Developing Contextually Relevant Emotional and Social Wellbeing Tools

• In Event: Developing SEL assessments ground-up: Learning from four contextualization initiatives in the global south

Proposal

Given the positive effects that social and emotional learning (SEL) has for children, especially those who have experienced severe adversity in conflict-affected and fragile settings, there has been a growing emphasis on this subject. However, the focus of SEL policies and programs has primarily been on children’s skills. Children learn and develop within dynamic education settings that include their teachers, peers, administrators, and other school/learning center personnel. Effective SEL interventions require more than including SEL content in lesson plans; rather, they necessitate a systemic approach that includes school leaders, teachers, and caregivers in the process of supporting students’ social and emotional development.

What has been missing from the conversation on children’s SEL skills is this focus on the education settings around children, especially the support and competency development that teachers require in order to promote children’s social and emotional development. Teachers influence children’s SEL not only by what and how they teach but also by how they interact with learners and manage the classroom. However, how SEL skills and teacher wellbeing are defined, codified, and operationalized in research and how this is translated into programs and practice is not always consistent or agreed upon. Moreover, most of the tools for measuring children’s SEL and teachers’ wellbeing have been developed in stable, high resource contexts and are not easy to adapt and use in conflict-affected and fragile contexts. This is especially important since the skills and support systems that make up children’s SEL and teacher’s wellbeing are socially normative; they are likely shaped and manifested by the environment around the individual. Therefore, it is critical to conduct research on children’s SEL skills and teacher wellbeing that is grounded in the perspectives of teachers, children, and caregivers; we need to more fully capture the unique experiences of children and teachers in varied contexts, and explore how the factors that influence SEL and teacher wellbeing manifest for students and teachers across gender, displacement status, years teaching, school location, and other characteristics.

In this presentation we will discuss a five-stage process developed for a funded project that addresses the following research questions: (1) How do primary school-age children, parents, and educators define and prioritize the social and emotional skills they believe are important in the lives of children? What are the psychometric properties (validity and reliability) of a measure that is developed using this context-specific information? (2) How do primary school teachers define and prioritize teacher wellbeing and the factors that affect this wellbeing? What are the psychometric properties (validity and reliability) of a measure that is developed using this context-specific information? We will discuss the development and initial implementation of the process in Haiti, Honduras, and Liberia and how iterative lessons are being used to adapt the process.

Authors

• Jeongmin Lee, University of Notre Dame

• Nikhit D'Sa, University of Notre Dame