Our Work

The Need & the Opportunity

Research and experience have shown that a safe, healthy, and equitable school climate that integrates the cultivation of students’ social and emotional development with academic teaching and learning correlates with higher student attendance and engagement, improved student connectedness, and better social and emotional health. These conditions also correlate with greater job satisfaction and higher retention for school staff.  Given the critical role of SEL and school safety in children’s overall well-being and feelings about school, increasing numbers of policymakers, educators, and other practitioners are viewing these as another pathway for school improvement.

In our first six months, the SEL Center has conducted a listening tour with the field. We have surveyed and interviewed practitioners, the comprehensive center network, several regional education laboratories, state and local education agencies, service providers, and other thought leaders, to understand the most urgent and important needs of the field. Several key themes and insights are emerging from our conversations, including:

• Integration
  There is a desire for clear connections between SEL, school safety, and academic outcomes, as well as strategies to weave the work together so that SEL and school safety do not exist in a silo or feel like an additional responsibility.
• Alignment
  There is a desire to clearly articulate SEL and school safety’s relationship with other whole child initiatives, such as school climate, trauma-informed practices, inclusive discipline approaches, 21st-century skills, and personalized learning.
• Messaging
  There is a desire for compelling language to discuss this work that is both tailored for the unique perspectives and needs of different audiences and holds to rigorous and clear definitions of terms.
• Educator SEL Competencies
  There is a need for greater supports for teachers and other child-serving professionals along their entire career. For example, new teachers would benefit from strategies to notice and attend to the SEL and safety needs of the children in their classrooms. Established teachers would benefit from strategies for self and collective care to make their work more sustainable.