Practitioners Sought for New Opportunity
EngagePractitioners Sought for New Opportunity
National Practitioners Advisory Group on
Using Data to Inspire SEL Practice
Apply HERE by April 25th, 2018 Deadline
We are looking for 20 practice leaders — educational practitioners from many different levels — who want to use their experience and wisdom to help improve the way data is used to inspire SEL practice and improve the social and emotional learning of children and youth. We hope you can help us find just such people for the new National Practitioners Advisory Group on Using Data to Inspire SEL Practice (NPAG) to be launched this summer. The NPAG is being formed to engage practice leaders and more fully ground the work and products of a national collaborative SEL field building project.
The Establishing Practical Social-Emotional Competence Assessments of Preschool to High School Students Project was created to advance progress toward establishing practical SEL assessments that are scientifically sound, feasible to use, and actionable as a key priority for the field. The project is driven by the Assessment Work Group (AWG), a multidisciplinary collaborative of leading researchers and administrators in the fields of PreK-12 education, assessment, social and emotional learning (SEL), and related fields. This project is managed and staffed by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), in close partnership with leaders from the RAND Corporation, Harvard University, the CORE Districts, Transforming Education, and xSEL Labs. The project is funded by a variety of funders – many who are part of the Funders’ Collaborative for Innovative Measurement.
The project has established the Measuring SEL website, this weekly blog and a growing Collaborators Network of over 1400 national and international leaders interested in this work. The project and AWG are working on strategies and products (briefs, interactive guide to assessment, tools, etc.) designed to support and enhance ways of using data to inspire SEL practice. The new National Practitioners Advisory Group we are now establishing will advise, review, and engage with project efforts over the next 18 months including an in-person meeting and receive a $500 honorarium.
By practice leaders, we mean people that are or have been engaged in practice or work closely with practitioners and can reflect on the perspective, dilemmas, and wisdom of practitioners working to improve children and youth’s social and emotional learning, particularly but not exclusively through assessments and the use of the data that results. We seek thoughtful, reflective people who can bring their experience and wisdom to the discussion to help craft and review useful tools and approaches. The advisory group will include practice leaders and those who work with and influence practitioners at the community, program, classroom, school, district, state and national levels and from a range of small and medium size communities to large urban areas. Altogether we seek an advisory group that balances work with children and youth from preschool to high school ages.
We are particularly interested in people who have been or are currently implementing or care deeply about how to use data to inform, inspire real SEL practices with young people. We are not just looking for people who are or have worked with CASEL or the CASEL framework. Rather we are looking for a wide range of people with diverse experiences in trying to improve SEL and related SE competencies and are trying to figure out the role of data in these efforts.
If you or someone you know fits this description and is interested and willing to contribute to an exciting national and even international effort working with leaders from many fields, please encourage them to fill out this application survey by April 25th.
Co-Chairs for the forming the National Practitioners Advisory Group
Dale A. Blyth, Sr. Consultant for CASEL (blyth004@umn.edu)
Deb Moroney, American Institutes of Research (dmoroney@air.org)
We hope you will apply or encourage others to apply for this exciting opportunity to help inform and shape our field!
WestEd’s Reading Apprenticeship was one of only nine programs in the nation to earn a spot on the “SELect” list in the just-released 2015 CASEL Guide: Effective Social and Emotional Learning Programs—Middle and High School Edition. Programs that qualified as “SELect” had to prove that their approach was both evidence-based and effective in achieving outcomes such as improved academics, improved attitudes, and reduced problem behavior. The aim of the Guide is to provide educators with information for selecting and implementing existing SEL programs in their schools and districts. Social and emotional learning has always been a key component of the Reading Apprenticeship Framework, which emphasizes the need for teachers to create safe classrooms and positive communication – part of the Social and Personal Dimensions – in order for students to fully engage in deeper learning while developing the persistence and confidence they need to make sense of challenging texts.