School Practices

A practice assessment allows you to look at how and what you are implementing and if you are being faithful to the goals of your selected programs and practices. Documenting and assessing your implementation process will allow you to monitor progress and determine where you need to make mid-course corrections to be more effective. Documentation will also help you to interpret your outcome results.

CASEL Practice Assessment Tools

• Sustainable Schoolwide SEL Implementation Guide and Toolkit Tools
  • CASEL Practice Rubric for Schoolwide SEL Implementation. This tool helps schools assess their progress through three main stages of implementation
  • The toolkit also includes a personal assessment and reflection tool for school leaders (tool 6); an SEL teacher competencies assessment form (tool 25); a self-assessment tool for identifying existing school practices (tool 13); and an instructional strategies checklist (tool 33), as well as a variety of professional development and implementation planning tools.
• Self-Assessment Guide Originally appearing in CASEL’s book, Promoting Social and Emotional Learning: Guidelines for Educators, this guide is designed to help you reflect on SEL practices at your school. The questions ask about SEL goals and activities, classroom-based SEL skills instruction, SEL coordination and integration, and SEL planning and evaluation.
• 10 Guidelines to Effective SEL Practice. Use the CASEL Guidelines as an SEL practice checklist.

Center on the Social and Emotional Foundations for Early Learning Inventory of Practices for Promoting Children’s Social Emotional Competence

This tool is designed to be used to plan a course of action to promote social emotional competence of young children. The tool encompasses four general areas: (a) building positive relationships; (b) creating supportive environments; (c) social emotional teaching strategies; and (d) individualized intensive interventions. The Inventory encourages individual self-reflection, opportunities for teaming between classroom teachers, mentor coaches, supervisors, site directors, and other administrators, and promotes effective practices for direct service staff.

Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS)

CLASS is an empirically validated observational instrument to assess classroom quality in preschool through twelfth grade classrooms. The 11 measured dimensions focus on the quality of teachers’ emotional, organizational, and instructional interactions with students in the classroom. The CLASS measures and training materials are available for purchase for early childhood, elementary, and secondary levels.

Baldridge National Quality Program’s 2004 Educational Criteria for Performance Excellence

Updated annually, this framework for comprehensive schoolwide improvement  is based on research on effective schools and organizational functioning more broadly, and not SEL-focused. It is designed to allow schools to evaluate their performance management practices.