Inspire

Design Challenge Winner: Student Assessment Engagement

By James Soland, NWEA   Any educator who’s administered a test will likely relate to this anecdote: while most students in class appear absorbed in the assessment, there’s one student who stares off into space. Or who doodles on his scratch paper.  Or who simply puts her head down on the desk.  And, it’s usually unsurprising when scores for that student come back low.   What we’ve learned at NWEA through our research partnership with Santa Ana Unified School District is that these small signs of disengagement from a test can be subtle manifestations of deep-rooted issues related to self-belief, motivation, and engagement.  They can be clues to how students perceive themselves, and to where they see themselves going.  …

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Data Use in Practice

I’ve never been to the Grand Canyon. But I know enough to understand that the distance between one rim and the other is vast and only traversed with monumental effort (or a helicopter).
The field of school-based social-emotional learning has its own Grand Canyon. On the one side: assessment data; on the other: teacher practices. Between them: a vast distance not easily spanned…
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Sharing SEL Assessments with the Community

Washoe County School District (WCSD) is one of eight urban school districts that partnered with CASEL to implement comprehensive SEL practices at all grade levels since 2012. Since then, all schools in the district have implemented Social and Emotional Learning – a key component of WCSD’s strategic plan – through staff training, curriculum, and integration of standards into schools and classrooms. In 2013, WCSD and CASEL received an Institute of Education Sciences grant to develop a measure to assess students’ social and emotional competencies and study how they impact student academic and behavioral outcomes. This researcher-practitioner partnership collaborated to improve self-assessments of social emotional competencies as part of a regular school climate survey. Over the past four years, Washoe has…

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Innovation Zone Approach to SEL Accountability & Improvement

The CORE Districts have long been proponents of measuring student social emotional learning. There is powerful evidence that academic outcomes improve when schools focus on SEL.  As California develops its Every Student Succeeds Plan, we are urging policymakers to create an Innovation Zone wherein social emotional learning and other locally-focused improvement measures can count for accountability purposes beginning in the 2017 school year.
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