Z – Building a Trans-Inclusive School Environment
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Social & Emotional Learning
Calm Down Corner
One way to help children learn how to self-regulate is by providing them with calm down corners. A calm down corner is a designated space in a home or classroom with the sole intent of being a safe space for a child to go to when they feel their emotions are running too high and they need to regain their emotional and physical control. Gain some tips for creating a calm down corner in this short article.
42 MTSS Intervention Strategies for Your Student Support Team
Every student comes into the classroom with their own experiences and needs. As educators, we can support students by choosing intervention strategies designed to help them succeed. A strong Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) depends on individualized, research-based intervention strategies. Intervention plans must be relationship-informed as well as data-informed, building on what we know about our students and determining how best to support them. Check out these ideas for your student support team.
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Creating Identity-Safe Schools and Classrooms
This research report addresses the ways in which practitioners can build inclusive and affirming school environments with keen attention to identity safety that can support all students in feeling safe, protected, and valued in school environments. A growing body of research points to effective school-based practices and structures, described below, that educators can use to foster the identity safety that nurtures student achievement, positive attachments to school, and a genuine sense of belonging and membership for each student.
Principals’ Social & Emotional Competence: a Key Factor in Creating Caring Schools
School principals have substantial impacts on many aspects of their schools, including school climate and culture, teacher well-being and retention, and students’ school success. As such, the personal and professional development of principals is a key element in creating a caring school in which adults and children feel welcomed, cared for, and challenged. It is now recognized that principals experience substantial job-related stress which can compromise their personal well-being as well as their leadership. Surprisingly, the social and emotional development and well-being of principals has received little attention.
This brief provides a conceptual model of the Prosocial School Leader, which has two components. The first is the principal’s own social and emotional competence (SEC) and the ability to handle stress and model caring and culturally competent behaviors with staff and students. The second component is an enhanced model of leadership in which principals are the prosocial leaders whose responsibility is to ensure that all staff, students, parents, and community members feel safe, cared for, respected, and valued. Principals’ SECs, well-being, and leadership form the foundation that influences the effective implementation of social and emotional learning (SEL), school climate, teacher functioning and well-being, family and community partnerships, and downstream student outcomes.
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CASEL’s SEL Framework
Learn more about CASEL’S framework, known to many as the “CASEL wheel,” that helps cultivate skills and environments that advance students’ learning and development. This framework creates a foundation for applying evidence-based SEL strategies to your school community.
Transformative SEL
“Transformative SEL” is a form of SEL implementation where young people and adults build strong, respectful, and lasting relationships to engage in co-learning. It facilitates critical examination of individual and contextual factors that contribute to inequities and collaborative solutions that lead to personal, community, and societal well-being. Through SEL, students and adults develop social and emotional skills needed for school and community engagement, with a focus on rights and responsibilities for creating learning environments that are caring and just.
Talking Circles: for Restorative Justice and Beyond
Learn how talking circles can serve other purposes beyond restorative justice, such as creating safe spaces, building connections and offering teachers a unique means of formative assessment. The article addresses four main areas of concern by providing background context and filling readers in on where the SEL movement has been, the strategic thinking that has guided CASEL field leaders and collaborators, and the possibilities for the future.
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Social and emotional learning is hegemonic miseducation: students deserve humanization instead
This article examines the pedagogy and psychology of humanization as a viable framework to confront systemically imposed self-hate, divide and conquer, and sub oppression if it teaches students knowledge (and love) of self, solidarity, and self-determination. The ahistorical objectives of social and emotional learning fall short of repairing the cultural contempt of hegemonic miseducation and does not address the primary social forces negatively impacting the health and wellness of communities of color – their colonial relationship with inequitable social systems. In this article, it is posited that humanization be put in place of social and emotional learning because SEL’s inadequate analysis of intersecting oppressions justifies existing power relations in communities and schools.
