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Continuous Improvement in Guilford County Schools: Organizing for the Journey Ahead

May 27, 2020 Inform

By: Jessica Bernstein, Lisa Brenner, Ally Skoog-Hoffman, Bloodine Barthelus The last blog post in this series highlighted the CASEL continuous improvement framework and illustrated how it supports an iterative journey toward high quality systemic social and emotional learning (SEL) implementation. To contextualize what this looks like in practice, the next four blog entries will spotlight district voices from the field. This is the first of the four, featuring CASEL’s newest district partner, Guilford County Schools (GCS) – which serves the High Point and Greensboro communities of North Carolina. In this blog, we outline GCS’s thoughtful approach to how organizing this work paved the pathway for systemic SEL work. A Continuous Improvement Approach from Day One When GCS became a CASEL […]

The Journey of Systemic SEL implementation Using Continuous Improvement as a Guide

May 13, 2020 Inform

By: Ally Skoog-Hoffman and Rob Jagers At CASEL, we think about continuous improvement (CI) as a roadmap that allows school-, district-, and/or state-level SEL teams to first think about the destination of their systemic SEL implementation journey, and then from there to map the “route” in reaching their proximal and longer-term goals. SEL teams start with the end in mind and cycle back to it – the “destination” is both the starting point for planning the journey and the place a team comes back to in each cycle of continuous improvement. We encourage educators to ask a set of essential questions when embedding continuous improvement into systemic implementation efforts: Where do we want to go? Where are we now and […]

Measuring Social, Emotional and Intercultural/Transcultural Competencies in European Context: Insights from the Policy Experimentation Project HAND IN HAND

April 8, 2020 Inform

By:Ana Kozina, Educational Research Institute, Ljubljana, SloveniaNina Roczen, DIPF | Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education, Frankfurt, GermanyAlbert Denk, Technical University Munich, Munich, Germany “HAND in HAND: Social and Emotional Skills for Tolerant and Non-discriminative Societies (A Whole School Approach)” is a European policy experimentation project that involves eight institutions[1] across five countries (Slovenia, Croatia, Germany, Sweden, Denmark) and targets the need detected in Europe and internationally to develop inclusive societies (schools and classrooms) that allow every student to feel accepted and be able to achieve their potential, particularly in response to increasing discriminatory behavior some students are facing. HAND in HAND targeted this need with an innovative support system for school settings that combines the promotion of […]

SEL In An Unplanned Home School Setting

April 1, 2020 Inform

By Clark McKown, xSEL Labs With nationwide school closures in effect, many households have become unplanned home schools, and parents have become teachers, with all of the responsibilities that go with the job, including setting the climate for learning, managing “student” behavior, and supporting student motivation. In my non-scientific sample of a handful of new home schools, one theme stands out: it’s hard work. Most parents will find their way through a combination of instinct and trial and error. There are a few things that parents as teachers can do right now that can make their teaching experience, and the experience of their children, go well. Most of our readers are educators, and many are also parents. I offer these […]

You Can’t Oops into Excellence: A Primer for Social Emotional Learning Implementation in High-Quality Youth Development Programming

March 25, 2020 Inform

by Tasha Franklin Johnson, Ph.D. and Aasha Joshi, Ph.D., YMCA-USA Who hasn’t heard the statistic that it takes 21 days to change a habit? You know, remember when you most recently tried to start a new diet, engage in a new exercise routine or make a lifestyle shift. But if a behavior change or forming a new habit takes 21 days, then how many days are needed to change or develop a habit of mind? And, what if you want to change habits of mind for lots of people? How many days are needed to change an already up and running system? Grappling with these questions are essential to cultivating a game changing, training and development paradigm for character development […]

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