Social and Emotional Learning Fundamentals: SEL 101 with CASEL

we're really excited to talk today about the foundations of social and emotional learning this is an sel 101 we're going to be talking about what sel is and how we see it promoted throughout schools and communities and we'll be also sharing with you resources for those of you that want to dig a little deeper uh before we get into the meet let's start by uh thinking a little bit about students or young people who are in our lives let's think about a young person in your life and think about what is it that you hope

that they will learn and be able to do to prepare them for the world tomorrow so i invite you to add into the chat a comment or two about how you what you would prioritize for the young people in your lives and what would be most important to prepare them for the world that they will be living in resiliency i see a lot of compassion wow it's going quickly perseverance empathy strong relationships emotion regulation a growth mindset gratitude these are all amazing responses i'm happy to see all of these things popping in here and this

really does set us up well for what we're going to be talking about today before we get into sel just a brief note on who is castle for those of you that are new to castle castle's been around for 27 years we're the collaborative for academic social and emotional learning it's a non-partisan nonprofit that defines social emotional learning more than 20 years ago the goal of castle's mission is to really help make sure that sel is part of every child's education pre-k through 12. we do that in a number of different ways we do that

by advancing the science of sel by really looking at what does the research say about social emotional learning and its impact on other outcomes we also have a practice team which is what i lead our practice team to really understand what does sel look like in classrooms in schools and in districts we have a policy effort which is where we're focused on the federal level and most importantly the state level to create those conditions within states so that districts can prioritize seo and all of this is done in collaboration with sel partners and organizations and

convening folks together to really bring forth the best research the best practice the best policy ideas so that we can advance the field sometimes people think that castle has a program or curriculum ourselves we do not we're collaborative and we are really our goal is to advance the field so let's take a quick poll before we get into the sel and just answer quickly how familiar are you with social and emotional learning so go ahead and answer if you're extremely familiar you're a pro or you're somewhat familiar moderately familiar or not familiar at all i'm

just going to give it about five more seconds and then we'll take a look at the results all right so this will help me to get a sense of who's in our audience and how much time to spend on different things ah looks like most of our audience almost half is moderately familiar um and actually a big chunk of you are extremely familiar so thank you for joining us um and some of you are somewhat familiar and a small percentage are this may be your first opportunity to learn about social emotional learning so we're happy

to have all of you here today before i tell you about castle's definition we are going to actually hear from a student who can describe for us how they understand seo social emotional learning to me provides students with purpose seo was a great foundation and catalyst for me atomic to value education and value human connection well seo taught you to step up when you need to but also step back when you had to so you were creating space for yourself but also making space for others so this is in the words of a student and

we think it's always great to bring the voice of kids into the conversation let's talk about castle's definition and how we understand social and emotional learning so this actually this definition has been updated um about gosh almost a year ago now the definition now is the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge skills and attitudes to develop healthy identities to manage their emotions and achieve personal and collective goals to feel and show empathy for others to establish those positive relationships and to make good decisions you all may be familiar

with the research on sel and there's a lot of research on our website that that our research team has been synthesizing and conducting these are some of the high level outcomes that we've seen and this has been well documented that sel leads to improved academic outcomes and behaviors that sel benefits are not short term but they are actually long term and that we see benefits globally we know that investing in sel is a wise financial investment there's research that suggests that investment in sel has an 11 to 1 return on investment and we also know

that it's not simply about outcomes in school but long-term life outcomes so if you're interested in more about the research you can learn about the meta-analysis and all the different studies that have been done on sel by clicking on this link below which when you receive the slides this will take you to where you can learn more about sel research when we think about why schools and districts implement sel we've learned that schools and districts have a number of different priorities for why they see sel as a key part of their mission these are some

examples of the kinds of priorities that school districts have that they really feel like their sel implementation is designed to advance in some cases schools are focused on the benefit of sel to their academic achievement others are really focused on college and career readiness workforce readiness we see a growing number of schools and districts who are understanding that sel can play a critical role in their equity work obviously mental health is a key priority across the nation especially in the wake of the pandemic and also really understanding that sel is foundational to civic learning and

civic engagement these are just a few of the different priorities that we've seen and we really do believe that every school should examine what their local priorities are and what their vision is for their young people and then think about their sel implementation as part of advancing that mission so when you think about these priorities or others that you may have which of these are you working on when you think about scl implementation so we'll take another quick poll to kind of hear from our audience about which of these or other priorities your sel implementation

is focused on so thanks for clicking in on which of these you feel is for your local context most relevant i'm eager to see the results of this poll and love the opportunity to hear directly from you in real time so go ahead and click on one of these boxes and if you selected other go ahead and drop in the chat what your other is and i'll give it about five more seconds and then we'll see what folks are focusing on ah mental health with a strong showing at 76 i have to say i would

