How to Create Effective SEL Professional Learning

Key Points

• Summer is a great time to start planning SEL for the school year!
• As a facilitator, you can infuse SEL into how you design sessions to ensure participants are actively engaged in their own learning.
• Use the strategies in this blog to offer teachers the tools and skills to support them while modeling model SEL for teachers and other staff.

Though summer is here, it’s not too early to start thinking about back-to-school and next year’s professional learning!

Schoolwide SEL requires high-quality professional learning that helps staff develop practices that model and promote SEL. And it’s most effective when it invites educators to be active participants in their learning.

SEL isn’t just about the content: It’s also about the “how” of teaching and interacting with others. Embedding SEL principles into professional learning makes it more effective for adults while also teaching them by modeling SEL. As a facilitator, you can infuse SEL into how you design sessions to ensure participants are actively engaged in their own learning. They’ll practice their own social and emotional skills during professional learning when they exercise:

• Self-awareness about their own effectiveness
• Self-management as they tune in to and manage emotions that surface
• Relationship skills as they share with and listen to their colleagues
• Social awareness and responsible decision-making as they work together on solutions to improve instruction and supports for students

Here are some tips for creating professional learning that is hands-on, engaging, and effective by using SEL principles and practices:

1. Draw on learners’ knowledge and experiences

Facilitators demonstrate respect for learners and curiosity about their contexts when they center the expertise and wisdom in the room.

Introduce self-awareness activities as a way to guide learners to examine and share their experiences, personal identities, and professional journeys in ways that elevate what they already know and recognize where there are learning opportunities.

The experience of being asked for input and of co-constructing shared knowledge and insights with colleagues can generate a more trusting, collaborative environment for adults, just as it does in classrooms.

2. Build the engagement around connection and discussion

When there is little time and much to learn, it can be tempting to focus solely on disseminating information and shortchange time for learners to talk. Discussion is an essential way that adults integrate and apply new information. This supports educators in more effectively carrying out their SEL implementation role, while also fostering connections and belonging among learners.

Activities such as the SEL 3 Signature Practices that engage social awareness and relationship skills guide learners to co-create new understandings with colleagues that support changes in mindsets and practices over time.

3. Encourage experiential collaborative problem-solving

Reading and hearing new information can build a knowledge base, but collaborative inquiry is more effective in making a lasting change in practice.

Activities that encourage problem-solving and inclusive decision-making about real issues, such as our SEL Data Reflection Protocol, support learner agency and collective efficacy.

Facilitators position themselves as a co-learner, trusting that the group can work together to devise solutions to the challenges they face.

4. Prioritize time for application and practice

As facilitator, your goal is to move a group from learning to understanding and application, providing tools that help them continually build expertise over time. Everyone applies learning to their work in different ways: Educators deserve time to process new ideas and information in the context of their ongoing work.

Learning is more likely to impact practice when facilitators design professional development experiences that include choices, individual goal-setting, and time to work on a plan they will use with students.

Get Ready for the New School Year

Using these strategies to prepare your staff to kick off the new school can set a pattern to follow for professional learning throughout the year while also modeling how to integrate SEL in classrooms and staff engagements. It’s a great step toward starting the year off right!

Tools and Resources:

Fine-tuning your presenter skills? See 12 Strategies for Adult SEL Facilitation

Planning an agenda for a team retreat? See Team Retreats

Weaving SEL into other professional learning? Join one of CASEL’s free online SEL 3 Signature Practices workshops!

Are you looking to plan SEL professional learning for the year? Visit CASEL’s District Resource Center for guidance.

Related Posts:

• SEL Quick Start: The SEL 3 Signature Practices
• How Can Districts Learn About SEL From Each Other? Austin and Albuquerque Lead the Way
• Three Important Shifts in our Guidance on Adult Social and Emotional Learning (SEL)

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