What Does SEL-Supportive Tier 1 Practice Include?

Relationships & Belonging

Creating environments where students experience connection, dignity, trust, psychological safety, and meaningful relationships with adults and peers.

Explicit SEL Skill Development

Intentionally teaching, modeling, practicing, and reinforcing developmentally appropriate social and emotional competencies.

Student Voice, Agency & Identity

Providing meaningful opportunities for students to contribute, make choices, reflect on strengths, establish goals, and see their identities and experiences represented and valued.

Emotional Awareness & Regulation

Helping students recognize emotions, understand their responses, develop a repertoire of regulation strategies, and identify when and how to seek support.

Relationship & Communication Skills

Developing communication, empathy, perspective-taking, collaboration, conflict navigation, repair, and community responsibility.

Intentional Decision-Making

Supporting students in considering context, consequences, individual and collective well-being, values, and multiple perspectives when making decisions.

Adult SEL & Responsive Practice

Supporting adults in developing and modeling self-awareness, regulation, reflection, relationship skills, bias awareness, and responsive decision-making.

What This Can Look Like in Tier 1

• Intentionally greeting and connecting with students

• Establishing predictable, inclusive classroom routines and expectations

• Co-creating classroom agreements and community norms

• Explicitly teaching and modeling social and emotional skills

• Providing opportunities for students to identify and communicate emotions

• Teaching and practicing multiple regulation strategies

• Using developmentally appropriate check-ins to understand student experience

• Providing structured opportunities for collaboration and peer interaction

• Teaching and modeling conflict-resolution and relationship-repair skills

• Providing meaningful student voice and choice

• Helping students identify strengths, set goals, reflect, and monitor growth

• Normalizing appropriate help-seeking

• Integrating reflection and perspective-taking into academic learning

• Using culturally responsive-sustaining instructional and relationship practices

• Responding to behavior with curiosity about skill, need, context, and environment

• Modeling emotional regulation, reflection, repair, and respectful communication as adults

SEL ≠ An Activity

SEL activities, lessons, games, videos, and resources can provide valuable opportunities to explicitly teach and practice social and emotional skills. They are tools—not the SEL system itself.

Strong Tier 1 SEL is embedded in how adults build relationships, design environments, respond to behavior, facilitate learning, support student voice, model social-emotional competencies, and create opportunities for students to practice skills throughout the school day.

SEL is something we teach, model, practice, reinforce, and experience—not simply something we do.

SEL + Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Practice

Social and emotional learning occurs within cultural, linguistic, relational, and social contexts. Effective SEL recognizes students' identities, languages, experiences, strengths, values, and ways of communicating as assets.

Educators should consider how culture, identity, power, bias, expectations, and context influence how social and emotional behaviors are expressed, interpreted, and responded to.

SEL should strengthen belonging and agency—not require students to conform to one culturally defined way of communicating, regulating, participating, or relating.

NYSED's CR-S Framework specifically calls for student-centered environments that affirm cultural identities, prepare students for rigor and independent learning, build connection across difference, elevate historically marginalized voices, and develop student agency.

Questions for School & District Teams

• Do all students experience consistent Tier 1 environments that promote belonging, dignity, connection, agency, and emotional safety?

• Are social and emotional competencies explicitly taught, modeled, practiced, and reinforced across settings?

• Are SEL practices developmentally appropriate and culturally responsive-sustaining?

• Do adults have a shared understanding of the NYS SEL Benchmarks and their role in supporting them?

• Are students provided meaningful opportunities for voice, choice, reflection, collaboration, and help-seeking?

• When students struggle socially, emotionally, or behaviorally, do we examine skill, need, context, relationships, environment, and access before selecting support?

• Are Tier 2 and Tier 3 SEL supports connected to—and layered onto—a strong universal Tier 1 foundation?

• How do we know whether our Tier 1 SEL practices are strengthening student belonging, engagement, relationships, agency, and well-being?