Supporting the Whole Child: �Putting Equity at the Center of Social Emotional Learning

Linda Darling-Hammond,

Learning Policy Institute

Around the world, we have faced �A public health crisis�An economic crisis�A climate crisis�A civil rights crisis�An education crisis�

All of which manifest in ways that reflect deep inequalities in our society

Such Moments Often Lead to Generational Social Changes

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https://restart-reinvent.learningpolicyinstitute.org/

How can we use this time to support systemic change that supports the whole child?

Why Reinvent?

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Current schools, designed in the early 1900s, were not designed to support:

• Relationships
• A whole child approach
• 21^st century skills or deep learning
• Personalized supports
• Equitable opportunity or achievement

What Needs to Change

In a pre-pandemic survey of >148,000 secondary school students across the country,

• Only 29% felt their school provided a caring, encouraging environment;
• Fewer than half reported they had had the opportunity to develop social competencies such as empathy, decision making, and conflict resolution skills (from 29% to 45%, depending on the skill).

Students Need Both Social-Emotional Supports AND Social-Emotional Learning

SUPPORTS

• Strong, positive relationships
• Safe, inclusive environment
• Trauma-informed and healing-oriented practices
• Access to mental health resources
• Ways to be well known with daily touchpoints

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LEARNING

The Power of Relationships in Schools

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What Kind of Schools are Needed?

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The Three “R’s” For Thriving Schools

• Relationship-Centered
• Restorative and
• Responsive to
• Children’s interest and assets
• Cultural funds of knowledge
• Ways of learning and
• Academic, social, & emotional needs

Environments that Support Trust & Belonging

• Supportive classroom communities that teach respect and responsibility;
• Culturally competent teaching practices that connect students to school and the curriculum;
• Personalization practices that help teachers know students and families well.

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included academically

respected socially

relating to one another

Creating Empathy and Belonging Translates Academic Achievement

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The importance of taking time to humanize by …

• Hearing from students about their goals
• Learning about connections
• Developing empathy in ways that reduce bias
• Taking time to affirm each student within the classroom

Identity Safe Environments

…That counteract social identity & stereotype threats by:

• Affirming competence & belonging
• Equalizing access to high-quality curriculum and teaching
• Strengthening relationships
• Enacting culturally affirming and sustaining pedagogies
• Engaging in social-emotional learning and restorative practices

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Learning Policy Institute

Identity Safety

EXPLICIT FOCUS ON TEACHING SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL SKILLS AND MINDSETS

I  dropped out of school – actually they kicked me out – because I didn’t want to give them my hat. It was real zero tolerance! I was expelled for defiance for putting a hat in my backpack instead of giving it to them. And I had had bad experiences since preschool so it was easy for me to be like “[forget] this.” As a teenager, I was thinking “you don’t care about us anyway. You just get paid checks per student in a seat. And they think we don’t know, but we know.

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[After two weeks of circles at Alice Walker Academy], I realized it was the first time in my life I ever wanted to be at a school! Like we got circle today, I gotta go! I wanted to be in class, do projects, interact, be one of the first students called on. I felt good being up here! And the school had kids from West Oakland, East Oakland, Richmond, and yet there were two fights in the entire school the whole year. We had kids from south and north Richmond on the same basketball team and the team went undefeated while beating primary schools. We were kids that the system said couldn’t function in the same environment. That’s wild!

All my friends [from before I went to Alice Walker] are dead or in jail. Without [Restorative Practices], I’d probably be dead or in jail too. After I graduated, I realized I could bring this to homies to change my community. I had already lost four friends to the justice system—four sentenced to 10-15 years under the age of 20. I had seen four more murdered in the same year. I wanted to save my friends’ lives.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdKhcQrLD1w

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Schools that Support Attachment, Relationships, and Collective Efficacy

Structures for personalization that enable adults to know students well:

• Small schools and small learning communities;
• Looping
• Advisory systems
• Block scheduling

Structures that enable teacher collaboration, problem solving, and shared practice

Structures that connect families to schools in meaningful ways

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Factory Model Schools

Relationally-Based Schools

Creating Space for SEL in Secondary Schools

• https://www.edutopia.org/video/integrating-sel-and-literacy

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Systems of Support that Remove Obstacles to Learning

• Wraparound Supports: Health and mental health care, social services
• Community Schools
• Multi-tiered Systems of Support
• Extended Learning (Tutoring rather than tracking)

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This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY

“Reprioritize. This is the time to see if something can be different. To reset the system, we have to take a loss, but we can recoup the loss if we actually get kids excited about education and create a more positive space for them to learn.”�

—Michelle Ampong

Atlanta parent and school volunteer

Restarting & Reinventing School

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