After establishing foundational support for SEL, your team will move into the planning stage, where you’ll define your vision and how to achieve it. Effectively planning for full-scale implementation of schoolwide SEL is driven by a collaborative process of continuous improvement that asks your team to look at the following areas:
To promote students’ social and emotional competence, it’s important for schools to simultaneously foster a supportive staff environment that cultivates the social and emotional competence and capacity of the adults in the building. This focus area will help your school create a supportive staff environment that cultivates adult social and emotional competence and capacity through the following sections:
The core of SEL implementation is promoting students’ social and emotional learning throughout the school day and in partnership with families and communities. This requires much more than a single program or teaching method. Because student learning is influenced by their interactions across many settings, promoting student SEL requires thoughtful coordination of strategies that reach across classrooms, all areas of the school, homes, and communities. This focus area will support your school in promoting students’ SEL across these contexts through the following sections:
Schoolwide SEL implementation is driven by a process of continuous improvement. As you implement your SEL plan, you will likely come across obstacles that delay or hinder your progress, or new ideas that could increase your effectiveness.
Continuous improvement refers to a deliberate and structured process to address problems of practice and improve outcomes. To reach your goals for schoolwide SEL, you’ll need to plan and implement action steps, track your progress, examine and reflect on outcome data, and adjust course as necessary.
This focus area will support your school in developing robust continuous improvement practices to drive SEL implementation through the following key activities: