Developing Classroom-Based Measures in the Service of Authentic Social-Emotional Learning

• In Event: Taking Collective Responsibility for the Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) of Adolescents Through Classroom-Embedded, Collaboratively Developed SEL Measures

Abstract

Purpose:
Immigrant children fleeing violence, poverty, and/or other hardships in their home countries demonstrate remarkable resilience in their journeys to a new life, beginning their schooling in the U.S. with only a few words of English and few social supports. In the current political environment in which newcomers are faced with xenophobic threats to basic human rights, schools serving these children have a responsibility to address not just their academic and language learning but their social-emotional needs. This presentation documents the collaborative work of educators and researchers at a newcomer high school serving recent immigrants and English learners—a school committed to developing students’ academic, linguistic, and SEL competencies. The goal of the partnership was to refine the school’s prioritized SEL competencies, build on existing learning opportunities, and identify and adapt existing measures of SEL. SEL measures were piloted by four volunteer teachers over a two-year period, with two cycles of research, feedback, and revision in the design and implementation of the measures.

Perspectives/Significance:
The way in which social-emotional competencies have typically been measured in school contexts has been disconnected from instruction (e.g., surveys conducted twice yearly), indirect (e.g., indicators associated with academic or disciplinary outcomes), with limited usefulness for school personnel seeking formative evidence to inform how they support specific students. In this project, we sought to pilot and research measures of SEL that are instructionally-embedded – more directly connected to students’ daily academic and non-academic learning in school, and that are more valid (more directly and authentically measuring the SEL construct).

Methods/Data Sources:
After meeting with school stakeholders (including families and students) to identify priority SEL outcomes for students in the school, the researcher worked with teachers to identify existing measures and to experiment with new ones, serving as a sounding board and offering feedback for the development and use of the measures. During each academic year, researchers observed classrooms and interviewed the teachers and 2-3 focal students, and also conducted student focus groups. Researchers also administered SEL pupil surveys and collected school-level administrative data about students.

Results:
The first pilot year resulted in the formulation of initial design principles, which were used to inform the design of measures piloted in the second year. Debriefs of the pilots with teachers and analyses of data evidence affirmed the design principles that promote high quality measures in the service of learning (authentic and meaningful for students, valid and instructionally useful for teachers). At the newcomer high school, when measures were used in a shared/interactive way (e.g., peer/buddy system) with an authentic purpose (e.g., to support each other in reaching goals), students were more likely to find them authentic and meaningful. Teachers found that some of the measures provided new information about students that helped them better address students’ needs. Teachers and students felt most positively about the learning value of the measures that supported self-awareness and caring relationships through ongoing reflection, peer-mentoring, and sharing of lived experiences as immigrants and language-learners.

Author

• Ruth Chung Wei, Envision Education