News & Events
Teachers Call for Social and Emotional Learning in School. Teachers across America believe that social and emotional learning is critical to student success in school, work and life, according to a new national survey released at the 2013 CASEL Forum. Read more.
Washington, DC briefings and hearings focus on SEL. Several events during February 2013 in Washington, DC put the spotlight on social and emotional learning. Read more.
Austin Independent School District hosts CASEL’s Annual Cross-Districts Learning Event. In early November, representatives from our eight collaborating districts joined CASEL board members, staff and consultants for CASEL’s annual Cross-Districts Learning Event in Austin, Texas. Over three days, nearly 100 participants shared their commitment to social and emotional learning, exchanging ideas for implementation and instruction, communication strategies and their plans for future work together. They also heard from a panel of Austin students whose lives had been directly impacted by their district’s commitment to SEL.
CASEL has released the 2013 CASEL Guide. The Guide identifies well-designed, evidence-based social and emotional learning programs with potential for broad dissemination to schools across the United States. Based on CASEL’s work in research and practice spanning nearly two decades, we provide a systematic framework for evaluating the quality of classroom-based social and emotional learning (SEL) programs. In addition, the Guide shares best practices for district and school teams on how to select and implement social and emotional learning programs.
Released at a briefing on Sept. 20 in Washington, the CASEL Guide can be a valuable resource for educational leaders and teams aspiring to implement research-based approaches to promote students’ social-emotional development and academic performance. It also offers guidance to SEL program developers who seek to improve their programs, researchers who evaluate SEL programs, and policymakers who want to encourage the use of best educational practices.
The 2013 CASEL Guide was developed with generous support from NoVo Foundation and 1440 Foundation.
CASEL to host Capitol Hill briefing with special guest U.S. Rep. Judy Biggert. Members of CASEL’s Board of Directors and staff, along with Chicago-area educators, will speak to policymakers, advocates and media in Washington on Sept. 20, to release the 2013 CASEL Guide: Effective Social and Emotional Learning Programs (Preschool and Elementary School Edition). The CASEL Guide will be the first national, comprehensive review of programs that promote social and emotional learning since CASEL published Safe and Sound: An Educational Leader’s Guide to Evidence-Based Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) Programs in 2003. Please join @CASELorg as it releases the 2013 #CASELGuide on the day of the event. To attend, RSVP to Stephanie Gregg. For media inquiries, contact Megan Thorpe.
The University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) has selected Amy Mart and Ari Frede as the first-ever scholars for its Predoctoral Fellowship in Social and Emotional Learning Research. Mart and Frede, doctoral students at UIC and former Chicago-area schoolteachers, this year begin two-year fellowships at UIC’s SEL Research Group and the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). The fellowship allows education scholars to devote two years of study to social and emotional learning (SEL), a burgeoning field of education research that links students’ social and emotional skills with their academic achievement. Learn more about the fellowship and our inaugural fellows.
CASEL welcomes Anthony (A.J.) Watson for summer internship. A.J. Watson, a 2012 MBA graduate of the University of Michigan Stephen M. Ross School of Business, has been awarded a ten-week Education Pioneers Graduate School Fellowship for an internship at CASEL. Before getting his MBA, A.J. graduated from Howard University with a BBA in finance and minor in political science. He is considering a career in education in either Chicago or Detroit. Why did he choose CASEL? “The work sounded like what I wanted to do,” he says. “I’m interested in learning about education reform. I’d already had some experience with a school in southeast Michigan that focused on the whole student, and I realized that CASEL was dealing with similar issues. I wanted to understand more about how social and emotional learning is being implemented and why it’s effective.”
April 2012: Zins and O′Brien Awards At the April 2012 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), CASEL presented awards for leadership in social and emotional learning (SEL) to four individuals who have shown a deep understanding of SEL and made it a priority in their work. The awards honor the contributions to the SEL field of Joseph E. Zins and Mary Utne O’Brien. Both were close, valued CASEL colleagues who died while still in their 50s. The Zins awards recognize contributions to action research; the O’Brien awards were established to honor contributions to effective SEL practice, including implementation and policymaking. The awardees are:
- Joseph E. Zins Award for Action Research in Social and Emotional Learning—Early Career Research: Angela Lee Duckworth, University of Pennsylvania.
- Joseph E. Zins Award for Action Research in Social and Emotional Learning—Distinguished Scholar: J. David Hawkins, University of Washington.
- Mary Utne O’Brien Award for Excellence in Expanding the Evidence-Based Practice of Social and Emotional Learning: Carol Comeau, Superintendent, Anchorage (Alaska) School District.
- Mary Utne O’Brien Award for Excellence in Expanding the Evidence-Based Practice of Social and Emotional Learning: Congressman Tim Ryan, D-OH.
Learn more about the awardees and their contributions to the field by clicking on the above links.
February 2012: Five new districts were added to the Collaborating Districts Initiative. The five districts are the Chicago Public Schools, the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, the Oakland Unified School District, the Sacramento City Unified School District, and the Washoe County School District. Read more about them here.
1/18/2012 In connection with his lecture at New Trier High School, CASEL President and CEO Roger Weissberg was interviewed for an article titled Casel Builder in Quintessential New Trier.
1/4/2012 Roger Weissberg is quoted in Asking help isn’t easy for some students, a Chicago Tribune piece on a new study published in the American Sociological Review that found that students’ ability to speak up for themselves and seek help from a teacher often varies by economic and social class.
12/22/2011 Linda Darling-Hammond, Stanford University professor and CASEL board member, wins the 2012 Grawemeyer Award in education from the University of Louisville for her book, The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future.
In-depth interview with a prominent advocate of social and emotional learning. Maurice Elias with host Christopher De Michele, founder of Enrichment Resource Group. Maurice Elias of Rutgers University explores the past, present, and future of social and emotional learning with interviewer Christopher De Michele. This absorbing 50-minute conversation touches on parenting, school- and district-wide implementation, empowering teachers and administrators, leadership development, and much more.
11/12/2011 Emotional Learning Brings Real Hope to Schools – A little-known movement helps kids understand the connection between the brain and heart, and improve their behavior (and test scores) too. This article discusses how SEL is being implemented in schools across the country, about a few specific programs, the Collaborating Districts Initiative, and federal policy efforts around social and emotional learning.
11/18/2011 Roger Weissberg spoke in Boston, MA at the first SEL Leadership Conference at the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology on “Promoting the Social, Emotional, and Academic Learning of Millions of Young People.” For more information, please visit the SEL4Mass website.
10/20/2011 Investiture of Roger Weissberg as NoVo Endowed Chair in Social and Emotional Learning at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Read article.
10/16/2011 Reading, Writing, Empathy: The Rise of ‘Social Emotional Learning. Dr. Marc Brackett, president of the RULER Approach, was featured in Good Education.
9/27/2011 [CNN Video] Beyond GPAs: Character Point Average
Nancy Carlsson-Paige and Bob Wise tell Christine Romans that developing an ‘emotional quotient’ is an important component of learning.
9/23/2011 The Emotional Well-Being of Our Nation’s Youth and the Promise of Social–Emotional Learning
A detailed piece from National Association of School Psychologists that synthesizes several social and emotional learning research articles and discusses their support of the CASEL’s efforts on Capitol Hill.
