SEL journal

We have learned that SEL programmatic implementation must be responsive to the needs of our school communities and not necessarily lockstep in its delivery. This means being nimble to responding in the moment to school site requests and working closely with our external partners such as the Center for Collaborative Classroom (CCC) to rethink the content and design of professional learning. With CCC, developers of Caring School Community (CSC), we have designed several professional development offerings—synchronous and asynchronous—where our educators benefit from multiple opportunities to revisit the values and frameworks that ground the CSC program components, and engage in collaboration with grade-level colleagues on how the program can best be used to serve all students. The offerings include videos, panel conversations featuring OUSD teachers implementing CSC, as well as suggested ways to review material to maximize their use of the CSC program to meet the needs of students. Additionally, teachers are able to unpack the different components of the curriculum in a professional learning community setting.

Through these offerings, teachers expressed the need for each student to feel a sense of belonging and to experience a smooth transition into the school day. A key theme emerged, “Starting the Day the SEL Way.” This theme has become a powerful frame for veteran and novice implementers to engage with the morning meeting lessons. Our work has demonstrated that an SEL program such as CSC can be impactful during this unprecedented and uncertain time when we make visible themes such as agency, belonging, and collaborative problem solving, and connect them to specific CSC program components while permitting teachers to be innovative and flexible in their use.

November 2021

Building Academic and SEL Standards Integration through Inquiry Cycles

Every year the OUSD SEL Team partners with a group of focal principals in order to deepen our understanding of the support needed to integrate academic targets and SEL skills. This year, at Horace Mann Elementary, Principal Tammie Adams is using her school’s inquiry cycles to do this work with teachers and measure the impact for students.

Each inquiry cycle includes a curricular focus, professional development, PLC planning, and analysis of student learning data. The school year began with a cycle focused on SEL curriculum implementation, including professional learning time to familiarize teachers with the OUSD SEL Standards and Indicators. (OUSD SEL PK-Adult SEL Standards) Teachers spent time planning ways to foster learning relationships among students and provide explicit SEL instruction that supports students to engage as independent learners in academic areas.

The next cycle focused on ELA and SEL Standards integration. Teachers continued unpacking targeted SEL Standards while considering what SEL skills should be highlighted in specific ELA lessons. This included ways to listen to a partner, asking questions to explore a partner's thinking, and strategies for successful collaboration in discussions of complex texts. 

The following cycle will focus on math curriculum, building on the SEL strategies and deepening collaborative skills needed to engage in mathematical reasoning.

June 2021

A School’s Approach to Centering SEL This Year

This past school year brought on old and new challenges as our school communities navigated both distance and hybrid learning. One school’s story offers us a window into the ways a school was able to address the social and emotional needs of their students and staff.

Serving 320 students in transitional kindergarten through fifth grade, Emerson Elementary has has partnered with the SEL Team for the past four years; and in 2018, Emerson became one of our elementary SEL Focal Schools where we have been focused on building the school’s leadership skills and capacity to support the growth and development of student and adult SEL. During this past year of distance and hybrid learning, Emerson’s principal and SEL Lead Learner (teacher leader) intentionally centered their staff’s professional learning on maintaining and sustaining relationships.

What key practices drove their work?

• Professional Learning for School Site Leadership

Emerson’s principal and SEL Lead Learner participated in yearlong role-based, inquiry-driven professional learning and leadership coaching (see CASEL Soundbites, March 2021 edition to learn more about the SEL Principal Learning Group) where leading with care and engagement in a virtual setting was a central theme. This included three opportunities for the principal and SEL lead Learner to come together to reflect and plan. 

• SEL-focused Staff Check-ins

The principal was interested in what all stakeholders would remember and say about school site support. In partnership with her SEL Lead Learner, they focused on three actions:

1. Maintain and sustain staff relationships. To gather information, staff were queried after the first six weeks of school—During the first six weeks of school, what are one or two ways you are maintaining relationships with your Emerson colleagues? What suggestions do you have for sustaining strong relationships? What support would you like us to provide?

2. Support students socially, emotionally, and academically using strategies well-suited for the virtual learning environment. Early on in the school year, the principal and SEL Lead Learner wanted to know what teachers were doing and not yet doing in integrating SEL supports during virtual synchronous whole group instruction. CASEL’s SEL ‘Look-Fors’ in Blended Learning Tool (Emerson SEL Considerations in Virtual Learning Tool) was modified and used to gather teachers’ reflections to prompts, such as: What resonates with you? Notice what you are already implementing. What is something you would like to try? Key SEL practices, framed as SEL considerations, were elevated and reinforced in multiple ways and viewed through an asset-based lens.

3. Support teachers and school staff in creating a caring and engaging virtual climate for students. For students to feel cared for and engaged, their teachers needed to experience being cared for and engaged in their learning. Halfway through the school year, against the backdrop of surging COVID-19 infections, shelter-in-place, technical challenges, and perpetual uncertainty, staff were stressed and anxiety was running high. Staying connected amidst all the challenges was the antidote to the seemingly constant state of putting out fires. The SEL Lead Learner facilitated a staff check-in where everyone affirmed themselves and each other for the work they had accomplished. Throughout the school year, teachers held consistent virtual celebrations with their students.

