list of required texts and subjects to memorize; rather, he chooses those useful actions that truly seem to provide the practitioner with a strong sense of satisfaction. Hence, motivation is the mother to attention, and both work together to create--not bored and alienated students, but--engaged students who begin imitating the behaviors they seek to master.
The big distinction between the typical behaviorist approach to education and SL is the idea of the "model." Behaviorists see the mind as a large machine. SL sees it as an organism. In short, this is the relation between behaviorist's "shaping" and the SL's "modeling." Behaviorism uses mechanical incentives to inculcate behaviors eventually carried out by rote. SL advocates see the contextualized model of behavior as the primary motivating force in learning. Shaping the mind becomes a mechanistic, learned response. SL sees a strongly contextual approach, where the existing functions of behavior among social groups and individuals who appeal to the student are seen as the true motivating force. A useful analogy might be the distinction between learning out of a book (behaviorism) and learning as an apprentice (SL).
This particular strength of SL is often its most attractive. Students, because they are motivated to master a certain skill that they have observed (e.g., a carpenter, a good guitar player, etc), will then seek to imitate the movements of the "master" or "model" in question. But since this is based on a clear motivation, there is a strong sense of achievement, and hence, a strong sense of self-discipline that must go into mastering the skill. This might be closely related to persistence, where the student will eventually learn that the actions that go into being a true master cannot be faked, but come about only after a long struggle.
Speaking more generally, Social Learning is a community-based approach to education. Educators, under this view, would be encouraged to expose children to as many crafts and occupations as possible within the local community. The children who are attracted to a certain profession could then, slowly, be exposed to it on a regular basis, gradually imitating its movements and basic attitudes. This then inserts the student into the organic life of the community and ejects the student from the rarefied world of the behaviorist, "cause-effect" approach of book learning. SL is the negation of the behaviorist approach to education.