Social, Emotional, and Academic Development (SEAD) - Weaving Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) into instruction and coupling this learning with social justice goals supports teaching of valued skills and mindsets

Helping students move from being passive recipients of academic content to active learners is a proven way to strengthen their social-emotional skills. This happens when all members of a school community develop a shared understanding of child and adolescent development so that students experience a coherent, and mutually supportive set of practices that can help them develop socially, emotionally, and academically. Integrating Social-Emotional Learning into instruction and coupling this learning with social justice goals of culturally responsive education supports the teaching of valued skills and mindsets, and helps them take root. Resulting from the unprecedented work of implementing social-emotional screeners across the entirety of the nation’s largest school district, the Social Emotional Academic Development (SEAD) Framework supports teachers and district leaders in developing a shared understanding of child and adolescent development so that students experience a coherent, and mutually supportive, set of practices that can help them develop socially, emotionally, and academically. Integrating Social-Emotional Learning into instruction and coupling this learning with social justice goals supports teaching of valued skills and mindsets, and helps them take root. Educators can incorporate classroom activities focused on perspective-taking and develop empathy through curricular projects that ask young people to understand real-world challenges. Students learn interpersonal skills and develop executive functioning as they employ specific strategies for collaborating on projects and develop a growth mindset while revising their work in response to feedback. This toolkit is designed to support schools in implementing, reflecting on, and evaluating their SEAD (Social, Emotional, Academic Development) practices with students. The goal of this document is to describe each social-emotional learning skill to educators and provide them with potential instructional strategies, entry points and sustainable practices ...