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SEL, Dance, & Equity

March 18, 2020 Inform

How a Movement-Based SEL Program is Using Tech to Reach More Students & Assess Outcomes By Margot Toppen, Founder and CEO, EduMotion Imagine if every school day began with a few minutes of students dancing together. Since 2006, EduMotion has been providing programs that aim to foster inclusion, respect and social awareness through the joy of dance. In Chicago, we provide our flagship outreach program (Dancing with Class) through direct service, sending professional Teaching Artists to schools to facilitate lessons. To measure SEL outcomes, we’ve identified key skills students work on related to each of the five competency domains that make up the CASEL framework and assess outcomes in these areas through student and teacher surveys. Through student surveys, we […]

The Future of SEL Assessment – 5 Essential Directions

March 11, 2020 Inform

By: Christina Cipriano, Ph.D., Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence On October 2nd, 2019, sixty-three stakeholders reflecting the national SEL assessment landscape in the U.S. participated in an invited, full-day work session to build on the vision articulated by the Assessment Work Group’s State of the Field Report and National Commission Report by generating ideas and forging partnerships to launch the most essential next phases of work related to the assessment of SEL. After a full day of collaborative discourse (facilitated by Education First) and a review of the themes that emerged, we identified five essential next phases of work for advancing SEL assessment. The full report can be found here, and we summarize these five directions below. Leverage Resources and […]

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; […]

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