Implementation » CASEL Work

Implementation Guide and Toolkit
In recent years, CASEL has worked to identify and understand, through literature reviews, expert interviews, and hands-on experience with schools and districts, the essential factors affecting successful schoolwide SEL implementation. Based on this understanding, we developed tools and materials aimed at helping education leaders implement and sustain schoolwide, integrated SEL programming. These efforts resulted in our latest publication, Sustainable schoolwide SEL: Implementation guide and toolkit.

This publication includes a 158-page guide that synthesizes research literatures on school reform and organizational change, and summarizes the state of the science of the implementation and sustainability of interventions. The research-based information is supplemented with interviews with experts throughout the field—researchers, seasoned educators, and developers of top programs. The publication also includes a 272-page Toolkit with 40 tools that support every step of the implementation process.

Collaborating Sites
With funding from the Office of the Illinois Governor as part of the state’s Safe and Drug-Free Schools grant from the U.S. Department of Education, the Illinois Collaborating Sites Project combines intensive and direct field work with action research in nine schools. Through this project CASEL has worked with the nine collaborating school sites over a five-year period to establish school-wide, evidence-based, SEL programming and document its impacts on students’ healthy development and achievement.

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Safe Schools/Healthy Students Initiative (SS/HS)
Under a three-year contract, CASEL is currently collaborating with the Education Development Center, Inc. and the American Institutes for Research to provide training and technical assistance to Safe Schools/Healthy Students grantees funded by the U.S. Departments of Education, Health and Human Services and Justice. CASEL was asked to join in this collaborative venture because federal officials believe that the language of SEL, which is non-technical, emphasizes healthy development of students, and promotes student skills development, helps educators and justice personnel to embrace and engage in the mental health and prevention goals of the grant.

Through this contract, CASEL develops training content on the integration of social and emotional learning into the six components of the SS/HS grant. CASEL provides web-based seminars, teleconferences, workshops, and email supports to sites interested in social and emotional learning. CASEL is also working intensively with one SS/HS site in Illinois, the West Chicago Elementary District, to help it develop as a model site of SEL practice. CASEL will document challenges, strategies, and tools developed out of this experience in order to share the knowledge developed there with other SS/HS grantees and others.

Visit the National Technical Assistance Center for Mental Health Promotion and Youth Violence Prevention for more information.