LM Sept2022hi

We have made SEL a part of who we are for the past six or seven years. We have embedded SEL into our day-to-day work. I think one of the reasons we were highlighted is because we have had sustained implementation. Howdoyoudefinesocial-emotional learning? It’s the belief that all students need a balance of aca- demic as well as social emotional learning. It’s really about a focus on a positive school culture and climate. We believe that’s a foundation of what makes for strong social-emotional learning. That’s a partnership among all of our stakeholders. We’ve adopted the CASEL definition of collaborative academic and social-emotional learning, which really talks about how this is a process where all of our young people and our adults work on the acquisition and the application of the knowledge, skills and atti- tudes to manage their emotions to reach their person- al and professional goals, as well as understand how to feel empathy and to show empathy for others. We believe it cultivates resourceful and resilient students because we teach them explicitly social-emo- tional skills. It is part of our learning environment and what we do. Youuse thismetaphor about social- emotional learningbeing theplate. Canyou talkaboutwhyyou thinkof it in those terms? We’re asking our educators to do a lot. When we think about putting a focus on something like SEL, it can easily be looked at by some folks as just one more thing to do or one more thing on my plate. Where’s the time for this or how are we going to really do this, right? When we started our work, it was really import- ant for us to really know the why and to really clearly define the goal. We spent a lot of time doing research and learned successful implementation of social-emotional learning can have an impact on academics and lifetime out- comes. There is a significant return on investment— as well as school safety. We know that in order for our kids to be successful academically, they have to be healthy from an emo-

tional standpoint too. SEL is not one more thing on the plate, it is looked at as a part of everything that we do. What doesprofessional learningaround SEL look like inNaperville203? I think that’s one of the things that has helped estab- lish success for implementation. We were very inten- tional and deliberate about building capacity among our educators and helping them understand the why behind social-emotional learning. We have self-paced opportunities for our educators through online courses that we’ve developed recom- mendations for. We’ve created a series of modules online for our educators to be able to use and then really building professional learning networks around social-emotional learning. We want to ensure our learning is embedded and that we have instructional coaches and teacher leaders who have received additional support and additional training to be able to work with our classroom educators and our classroom teachers. For us, the professional learning has to be through multiple ways. Not just a one-time, one-shot type of thing. What does SEL look likeduring theschool day inNapervilleCUSD#203? Let me begin by saying it goes back to that analogy about the plate, right? We really look at SEL as an integrated part of what we do from an academic standpoint. It is not something that happens only on Tuesdays from 9 to 9:30. We created SEL curriculum teams who developed a comprehensive early childhood through 12th grade SEL curriculum. Our teams reviewed the Illinois state social-emotional learning standards and any existing content area that we had for the district. Our goal was to embed those Illinois SEL standards and other content we vetted into content curriculum maps. To measure and report student growth toward these SEL standards, we’ve worked to develop social-emotional learning assessment rubrics and standard-based reporting tools that our teachers use to measure both growth toward the standards and de- termine which students need intervention and support. Recently, we’ve also begun to implement the use of a panorama survey to really get a better sense of how students feel about our school community.

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13 LM September 2022 continued...