have predicted that especially in this day and age the priority for sel had been growing significantly before the pandemic and we've seen a really sharp increase in the priority for sel as a result of the pandemic so i'm not surprised to see that mental health is top of mind for so many folks and we agree with you that social and emotional learning is a key element to providing a preventative um and positive universal approach to supporting positive mental health also about a third of you are saying academics is a key priority which we know from

research that sel can have a strong impact on academics college and career readiness is in there at 16 um equity at 31 so that is another trend that we've seen throughout the country over the last several years that our mission for equity we recognize that sel can play a role there as well and civic learning is something that's a little smaller percentage but we'll be talking later about how we'll be sharing more information about scl's role in civic learning next week at our virtual summit okay and in the other category it looks like many people

have popped into the chat that they are looking at some other things climate and culture in schools nutrition education um really looking at physical and healthy development responsible thinking and ethics so lots of ways in which you see priorities showing up at schools and how sel can play an important role in that so let's talk for a minute about what we mean by social and emotional learning i think probably many of you are familiar with castle's wheel we're going to just take a minute and talk about these competencies we these five competencies are interrelated and

they are critically important and they sort of within each one there's a number of examples of things that would be sort of exemplars of that competency let's start in this orange section with um the self so when we think about self-awareness we think about how do we understand who we are how we feel what we value what our growth mindset might be what is our sense of purpose what matters to me this is really about how we understand ourselves and our own thoughts and beliefs and values and this is critically important that we really take

time to reflect on who we are and also on the self-management this has to do with how we behave as an individual how do we manage those emotions how do we manage stress how do we manage our impulses how do we stay focused how do we have perseverance in the face of obstacles how do we stay organized how do we take initiative how do we understand that we have power to make a difference all of this is part of our sort of self-management and um you know understanding who we are and how we behave given

what we understand about ourselves so let's next move into the green zone which is where we really think about others in social awareness this is where we really begin to understand how other people think how other people feel can we can we read body language can't we to tell how people are feeling can we put ourselves in their shoes to really understand their perspective can we express gratitude um can we create and experience a sense of belonging with others do we understand what the social norms and demands are at any given time what's going on

around us that's all the social awareness and then of course it's how do we engage with others than all of that so how do we communicate effectively how do we demonstrate cultural competence how do we build positive and healthy relationships how do we manage conflict how do we ask for help when we need it how do we offer help when we see that others need it what kind of leadership we have here and really are we willing to engage with others and stand up for others when we see um when we see that there's a

need for that so the green zone is about how we understand others and how we engage effectively with them and then we put that all together to make responsible decisions so are we are we being curious to learn more about situations and analyzing what could be what could be consequences of different decisions are we able to solve problems on our own and together are we able to sort of take be ethical in how we behave are we able to reflect on my role and what role i can play in the broader community that's the responsible

decision making so these are the different competencies and skills that we know are foundational to success in school success in the workplace and success in life and when we want to promote these within school there's a lot of different ways that we would do that there are key settings that are critically important as we think about a systemic approach to promoting social emotional competence the first and obvious one is the classroom here's where you would find curriculum that's designed to teach those skills you would find opportunities for a positive classroom climate and ways that we're

engaging together also within the school there are opportunities to promote social and emotional competence throughout the building in terms of how the school climate and how the adults are interacting with each other there are also really important opportunities as we partner with families and caregivers to work together to promote healthy social emotional competence for our young people and to relate positively to families and caregivers and throughout our community so here's where we would really want to align our efforts with community partners and also think about how we can contribute to our communities through service learning

and what have you um so this model is castle's model for school-wide sel where we are promoting these social and emotional competencies within these different environments and we're coordinating the practices um and policies within the different environments so that we are promoting what we call a systemic approach but this model is still pretty abstract and sometimes people ask us so what does that actually look like in a school here are 10 indicators of school-wide sel that really provide more information about what this looks like within a school so sometimes people believe oh if we're doing

sel in our school that means we're doing explicit sel instruction and we would say yes that is super important and it's really important that schools allocate time for explicit instruction and sel skills but it's by no means sufficient so in addition to that sel instruction that's explicit we also know that there are great opportunities to promote social emotional competence while teaching academic content so it's not a either or it's a both and additionally we know that it's important for young people to have an opportunity to use their voice to make decisions to show leadership within

the classroom and within the school also throughout the school we know it's important that the climate and the culture of the school is supportive and positive that the adults themselves have an opportunity to reflect on and develop their own social emotional competence so they can be in healthy relationships with each other and with students and model those skills we know that discipline policy can promote social and emotional learning in in restorative ways um if we are careful about how we structure those policies and and provide that support we also know it's important to provide an

