Exploring Challenges and Promising Practices for Measurement for Social Emotional Learning and Educator Well-being

Group Submission Type: Pre-conference Workshop

Description of Session

Literature reviews in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) have found that targeted, explicit social and emotional learning (SEL) and soft skills instruction across the education continuum can promote learners’ overall well-being, as well as improve academic, employment, and health outcomes. All learners should have the opportunity to build social and emotional and soft skills through learning experiences that encourage feedback, reflection, practice, and application of these skills. Furthermore, evidence suggests that supporting educator well-being, including teachers, coaches, and mentors, is the most effective way to support the development of social and emotional skills of learners, even when there is no separate SEL content in the curriculum. However, how SEL skills and educator well-being are defined, codified, and ultimately measured varies greatly, making it challenging to compare results. Additionally, most of the tools for measuring children’s SEL and teachers’ are not easy to use in conflict-affected and fragile contexts.

Given the challenging environment in which many educators work, including crisis- and conflict-affected and low-resourced settings, this pre-conference workshop emphasizes evidence-based and effective strategies and tools that support capable adults in understanding, modeling, assessing, and measuring social-emotional and soft skills for learners. This workshop builds on a successful pre-conference workshop on “Strategies to Model, Practice, and Integrate SEL and Soft Skills across the Education Continuum,” delivered at CIES 2023. The objective of this pre-conference workshop is to highlight measurement strategies and approaches that foster educators’ understanding and monitoring of well-being and social and emotional skills. The target audience for the workshop includes practitioners who engage with SEL and soft skills programming and measurement through curriculum development, educator training, program design, Monitoring Evaluation Learning (MEL), and/or communities of practice. After participating in this pre-conference workshop, participants will be able to:

1. Understand USAID’s approach to integrating SEL and soft skills evidence-based practices into learning activities across the education continuum.
2. Identify key challenges with measuring SEL and soft skills in education programs.
3. Examine processes for developing contextually relevant SEL measurement tools for learners, and teacher well-being measurement tools, including environmental considerations in crisis- and conflict-affected contexts, to ensure approaches are safe, inclusive, and equitable for all learners.
4. Understand measurement strategies that offer insights into the relationship between SEL and foundational skills, including contextualization of indicators and instruments.

This in-person, activity-based workshop will be an interactive space for practitioners and program evaluators to learn about approaches to understanding how children, parents, and teachers define and prioritize SEL and educator well-being, and processes for applying this understanding to produce context-relevant, validated assessments for each. Participants will also examine how these skills are being measured. Activities will include deep dives into processes for locally defining relevant SEL skills and conceptions of educator well-being, and then developing contextually relevant measurement tools and approaches for use at the classroom, school, and community-levels.

Sub Unit

• Pre-Conference Workshops, Book launches, and Visual Art Exhibits / Pre-Conference Workshop

Chair

• Julia Finder Johna, United States Agency for International Development USAID

Workshop Organizers

• Shira R Babow, TRG

• Julia Finder Johna, United States Agency for International Development USAID

• Laura Conrad, USAID Center for Education

• Brianna Reed, Education Development Center, Inc.

• Deborah Marie Rodriguez Garcia, Save the Children

Presenting author

• Shira R Babow, TRG