Since the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) started working with state education agencies in 2003, the level of activity to advance social and emotional learning (SEL) has accelerated significantly, particularly in the past few years. State education leaders and policymakers are taking numerous steps to help…

Momentum has been growing across the country to support statewide implementation of social and emotional learning (SEL) in preschool through high school. In this brief we present an update on states' involvement in articulating goals and developing guidelines for student SEL. [Additional support for this work was provided by Pure Edge, Inc.]

In the work of the authors with states over the years, they have observed that most follow a similar process when they develop policies or guidelines to support statewide implementation of social and emotional learning (SEL), such as establishing learning goals or standards for student social and emotional competencies, or providing guidance to…

The current document serves two purposes. First, it provides an overview of six key features of a high-quality, comprehensive package of policies and guidance to support student social and emotional learning (SEL). These features are based on Collaborative for Academic Social, and Emotional Learning's (CASEL's) review of the research literature on…

Six years ago the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) took the unprecedented step of launching an effort to study and scale high-quality, evidence-based academic, social, and emotional learning in eight of the largest and most complex school systems in the country: Anchorage, Austin, Chicago, Cleveland, Nashville,…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) provides an opportunity for states and local education agencies (LEAs) to rethink the goals and policies that they have in place for public education. Under the new law, education leaders have greater flexibility to define student success and to design their own systems and programs to ensure educational…

Social and emotional learning, or SEL, involves the processes through which individuals acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand and manage their emotions, feel and show empathy for others, establish and achieve positive goals, develop and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible…

Developing and articulating clear goals for student social and emotional learning (SEL) involves a number of important steps. This document focuses specifically on the articulation of learning goals (sometimes called "competencies" or "standards" in state and district policy) and suggests a process for those state teams that…

There is growing momentum across the country to support statewide implementation of social and emotional learning (SEL) in preschool through high school. In this brief we report on how many states have developed learning standards to support SEL. We have observed commonalities in the process states have used, and we share some of the lessons we…

In this brief we use the CASEL reviews of evidence-based programs to answer the question, "What do teachers and other adults actually need to do in the classroom and school to help students achieve the goals laid out in social and emotional learning (SEL) standards?" Specifically, we identify and describe four approaches that have been…

The purpose of the CASEL State Scan is to support the development of high-quality standards for social and emotional learning (SEL), preschool through high school, across the country (Dusenbury, Zadrazil, Weiss-berg & Mart, 2011). This brief summarizes recent findings from CASEL's State Scan (Dusenbury, Newman, Weissberg, Goren, Domitrovich…

Following a surge of research showing the importance of social and emotional competence for children's academic and social success (e.g., Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki, Taylor & Schellinger, 2011; Sklad, Diekstra, Ritter, Ben & Gravesteijn, 2012), education policymakers across the country have made efforts to incorporate social and emotional…

Social and emotional learning (SEL) involves the processes through which children and adults acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.…

This compendium, a deliverable for "Assessments for Social, Emotional, and Academic Learning with Preschool/Elementary-School Children," focuses on tools to assess the social and emotional learning (SEL) of preschool and elementary school students (i.e., five- to ten-year-olds), along with aspects of the contexts in which they learn and…

As knowledge of effective treatments for mental disorders has grown, so too has the field of mental health promotion and positive development. Studies completed during the last two decades have synthesized the state of mental health promotion and documented that universal mental health supports positively affect child and adolescent developmental…