Cleveland, Ohio
District overview
The Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) serves just under 43,000 students in 112 schools. Although the district is located in a city that has been declining in both financial stability and population for several decades, and although students’ achievement scores are below state averages, the district is determined to help all its students succeed and to close the achievement gap.
Social and emotional learning has been an important part of the district’s overall approach for several years, particularly at the elementary level. With support from a local foundation, the district has implemented the PATHS curriculum in all elementary schools in grades K-5. As part of the CDI, during the spring and summer of 2011, CASEL’s district consultants provided training to more than 300 building administrators, student support staff, and district leadership team members to create district-wide awareness and understanding of social and emotional learning. Also, working closely with the CASEL district consultants, the staff has developed a draft scope and sequence that incorporates social and emotional learning into the core academic disciplines.
District website
Social and emotional learning highlights
- As Cleveland moves forward with the CDI, it is important to articulate a common framework and language to define the competencies and skills of social and emotional learning. Toward that end, CASEL developed a PowerPoint to use in professional development activities with district leaders, principals, and school support staff. The PowerPoint vividly illustrates the interconnectedness of the five essential sets of competencies.
- To identify effective approaches to students’ social and emotional development, the CMSD created a “Human Ware” team and commissioned an audit of student needs and services to address those needs. The audit was performed by the American Institutes for Research and completed in 2008. Read the executive summary for more information.
The Superintendent Says…
From an interview with Eric Gordon, CEO, Cleveland Metropolitan School District.
Why is social and emotional learning important in your school district?
There is a great deal of evidence that addressing social and emotional learning has a direct positive impact on kids’ academic learning, and that’s our primary mission. Beyond that, if we think of education as social justice and as the responsibility to create well-rounded individuals who can participate in the society, then having kids who have good social and emotional skills like self-regulation and developing relationships with others is also critically important.
What are your hopes and goals for the Collaborating Districts Initiative in your district?
I hope the initiative will allow us to anchor social and emotional learning as an embedded practice in our district and help us learn from each other how to do that most effectively. I also hope it will help our community come to view this as a lifelong investment. One of the fears with something like social and emotional learning, if people haven’t had it as part of their own educational experience, is that it feels like an add-on. I hope this will help us to bring to scale an embedded set of practices that will live on in the district with the support of the community.
What do you think will be the benefit of working with CASEL and the other collaborating districts as part of the CDI learning community?
CASEL is the premier research organization in the field of social and emotional learning. Having direct access to such esteemed colleagues in the field provides a solid theoretical and research base for the work we’re doing. Working with the other collaborating districts will give us an opportunity as practitioners to learn how to turn theory into practice and to know what’s working and what’s not working in bringing social and emotional learning to scale.
What are some challenges to social and emotional learning in your district?
There are two. One is helping every person in the organization understand that social and emotional learning isn’t a new thing that we have to do but a way of teaching, learning, and behaving that reinforces what we’re already doing. The other is that we’re in extremely difficult financial times. Being able to commit adequate amounts of time to training, for example, in such a resource-challenged environment is a threat to our ability to succeed.