SEL Inventory

After setting a vision for implementation at your school, it's necessary to take stock of current practices, programs, and resources related to SEL. This will ensure there is alignment between current activities, your school's SEL vision, and the district's theory of change.

School staff are often overburdened and under-resourced. The SEL Inventory aims to prevent staff from viewing SEL as "one more thing," and instead help them identify the many ways they are both explicitly (i.e., intentionally) and implicitly teaching SEL, as well as facilitate thinking about how to increase opportunities for culturally-relevant SEL instruction. This SEL Inventory will help your team reflect on implementation of current strategies, prioritize strategies, and determine how those priorities align to support one of the five CASEL skill areas. Your team should complete the SEL Inventory prior to embarking on installing and implementing any new strategies.

SEL Inventory

Next, your team will determine whether each program or activity is aligned to your school's SEL vision. Document your answer by selecting "yes," "no," or "partially" in the drop down menu of column "I" on the inventory template.

Assess Implementation and Priority Level

Next, you will assess the level of implementation and priority of each identified program, activity, or strategy. It is important to remind staff that this process is not evaluative. Rather, it is meant to help identify your school's strengths and areas for growth related to implementation and alignment. Use your decision-making process to determine the period of time over which you will reflect. For example, if you are completing this activity at the beginning of the school year, you may think back to last school year, but if you are completing this activity before winter break, you may reflect on the last quarter or semester.

Assign and document a level of implementation for each each program, strategy or activity using the scale "letting it happen", "helping it happen", "making it happen" or "one time event" in column "J" on the inventory template. Use the information below as a guide to properly assign an implementation level.

Letting it happen: Providing a one time training and having staff implement independently without any follow up support.

Helping it happen: Providing a series of training opportunities to staff over the course of the year. Providing coaching as needed to individuals who request training or need additional support.

Making it happen: Providing comprehensive training and coaching to all staff. Ensuring time is allocated in the master schedule for implementation. consistent use of progress monitoring tools to improve implementation fidelity.

One time event: A specific event such as an assembly, field trip, or family night that occurs once or annually.

Once you have identified the level of implementation, use your decision making process to identify and record the priority level for the current school year in column "K" of the inventory template. As you do this, make sure to consider the extent to which the program or activity aligns to the district theory of change and your school's SEL vision. Try to be realistic about staff capacity and competing priorities; it is okay to only have a few high-priority activities!

Identify Relationship to CASEL Skills

The final step of the SEL inventory requires your team to identify how, if at all, each program, strategy, or activity supports development of one or more of the five CASEL skills. If your team feels that the program, strategy, or activity is aligned to these skills, briefly describe your rationale in the associated column ("L" through "P" in the inventory template). Make sure to note whether the program or activity is aligned to each skill explicitly (i.e., intentionally) or implicitly. Again, remind your team that this process is not meant to be evaluative! There is no right or wrong answer; instead, this process is designed to help you take stock of your current practices.

Gathering Feedback

After completing the SEL Inventory, you may want to present it to other staff in your building. While this is not a required step, it is highly recommended, for it will: (1) increase staff buy-in by reinforcing the valuable SEL work already happening your building; and (2) provide an opportunity to collect additional feedback from staff with unique perspectives.

You may use several approaches to gather feedback. For example, a team-lead, with support from the larger team, could present findings at a building-wide staff meeting. Alternatively, you might ask the team members to connect with their grade-level teams, departments, or colleagues to share findings. If neither of these approaches are feasible, you can have staff review the inventory individually by simply emailing staff a copy. When deciding on a method for presenting the findings, think about where staff engage in productive, collaborative conversations. Make sure to include non-instructional staff in this process.

Feedback can be collected in either individual or group settings. Select the best approach for your building in partnership with your team. Ideas for collecting this feedback are listed below.

Group Discussion: Host an informal group discussion as a large group or in a smaller team settings. Before embarking on a group discussion, create or revisit existing norms specific to group conversation and assign a recorder/notetaker. Group discussions provide a good opportunity to systematically collect information about the extent to which staff agree or disagree with your work (e.g., alignment to CASEL skills or theory of action). You might consider using a process like "Fist to Five."

Written Comments: Provide staff a copy of the completed SEL Inventory and solicit written feedback, either electronically or on paper. If you choose to gather written comments electronically, have staff use the "Suggesting" or "Commenting" feature. This will allow staff to provide suggestions for improvement via comments without editing your work. Written comments is a great way to solicit feedback from grade-level or department teams. In either of those settings, it would be beneficial to have staff provide feedback related to their specific grade-level or department.

Survey: Create and distribute a Google Form to gather feedback from a large number of staff. Surveys are a good method for collecting feedback if you are having a difficult time scheduling a group discussion or if your staff are not yet comfortable sharing in large group settings. Given the rigid format, however, surveys may limit your staff's ability to collaborate and celebrate their practices.

After collecting feedback, meet with your team to make necessary edits. Once you have revised the Inventory, distribute a final version to staff.