integrated support just like you would for academics that there are universal tier one supports for social emotional learning and that there are also opportunities to provide additional support for students who need that i mentioned earlier that authentic family partnerships is a key part as well as authentic community partnerships where we are aligned in our mission and always looking at what we're doing and thinking about are we getting the results we're looking for and how should we improve our implementation to achieve those results so the continuous improvement process is key so these are the different sort

of things that you would see in a school that is prioritizing social emotional learning it can be overwhelming to think that we have to do all of these things typically castle would recommend that schools focus on certain priorities at a time not try to do everything at once and we provide a lot of guidance free on our website on how to do that let's take another poll and just reflect on these 10 indicators and think about which of these do you think is an area of strength which is something that you feel your school or

district is doing well in this moment and secondly which of these represents an area of growth so emily's going to launch this question here so there's two questions here the first one again is to look at what do you think your school or district what's relatively speaking an area of strength and relatively speaking where do you feel like would be an important area for you to focus for growth this will take just a few more minutes all right we'll give it just a few more seconds and then we'll look at the results make sure you

see that there are two questions you have to scroll down to get to that second one which represents an area of strength relatively speaking and where do you feel like there's great opportunity for growth okay uh emily let's see what we learned wow so this is kind of all over the board here i don't know if you all are able to see the full results but it looks like supportive climate is maybe the most often it has the most responses relative to the others and that's at 20 so a fifth of you believe that you

have a strong climate which is great um and it looks like uh in this first one um very few would list adult sel as a strength which is interesting to me because adult sel has a lot to do with how we create a supportive climate um so that's kind of an interesting finding there and then let's look at how we responded on the second one which represents an area of growth which we see lots of areas of growth and again adult sel has a lot of folks 29 saying this is an area of growth family

partnerships looks like an area of growth um actually it looks like since people were able to select more than one that there's a lot more areas of growth uh reported here than strength so it looks like we all have work to do i think what's helpful about looking at these indicators is recognizing that um you know a systemic approach to sel is not just one thing there are many different ways that we can be promoting uh our young people's social emotional learning and we don't have to take all of it on at once but just

being aware of the different areas can be helpful as we think about our work okay so let's move on we're not going to have time to get into how you actually do this which is i know what everyone is really eager to learn um but castle does have a number of resources that are free and available on our website that can help you really think about what are the first steps for getting a systemic approach to sel implemented and how do i work with others to do that whether you're at a school level or a

district level on our website i'm just going to give you kind of a quick preview of some of the things that you'll find on our website if you're at a district level the district resource center is extremely valuable as a resource because the district resource center gives an overview of how you do this at a district level it provides guidance on the different areas of implementation and it also provides examples from other districts who have already done this so when we think about the ways to do a systemic implementation at the district level for example

one of the key areas is developing a communications plan for how parents and staff and students will understand the priority for sel rather than starting from scratch you'll find in the district resource center templates for doing that examples from other districts you'll see strategic plans on for example and you'll see lots of those you know sel 101 presentations that other districts have given don't need to reinvent the wheels the district resource center is extremely valuable and at the school level there's the guide to school-wide sel and that really is designed to help schools think about

how they can get started with their implementation there's a rubric if you want to do a self-assessment that goes through those 10 indicators and you can rate yourself on how how deep is your implementation on each of those which can help you lead to your action plan and then there's guidance on how to think about everything from establishing an sel team to creating a vision to how to think about promoting um social emotional learning for students and a continuous improvement strategy so the school guide to school-wide sel is extremely valuable for schools who are thinking

about how they approach this work if you want more than that guidance on our website there actually is professional learning that castle offers um both live and on demand we have a live uh version a live session that will be started in january that's a four part series that you can register for we'll also be launching an on-demand series if you are not able to make the live time so there is professional learning that really takes you through how do we actually do this in our school if assessment is something that you're interested in there

is also guidance on how to assess social and emotional learning and how to choose an appropriate measure for that whether you're thinking about assessing your implementation or assessing the outcomes that students might get you can see the sel assessment guide one of the most common questions that we often hear is how do i choose a program for social emotional learning again castle does not have a program but castle has reviewed the evidence in the field on how programs have been effective so the guide to sel programs is available and that can help you think through

a process for selecting an evidence-based program we also have the fcl roadmap to reopening which helps schools that are reopening after covid think about the best way to reopen by this time i'm hopeful that all schools have reopened but there's great guidance in there as well and then there's also some really important resources available for for parents and thinking about how they can promote social emotional learning including a a recent campaign to help parents learn more about scl so all these resources are available on our website if you go to castle.org you'll see up in

the upper right corner castle websites that's where you're going to find most of these resources because they're all kind of mini websites within castle's website