A Guidebook for Integrating SEL into Schools, Classrooms, Student Activities, and Content

• In Event: Uptake and quality implementation of social and emotional learning programs: evidence & lessons from contexts of crisis

Proposal

While access and improved quality of basic education has improved greatly in the past two decades, there remains enormous disparity in student learning outcomes. Thus, educators and policy makers are examining approaches beyond academic instruction to ensure more holistic approaches are adopted, to build safe, supportive, and social learning environments that support student and teacher wellbeing, social and emotional learning (SEL) alongside academic achievement.
SEL skills build resiliency[4]. In a world where natural disasters are ever frequent, pandemics shut down school systems on a moment’s notice, and protracted crises occur around the world, stability in education is hardly the norm. Children and teachers are forced to learn in fragile contexts amidst great uncertainty. Strong social and emotional competencies are critical for children (and their teachers) to be resilient in the face of such shocks.
The extensive scholarship on impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on education underscores the exacerbated disparities in learning that take place during a crisis, especially in low-resources end emergency or conflict education setting. The call for strategies that integrate SEL into schools and classrooms has become a common voice.
Though educators certainly understand this critical need, operationalizing the integration of SEL into the school and classroom is not well understood. RTI International has researched the emerging evidence for integration of SEL into the school and classroom, including evidence-based approaches that target four mutually supportive approaches: (1) safe and supportive schools, (2) classroom climate and pedagogical interactions that foster SEL, (3) explicit student focused activities, and (4) SEL supportive content. The findings from this literature review informed a Teacher Guidebook that provides a comprehensive set of approaches and activities, with practical examples, that can be used in each of these target areas.
While there is an enormous amount of literature on SEL programs[8], not all of these programs have evidence and, it is mostly published in journal articles which summarize the interventions and may gloss over the essential details of implementation that would make it feasible for implementers to pick up and adapt. This Guidebook has examined the approaches that have evidence; analyzed them; identified commonalties across these approaches; developed a standardized way of describing approaches; and provides recommendations of how to put them together.
In this presentation we will demonstrate how educators can use this Guidebook to answer the following questions.
1. What programs exist and can be adapted to other contexts?
2. Which programs have evidence of effectiveness?
3. What combination of inputs has been found to be effective?
4. What approached can implementers rely on to have an impact?

Author

• Julianne Norman, RTI International