SEL Center

Center to Improve Social and Emotional Learning and School Safety

Creating a Culture of Care: A Guide for Education Leaders to Develop Systems and Structures That Support Educator Well-Being

Creating a Culture of Care: A Guide for Education Leaders to Develop Systems and Structures That Support Educator Well-Being

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Educator well-being is often approached in terms of self-care, with an overreliance on individual strategies and supports for well-being. Although well-intentioned, this approach can inadvertently put the onus on individuals to heal and care for themselves, ignoring the impacts of systems and structures on individual and collective well-being.

This guide is for education leaders at all levels—local, regional, and state—in charge of supporting their education staff. It offers practical information and guidance on educator well-being in these ever-challenging times. The guide includes the following sections to help education leaders co-create educational environments that are systems of well-being:

  • Key Concepts: the “what” and “why,” providing background information on the ecological systems framework and the root causes of and conditions for well-being; the relationship between brains, bodies, behaviors, and environments; influences of bias and perception on educator well-being; and shifting systems
  • Tips for Using the Strategies: the foundational elements of applying the guide’s strategies
  • Strategies: the “how,” offering some ways to rethink and redesign education systems as well as some preventative and restorative strategies, with specific examples
  • References: works cited throughout the guide

Education leaders are encouraged to read the guide with colleagues and discuss it in collaborative settings. The guide’s introduction to key concepts is followed by suggested activities that individuals or groups can use to actively engage with the content.

Engaging Students as Leaders to Reimagine School Safety: An Educator Case Story

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Accompanying Resources: 

This Guide shares the experience of one educator who adapted the Reimagining School Safety Guide to use in her classroom with pre-college students in New Orleans, Louisiana. It provides practical insights on how to use the Guide in a school setting with students as part of an effort to reconsider and shift paradigms of school safety. 

Key Insights

  • The Reimagining School Safety Guide can be adapted for a young adult audience and used to engage them in discussing and shifting school safety paradigms.
  • For students, school safety is not a “neutral” topic; it is something they experience every day in the physical and social ways they engage with their school and the people in it. Thus, they are an essential partner for addressing challenges in school safety and contributing to efforts to reimagine what safety means and how to achieve it. Doing so takes commitment from the adults facilitating these conversations to effectively engage students in safe, supportive, and equitable ways.
  • Educators must continuously examine their mindsets and practices to cultivate safe and supportive learning environments where students feel comfortable providing authentic feedback about their schools’ safety challenges.

Who is the Guide for?

The Guide is for educators and school site leaders—particularly those for students in middle school, high school, pre-college, and college—who are looking to include student perspectives in addressing school safety issues. Find actionable ideas to create a classroom that cultivates safety, inclusion, and engaged conversations about school safety, and explore school safety issues and specific strategies for engaging students in discussions about it.

The Role of Social and Emotional Learning in Future Workforce Readiness

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Research has shown social and emotional learning (SEL) to be an integral force for students’ education and well-being with positive effects lasting into adulthood. Still, explicit linkages between SEL and career and workforce development remain limited. This brief explores the role of SEL in preparing students for future success in their adult and working lives. In particular, the brief shows SEL’s importance in career and workforce development and its relevance to recent trends in the future of work, and offers an examination of equity barriers that hinder youth from underserved populations and how SEL can mitigate them. The brief concludes with a look at the role business and policymakers must play in addressing equity gaps and expanding access to integrative SEL and career and workforce development models.

Guiding Principles for Creating Safe, Inclusive, Supportive, and Fair School Climates

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All students deserve learning environments that are safe, inclusive, supportive, and fair. Schools can both keep their school community—including students and school staff—safe while ensuring every student is included, supported, and treated fairly. Consistently applied, evidence-based approaches to discipline are important tools for creating learning environments that are foundational to the success of
all students.

The U.S. Department of Education appreciates school administrators, teachers, and educational staff across the nation who are working to administer student discipline fairly, and to provide a safe, positive, and nondiscriminatory educational environment for all students and educators. The Department also recognizes that harsh or unfair exclusionary discipline practices and frequent disparities in the use of
exclusionary discipline practices for children of color, LGBTQ students, and children with disabilities can contribute to students feeling unwelcome, unsafe, and unsupported. When this happens, schools miss crucial opportunities to support students’ needs and put students on the path toward success. Instead, schools should provide students with the social, emotional, physical, academic, and mental health support they need to thrive. To that end, more and more schools serving students in pre-K through grade 12 are using evidence-based approaches to meet students’ social, emotional, academic, and mental health needs. This resource, Guiding Principles for Creating Safe, Inclusive, Supportive, and Fair School Climates, provides guidance on how to maintain safe, inclusive, supportive, and fair learning environments for students and school staff and includes specific recommendations for evidence-based practices to give students what they need to learn and grow.

This resource identifies five guiding principles and suggests actions schools and school districts can take to create inclusive, safe, supportive, and fair learning environments. The resource also lists federal resources to support these efforts. The five guiding principles are:

  1. Foster a sense of belonging through a positive, safe, welcoming, and inclusive school environment;
  2. Support the social, emotional, physical, and mental health needs of all students through evidence-based strategies;
  3. Adequately support high-quality teaching and learning by increasing educator capacity;
  4. Recruit and retain a diverse educator workforce; and
  5. Ensure the fair administration of student discipline policies in ways that treat students with dignity and respect (including through systemwide policy and staff development and monitoring strategies).

This resource references evidence-based policies, practices, and programs that can help create safe, inclusive, supportive, and fair learning environments for all students to learn, grow, and become successful.

State Preschool in a Mixed Delivery System: Lessons From Five States

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Most U.S. states operate their public preschool programs in a mixed delivery system, in which public preschool and child care are offered through a variety of settings, including local education agencies (LEAs) as well as non-LEA settings, such as Head Start agencies, community-based child care centers, private schools, and family child care homes. A mixed delivery system has many benefits, including adding valuable capacity to serve children; providing families with choice in the environment they prefer for their children; and supporting small businesses. There are several challenges to operating a mixed delivery system, however, such as coordinating and supporting the participation of preschool providers across settings, from large LEAs to small private providers.

To inform state preschool administrators and policymakers as they refine their mixed delivery systems, this report describes the mixed delivery systems of five states that have taken different approaches to supporting providers across settings. All five states meet at least 7 of the National Institute for Early Education Research’s 10 quality benchmarks, indicating that they have many policies to support quality preschool.

Evidence for Social and Emotional Learning in Schools

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There is a consensus among educators, parents, and policymakers that education should include a focus on supporting essential social and emotional capacities to help children navigate the world successfully. To develop these competencies, many schools adopt social and emotional learning (SEL) programs. The report reviews the findings from 12 meta-analyses of school-based SEL programs. Across these studies, there is a consistent, reliable effect of tested, evidence-based SEL programs on students’ social, emotional, behavioral, and academic outcomes in PreK–12th grade, including the development of social and emotional skills, improved academic engagement and performance, growth of positive social behaviors, and lower rates of behavior problems and psychological distress. These findings are applicable across gender, ethnicity and race, income, and other demographic variables.