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Flipping the Script on Social Emotional Learning in Afterschool Spaces

March 4, 2020 Inform

By Kari Denissen Cunnien In 2016, I was part of Propel SEL, a broad-based community partnership in the Minneapolis and Saint Paul designed to strengthen social emotional learning across multiple afterschool, summer learning, and mentoring sites. The initiative could have taken a more well-worn path: select a common SEL framework to use across sites, train adults to implement it, measure the outcomes. But that is not what happened. Instead, we walked a less tread path and the results changed minds and program practices. Afterschool program staff who participated in Propel SEL commented that the experience was, “powerful”, “brought staff together”, and “changed everything about the way we thought of SEL.” Here is how Propel SEL flipped the script on the […]

Transitioning: Out, Over, In, and Forward

February 26, 2020 Inform

By Dale Blyth and Roger P. Weissberg Life and learning involve many transitions – transitions out of initiatives, transitions over to new ways of doing things, and transitions into exploring new ways to move forward. At times of transition it is critically important to express appreciation. We wish to express our appreciation to all those who have been on the journey with us and for those who are helping to create new opportunities moving forward. This blog is about the transitions we are making as the Assessment Work Group efforts transition out in June 2020, and we ensure its resources transition over to CASEL formally so they can continue to be accessed. Finally, it is about exploring new possibilities for […]

Adult SEL: Fully Measuring the Impact of Supporting Teachers

February 19, 2020 Inform

By: Mark T. Greenberg, Chairperson, CREATE for Education, and Emeritus Bennett Chair of Prevention Science (Pennsylvania State University) The last two decades have seen an assault on America’s public schools and their teachers as evidenced by their de-professionalization, assault on their unions, and immense philanthropic support for charters and vouchers (Ravitch, 2020). Teacher satisfaction has plummeted and many teachers left the profession out of frustration with the test accountability focus of educational policy and the narrowing of the curriculum (Greenberg, Brown & Abenavoli, 2016). During this same period, the goal of creating caring and responsible students began to gain significant attention through the effective research (Durlak et al., 2011) and advocacy of the field of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL; […]

Enhancing Social-Emotional Learning with Self-Regulation for Learning

February 12, 2020 Inform

By Richard M. Cash, Ed.D. (Education Consultant, nRich Educational Consulting, Inc.) Today’s world if far more complex than any other time in human history. Over the past two decades the world’s issues have become more interconnected than ever before. The economy, changing climates, health and wealth disparities, international and national conflicts, terrorism and (fill in the blank) ___phobias. The world truly has grown smaller. However, adults and children alike are becoming more socially isolated. With advances in technology, especially in the social media medium, people can “unfriend” those who they disagree with, “block” people with differing points of view, or bully opponents either anonymously or from a distance. It is especially disconcerting when those in power or who have […]

Social and Emotional Skills Stealth Assessment

February 5, 2020 Inform

By: Kate E. Walton, John Whitmer, & Jeremy Burrus – ACT, Inc. Can we measure social and emotional (SE) skills without using an assessment? Students’ SE skills are reflected every day in real-world behaviors, such as in daily interactions with online learning environments. Can these behaviors be analyzed in some way to provide scores and feedback on student SE skills? Here we discuss the results of an exploratory study which serves as a demonstration that this may indeed be possible. First, we discuss some of the challenges associated with assessing SE skills. We then propose linking learning analytics research and SE skill assessment. Next, we describe a study we conducted using learning analytics methods to examine associations between SE skills, […]

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