Social Emotional Learning and Development Updates and News
Welcome to our periodic newsletter where YDEKC shares updates related to Social Emotional Learning! We focus on the critical skills and dispositions that young people need to be successful in school and beyond and the adult practices necessary to ensure all young people feel a sense of belonging and the self-efficacy to thrive.
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In 2017, we responded to the need for cross-sector professional development that integrates the array of practices that support youth success in school and life by hosting a Social Emotional Learning Symposium for Practitioners in August. The symposium focused on enhancing our ability to build social and emotional strengths in ourselves and young people across differences of race and culture. As we head into 2018 (and Martin Luther King Jr. weekend in particular) I am reflecting upon our keynote speaker Dr. Shawn Ginwright’s principles for an equity based approach to social emotional learning. He challenged us to ask ourselves what we are doing in our schools, programs, and education systems to…
- Address the social emotional needs stemming from trauma?
- Make identity central, focusing race, ethnicity, and gender?
- Create strategies that build political awareness of social issues and conditions?
- Provide supports and opportunities for the social emotional development of adults?
With these principles in mind, we hope to come alongside you in 2018 to understand the landscape of social emotional learning within each school district in the Road Map region and support cross-sector conversations and collaboration to further strengthen our capacity as adults to create safe, healthy environments where all youth will thrive. We look forward to working with you.
Warmly,
Anne Powell Arias
Project Manager, Youth Development Executives of King County
ydekc.org | aarias@ydekc.org | 206.336.6910
YDEKC Updates
Initial Report from the Regional SEL Landscape Survey
To understand what actions are taking place across sectors to shift adult practices and to increase student success skills including youth engagement, motivation, and social emotional learning, we conducted an online survey of the Road Map Region in November 2017. Sixty-two people responded to the survey, representing a diverse array of sectors, age groups served, and each of the Road Map school district areas. We will be preparing a more in-depth landscape report that incorporates the survey results. Check out a few highlights that are informing our developing strategy to support the region!
Meet our Social Emotional Learning Strategy Senior Manager, Mona Grife!
Mona Grife is our new point person on cross-sector planning with Road Map districts (and possibly beyond). She comes to us with over a decade of experience that has centered on building dynamic youth programs and collaborative school and youth organization partnerships, primarily in the King County area. Recently, we asked her to reflect on what social emotional learning means to her.
“Recently, I took some time off to raise my two boys. During that time, I had quality time to reflect on what was important to me as a mom and as a youth development professional. I started to think about all the great and challenging youth programs that I had been a part of: theater education programs, service learning projects, life skills programs, civic engagement initiatives, and various coalitions and youth councils. I realized that the common thread when a program was successful was when we deliberately focused on creating a safe, encouraging, and inspiring space.”
To learn more, check out Mona’s full response here and her full bio on our staff page!
Local News and Resources
Know of local resources geared towards strengthening adult strategies and practices that support social emotional skill development in young people? E-mail Anne Arias at
aarias@ydekc.org.
National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development: Visit to Tacoma Public Schools
In November 2017, the National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development visited Tacoma, Washington to learn more about the Tacoma Whole Child Initiative (TWCI), including understanding how community partnerships are leveraged in school and beyond in support of students’ comprehensive development. This
Summary of Key Takeaways includes the following highlights: a community-wide approach to supporting social, emotional, and academic development requires clear vision, a common language, and strong leadership; relationships are at the core of supporting students’ development; and this work is about fixing the environment, not the student.
Start With Us: Black Youth in South King County & South Seattle
Check out the latest report from the
Road Map Project! Much attention is given to the need for improving educational outcomes for Black students, but rarely does research start by talking to students themselves.
Start With Us: Black Youth in South King County & South Seattle is driven by what Black high schoolers in South King County and South Seattle say they need from the education system serving them. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods to incorporate youth voice, this report does not look at traditional measures such as graduation rates or test scores, but the systemic issues that affect the educational experience for Black youth.
