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Featured Resources from the Field

February 21, 2018 Inform

By Jordan Trejo, CASEL Exciting progress is happening in the SE competence assessment field, including the recent release of several great resources. Here’s five to check out: This month’s issue of ASCD’s Educational Leadership is dedicated to all things assessment. Articles span topics from thinking about what really matters in contemporary education and assessment, to teacher-created performance assessments, to a standardized approach called ‘goal attainment scaling’. Half of the articles are currently available free to read for a limited time. While you’re there, make sure you also read “Accounting for the Whole Child” from our collaborators at Transforming Education. They make a strong case for the importance of SEL and why measuring student SE competencies goes hand-in-hand […]

Remember the Relationships: The Missing Link that Makes SEL Measures More Understandable and Actionable

February 14, 2018 Inform

By Kent Pekel and Peter C. Scales, Search Institute The term “social-emotional learning” starts with the word social, and so it may seem strange to contend, as we do in this blog and in a longer white paper, that most approaches to SEL and SEL measurement underemphasize the role of relationships in strengthening SEL. As the field has focused on students’ interpersonal capacities and intrapersonal self-regulation, relationships obviously haven’t been ignored, but, for the most part, we suggest that the field hasn’t paid adequate attention to the relationships between teachers and students through which social and emotional skills can be powerfully enhanced. The focus of most SEL measures is on the individual student’s social-emotional knowledge and skills, rather than […]

From a Teacher’s Perspective

February 7, 2018 Connect

By Heather Schwartz, CASEL A few months ago at CASEL we were discussing the Assessment Work Group. Before sharing my perspective on an issue, I found myself saying “I’m not an expert in assessment, but….” And then it dawned on me: as a teacher, I know about assessment. I know a lot about it. It’s what we teachers do day in and day out. It is the act of leaning in to our students to listen and observe. It is how we understand their process for making meaning. For me, this is what SEL assessment should be all about, as well. This realization reminded me of an experience I had in the classroom. Isabel was an extremely hard working student […]

Using SEL Assessment Reports with Students: Insights for Empowering Growth

January 31, 2018 Inspire

By Jonathan E. Martin, Director of K12 Consulting Services and a member of the SEL team at ACT. Who are the figures most important to the work of developing Social Emotional skills in the students in our schools: Teachers, Parents, Administrators, or Counselors? How easy it is to forget that the best answer is always the student him or herself! As students at City High School, a charter school in Tucson, ready themselves for college and careers, they’re eager to receive an affirmation of the skills they already have, and also to better understand what they should focus on improving before making their giant leap beyond secondary schooling—but not only in their academic subjects. They also want to know how […]

SEL with Adults is Hard, so Teach it Early

January 17, 2018 Connect

By Meaghan Ruddy, The Wright Center Supporting SEL in adult learners is very challenging due to the power of social and emotional habits as they form over time. Teaching SEL at younger ages will likely result in more helpful habits as those students age. As we develop we are strengthening all sorts of habits all the time whether we know it or not. This is because the brain seeks to automate as much as possible as quickly as possible. The brain has two main systems: the executive and the automatic, or default. The executive is resource heavy in terms of the energy it needs to keep running, so it creates habits that become default ways of being. While the executive engages […]

INFORM

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Blog

Featured Resources from the Field

Remember the Relationships: The Missing Link that Makes SEL Measures More Understandable and Actionable

From a Teacher’s Perspective

Using SEL Assessment Reports with Students: Insights for Empowering Growth

SEL with Adults is Hard, so Teach it Early

INFORM

INSPIRE

ENGAGE

CONNECT

Blog

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