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Leveraging Policy to Support a Data-Informed Approach to Social-Emotional Learning

May 23, 2018 Inform

By Bob LaRocca, J.D., Director of Policy and Communications, Transforming Education There’s a palpable, growing urgency to focus on social-emotional learning (SEL) in our schools. Education experts and policymakers recognize that building healthy relationships and responsible decision-making matters to student outcomes, and teachers overwhelmingly acknowledge that SEL is important to learning. Meanwhile, recent “staggering statistics” reveal the high rate at which today’s students suffer from mental illness and trauma – conditions which certain SEL-related practices can work to address. For these reasons and others, more and more educators are seeking to intentionally cultivate learning environments that help students develop socially and emotionally. This demand for SEL presents a key opportunity for state and local education leaders to take action. Although […]

Measuring Social Reasoning in Children: Be Part of a National Norming Study!

May 16, 2018 Connect

by Nicole Russo-Ponsaran, Rush NeuroBehavioral Center Millions of children in the United States have social challenges that are related to behavioral and academic difficulties. To address this problem, many states are adopting social-emotional learning standards and schools are implementing programs that teach children how to interact positively with others. Yet, educators have surprisingly few tools available to adequately measure social-emotional skills children directly. Ever wonder how a child navigates her social world and what makes one student more successful than another? Using the theoretical social information processing model by Crick and Dodge as its framework, the research team at Rush NeuroBehavioral Center, in partnership with Soar Technology, Inc., developed Virtual Environment for Social Information Processing, or VESIPTM, […]

Observational Data to Inspire SEL Practice

May 9, 2018 Inform

By Charles Smith, QTurn LLC Over the past decade we have learned a lot about how to use data to transform educational settings and improve student outcomes such as social and emotional learning (SEL). In my experience, “using data to inspire SEL practice” is the right way to think about it. Transformation through inspiration requires circumstances where educators experience both organizational support and positive motivation to demonstrate and/or improve their practice. From a measurement perspective, we’re asking a question about the consequences of producing the SEL data: Do the data inspire teachers and youth workers to demonstrate their best practices or to work on improving them? For obvious reasons, much of the action in the field of SEL measurement […]

Sorting Through Positive Development Frameworks

May 2, 2018 Inform

By: Katherine M. Ross, Ph.D., Clark Hill Institute for Positive Youth Development, Virginia Commonwealth University Patrick H. Tolan, Ph.D., Curry School of Education, University of Virginia The shifting interest from the longstanding deficit orientation to how healthy, effective development occurs has generated renewed excitement for education, health and wellbeing. In this new approach, four major frameworks have emerged: Social Competence, Social and Emotional Learning, Positive Youth Development, and Positive Psychology. Surprisingly, the literature, contributors, and consumers of each framework have developed with little cross-fertilization. Within frameworks and among adherents of each, programs, key concepts, and implications for promotion of positive development and prevention of youth problems have been produced separately. How similar are these approaches and are there meaningful distinctions in how, […]

Ending the Testing Debate: New Report is Advancing the Case for Ways to Measure the Hard-to-Measure

April 25, 2018 Inform

By Lexi Barrett, Senior Director of National Education Policy at Jobs for the Future (JFF); and Stephanie Krauss, Director of Special Projects at JFF and CASEL CSI advisor For those of us who have championed the importance of SEL and deeper learning for some time, we know the sticking points. One concern we hear a lot is, “social emotional and deeper learning skills may be important, but how do you measure them?” As the saying goes, what gets measured gets done. As we recover from the education era of standardization—marked by No Child Left Behind, remembered for its many standardized tests—we see this question for what it is. People want to know how you can measure these hard-to-measure skills, consistently […]

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Blog

Leveraging Policy to Support a Data-Informed Approach to Social-Emotional Learning

Measuring Social Reasoning in Children: Be Part of a National Norming Study!

Observational Data to Inspire SEL Practice

Sorting Through Positive Development Frameworks

Ending the Testing Debate: New Report is Advancing the Case for Ways to Measure the Hard-to-Measure

INFORM

INSPIRE

ENGAGE

CONNECT

Blog

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