Using Diverse Books to Support Social and Emotional Learning
Webinar, 1/17/2018, 1:00PM
LEE & LOW BOOKS, an independent children’s book publisher specializing in diversity, is hosting a webinar on January 17 at 1:00PM PDT focused on the Social and Emotional Learning Diverse Reading List. Literacy Specialist Katie Potter will review texts that address Empathy, Positive Relationships, Recognizing & Managing Emotions, Problem-Solving, Grit & Perseverance, and Perspective-Taking and each participant will receive access to the book list at the end of the session.
Registration is free and required in advance.
Racial Stamina & Racial Justice Work: What’s Mindfulness & Compassion Got to Do with It?
Kane Hall, University of Washington, 1/18/2018, 7:30PM-9:00PM
Dr. Angela Rose Black will highlight the critical intersection between racial stamina, racial justice, and the utility of mindfulness and compassion based techniques in supporting both. This lecture is free and open to the public. Registration is required. Registration and more information
here.
Building Resiliency 1: Strategies to Engage Youth Exposed to Trauma
2100 Building, 1/22/2018, 4:30PM-7:30PM
Sound Discipline will host a workshop in Seattle that will focus on what trauma and insecure attachment do to growing brains, how to lead a classroom to benefit all students (including those exposed to trauma), how to reach youth why their brains sometimes “won’t cooperate” and what to do about it, and how to use strengths-based plans to foster learning for youth exposed to trauma. Register
here.
WERA Social Emotional Learning Symposium
Hilton Seattle Airport & Conference Center, 2/27/2018, 8:30AM-5:30PM
Washington Educational Research Association (WERA) is hosting a Social Emotional Learning Symposium. This year’s symposium, “Supporting Systems, Professionals, and Students,” will focus on Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), and will create opportunities to access different levels of learning, including:
1. How systems build processes to attend to the development of students’ SEL,
2. How administrators and teachers build capacity to support students’ SEL, and
3. How progress and growth within a SEL effort can be measured
Register
here.
Rad Books for Rad Kids
Looking for books for your classroom or youth program? Check out the South Seattle Emerald’s spin on a book review column featuring South End librarian Maggie Block’s analysis of youth literature through a radical lens. There are three parts:
Catch-all resources to help you find diverse books,
Resources to find books, media, and information about specific communities and identities, and
Necessary Histories.
National News and Resources
Supporting the Whole Teacher: Developing Educators’ Social Emotional Skills
This
research brief from The Aspen Institute’s National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development highlights the evidence-based RULER program, which several districts in King County have adopted, and its application within Seattle Public Schools. It describes the positive impact teachers’ own development of social and emotional skills has on their students—and themselves.
Equity and SEL: What Educators Need to Know and Do
This Q&A with Rob Jagers, Senior Research Fellow at CASEL, describes ways in which equity and social emotional learning intersect, how CASEL’s Equity Work Group is developing “equity elaborations” on the
five SEL competencies, and some strategies that support social emotional learning for all students.
Social and Emotional Learning and Traditionally Underserved Populations
The American Youth Policy Forum has produced a
brief focused on how SEL initiatives affect traditionally underserved student populations, including students with disabilities, English language learners, and youth involved in the juvenile justice system and some ideas about how those supports can be tailored to better meet the unique needs of different learners.
Social and Emotional Learning Interventions under ESSA
How can the Every Student Succeed Act (ESSA) support social emotional learning?
This RAND analysis offers guidance to states, districts, and schools on how they can use funds through ESSA to support SEL and to identify evidence-based SEL interventions that meet their needs. In short, the research team has identified 60 SEL interventions that have recently been evaluated that meet ESSA evidence requirements for Tiers I-III.
Social and Emotional Learning in Out-of-School Time Settings
The brief published by the Harvard Graduate School of Education draws on a content analysis of 25 top SEL programs by Stephanie Jones and her team at Harvard’s EASEL Lab and brings a sharper focus to programs that can be applied to an OST setting. While the group identified only three programs that explicitly target OST settings, they reviewed a number of others than can be adapted by OST programs. Aworksheet is provided to help OST programs identify what kind of social emotional learning programs would be a good match for their priorities, goals, structure, and resources.
