Giving Compass' Take:

• In this story from Getting Smart, author Erin Gohl highlights CASEL's guide to implementing social-emotional learning (SEL) in schools.

• How important is social-emotional learning to college and career readiness? What other benefits might a school and its students experience when they implement SEL?

• To learn how video games can help kids develop SEL skills, click here.

Ensuring this healthy development of students has become a standard part of conversations in today’s educational dialogue. Social-emotional learning (SEL) fills a significant amount of discussion time at school board meetings, is a regular session topic at educational conferences, and encompasses a growing sector of educational vendor products. Academic research, practitioner experience, and popular consensus agree that schools should organize themselves to ensure healthy, happy, and engaged students.

But, despite this growing attention, there has been an absence of clarity on best implementation practices for navigating the complexities of this endeavor.  Schools struggle to clearly define the current baseline, desired future state, and the concrete steps of collaboration needed to ensure that schools are effectively addressing the healthy development of students. Schools have been doing the best they can to figure out the next, or even initial step, in the absence of an exemplar design and planning tool or standard.

The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), a leading voice on the social-emotional health of students for over two decades, has recently published a comprehensive framework and toolset to help bring clarity on, and provide actionable steps for, how to proceed in this daunting, yet fundamentally important challenge. The CASEL Guide to Schoolwide SEL gives pragmatic and thoughtful guidance on how schools–principals, teachers, and staff–can create environments and cultures that simultaneously prioritize students’ emotional development, social maturity, and academic achievement.

Read the full article about social-emotional learning by Erin Gohl at Getting Smart