• A Culture of Affirmation

How does a leader bring closure to a year of learning that was unlike any other year? To end the year where staff continued to feel cared for and a sense of belonging, our SEL Program Manager facilitated a digital art project called, “Reflections, Affirmation, and Celebrations” to serve as the end-of-year ritual of closing. Each staff member decorated their slide with digital artwork, self-affirmations, and gratitudes. Colleagues then adorned each other’s slides with “sticky notes” of appreciation.

• SEL Team Support

Our work with the SEL Focal Schools focuses on building the principal’s and SEL Lead Learner’s skills and capacity to lead the SEL work in their school community. Consistent communication, staying connected, and maintaining ongoing conversations on how to keep moving the work forward, were critical to keeping SEL at the forefront during a year of shelter-in-place and virtual learning. The conversations covered a range of topics, from progress monitoring to implementation. Much support was devoted to figuring out with the SEL Lead Learner on how to keep SEL front and center with the teachers. With the principal, the daily demands of leading a school often left her with little bandwidth and time to maintain the conversations; so at each meeting, our SEL Program Manager provided an agenda co-constructed at the previous meeting, facilitated the meeting, and identified resources and artifacts that would help leadership maintain SEL in the forefront.

March 2021

Principals as Learners

(Note: All quotes are from SEL Principal Learning Group participants)

“We’re creating the principal playbook for distance learning in real time.”

In the midst of the unrelenting waves of change and uncertainty this school year, one silver lining has been the OUSD SEL Team’s opportunity to extend its collaboration with Lead by Learning (formerly Mills Teacher Scholars). Modeled after the success of the SEL Lead Learner Group, the SEL Team and Lead by Learning are partnering to pilot an inquiry-based professional learning model designed specifically for school principals. Comprising principals from five of our six elementary SEL Focal Schools, the Principal Learning Group meets virtually every other month, interspersed with leadership coaching and thought-partnership sessions. The SEL Principal Learning and Lead Learner Groups are two linked components of a broader agenda to influence the development of SEL-integrated learning for adults and students in OUSD.

This year, the group aims to learn what it means to lead through the lens of SEL in a virtual learning environment by probing these questions:

1. What are the transformative leadership capacities that support schoolwide implementation of SEL, and what are some ways these capacities can be cultivated and deepened?

2. What does it mean to lead with care and engagement in the current context?

3. For each leader, what is your story of leading with SEL and what is the story of your school’s SEL journey?

“It's been hard to help maintain a vision of best practices for SEL when uncertainty and change

keep happening. We keep moving from one emotional crisis to the next.”

At the heart of professional learning is creating the conditions for the principals to be learners, with an emphasis on connection and care. At each session, principals engage in three practices that provide opportunities for them to delve into the complexity of their work, and in doing so, build their social and emotional capacity:

1. Practicing public learning—This is literally “going public” and stepping into a learning stance with your own learning and the uncertainties you are holding. In the process of building trust and community, the learner gains insight into his/her mindset, beliefs, assumptions, and biases. 

2. Supportively challenging ourselves and each other—Pushing a colleague to go deeper, to understand how one’s beliefs and practices impact progress towards equity requires collegial conversations grounded in empathy, data, and shared responsibility.

3. Making the learners’ experience visible through data—A principal’s data, in all its varied manifestations, helps shine a light on the learning process of teachers, and to see teachers’ learning as more than activity.

“I would like to be able to move away from transactional compliance and toward

curiosity and collective efficacy with all stakeholders.”

The SEL Team’s work with schoolwide SEL implementation has shown that the principal is the driver of change, and creating the conditions for all adults, including the principal, to build their SEL capacity and see themselves as learners, is equally as important as building students’ SEL skills and recognizing and holding all students as learners. So, what does this mean for the principal in their day-to-day professional life and the kinds of professional learning and coaching they need to become transformational leaders? To record their learning as it unfolds, the participating principals have created a living document which captures the characteristics of leading with SEL. They revisit this at the end of every session. Halfway through the school year, the following themes have emerged:

Principals are also beginning to incorporate the practices in their staff’s professional learning. For example, two principals introduced and modeled the public learning practice to their staff. As a result, they observed a stronger sense of empathy and community, and a greater willingness among the teachers to be vulnerable about voicing their uncertainties and teaching dilemmas. They also noted how public learning has increased teacher agency and collaboration in spite of the continuing uncertainty. One principal commented that in her session, modeling the public learner practice received the highest score from every teacher. Another principal mentioned her teachers’ suggestion of incorporating the public learner practice in their grade-level PLCs and other adult collaborative learning spaces.

Finally, the principals continue to craft their stories as leaders of SEL, and their school’s story of SEL in partnership with their school’s SEL Lead Learner. Collectively, these stories will provide other schools a window of what it means to lead, teach, and learn with SEL. During this time, the participating principals have valued feeling connected to their peers from across the district, having a safe space to be vulnerable about their leadership challenges and dilemmas, and reconnecting with their values and what matters most to them—it’s their storm anchor to help guide them on their daily decisions.

“I'm thinking SEL is how we do everything right now. Leading with SEL at the core, creates

space for growth, mistakes, honesty, reflection and change.”

Lead by Learning has created a playbook that serves as a guide to building a vibrant adult learning culture in service of equity. To learn more about the guide, including downloading their playbook, click here.