What About the Adults?: A Sneak Peek at CASEL’s New Report on Adult SEL Approaches

Key Points

• What comes first: adult social and emotional learning (SEL) or student SEL? While both are important, many practitioners and SEL program providers recommend supporting SEL as an important precursor to implementing student SEL.
• To be truly effective, SEL must be woven throughout all the district’s work. That’s why adult SEL is as critical a component to the well-being, growth, and academic achievement of students as it is for the adults who support them.
• This blog offers a sneak preview of insights from a forthcoming CASEL report that surveys a range of adult SEL approaches.

What comes first, the chicken or the egg? Or, as we like to ask at CASEL, what comes first, adult SEL or student SEL?

The answer may surprise you! While both are important, many practitioners and SEL program providers recommend supporting adult SEL as an important precursor to implementing student SEL.

That’s why we’re so excited to announce our upcoming report, Educators’ Social and Emotional Competence: A Landscape Analysis of Strategies and Outcomes for Thriving Schools, which will focus on deepening our understanding of the various approaches to adult SEL. While this report will not rate specific approaches, like our Program Guide does for student SEL, it will take a fresh look at adult SEL, exploring a variety of approaches currently in practice for supporting the promotion of critical competencies, skills, and mindsets that allow adults to bring their best selves to this critical work, enhance their own lives, and support positive academic, behavioral, and well-being outcomes for students.

This new report synthesizes the diverse approaches to adult SEL by crosswalking the Learning Policy Institute’s brief on Effective Teacher Professional Development (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017) with our model of adult SEL. Using a sample of adult SEL approaches that provided us with information about their offering, we highlight themes around approach delivery, opportunities for reflection, feedback, modeling, and structures for sustaining effects. We also highlight the research on adult SEL and the positive outcomes for both adults and students.

Why Adult SEL?

For SEL to be truly effective, it must be systemic; that is, woven throughout the district’s work at all levels. With that lens, adult SEL is as critical a component to the well-being, growth, and academic achievement of students as it is for the adults who support them.

That’s why education systems need effective approaches for helping nurture these capacities in their adults. This happens both on the level of classroom teachers as well as all other levels:

• Teachers can teach and model SEL in lessons; for example, promoting critical thinking in a math lesson and encouraging students to engage with challenging content.
• Teachers, school leaders, and school staff set the tone of the learning environment through their interactions with students and with each other.
• Adult SEL also equips teaching staff for the pressures of this often challenging profession and provides them with tools for agency and innovation.

For adults to most effectively deliver and model social and emotional competencies in academic settings, they need support in developing their own social and emotional competencies as well as supportive school, district, and community-wide structures.

Our goal with this new report is to provide insight into the breadth of approaches, highlighting what they offer and the most applicable ways to use them.

Do you want the details, you’ll need to wait for the report!

But for now, we’d like to share some of the questions we raised and the insights we gained about adult SEL and the approaches that support it:

1. Is There a Clear Definition of Adult SEL?

There isn’t a single definition of adult SEL. There are many. Some definitions focus on the role adults play (e.g., teachers, school staff, etc.). Others focus on specific approaches, such as mindfulness approaches or emotional intelligence. Yet others define adult SEL based on particular outcomes, like improving an educator’s sense of agency or strengthening student-teacher relationships. In uncovering variations on how SEL is defined, we got a glimpse of how vast and variable the field is!

In terms of how we define adult SEL, here are the framing definitions we used to develop this report:

• Adult SEL refers to the process through which all adults in the school context develop and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to foster healthy identities, manage emotions, build relationships, and make responsible decisions (CASEL, 2020).
• Adult social and emotional competence is an outcome of SEL, shaped by an individual’s personal development, professional training, and the structural conditions of their school or district.

2. What Are Some Common Approaches to Adult SEL?

Just as there are many definitions of adult SEL, there are many approaches. They differ in terms of who the adult SEL approach targets (e.g., teachers, school leaders), what content is covered in the approach, and how the approach is delivered.

For example:

• Delivery models: We encountered a wide range of delivery models, including online, in-person, and hybrid (i.e., approaches that begin with in-person retreats and supplement with online learning).
• Training: One program required no training but encouraged consistent engagement. For other programs, training ranged from two 45-minute interactive online exercises to training that extended over two years.
• Coordination across schools: There is also a range concerning coordination across schools and the mechanisms used. While only four of the approaches are explicitly designed to be implemented schoolwide, others offer tools and support for systemic SEL. This includes monthly newsletters to principals for supporting whole-school action, optional leadership training for all staff, and awareness building around systemic approaches to SEL.

Additionally, some suggest that all staff in the building—including office, custodial, and other support staff—receive training. With so many options, schools and districts may look for certain characteristics of the approaches that most align with their needs.

3. Are Approaches to Adult SEL Effective for Positive Educator and Student Outcomes?

According to what we have discovered in creating our report, YES! There have been many positive outcomes associated with adult SEL. These outcomes have been synthesized in academic literature reviews and meta-analyses and, include positive findings for:

• Adult social and emotional competencies (Oliveira et al., 2021). In fact, these competencies are thought to be a key mechanism for other positive outcomes.
• Classroom behavior, including classroom management and student-teacher relationships (Blewitt et al., 2020).
• Occupational health and wellbeing, including stress reduction, burnout, and overall well-being (Beames et al., 2023).
• Agency and purpose, with most of the research focusing on self-efficacy (Zhou et al., 2023).

There have also been positive outcomes for students, including improvements in:

• Educator-student relationships (e.g., Hwang et al., 2019)
• Classroom climate (e.g., Zee & Koomen, 2016)
• Academic achievement (e.g., Brown et al., 2023)

4. What Key Questions Do We Need to Understand?

Through our scan and synthesis, we surface questions that warrant more understanding and research. These questions include:

• What are the most critical short- and long-term outcomes to target through adult SEL approaches?
• What works for whom?
• What is the role of technology in adult SEL?
• How can systems change to facilitate adult and student outcomes?
• How do adult SEL approaches connect to other models of workforce wellbeing?

As we continue to understand and advance the many factors that contribute to young people’s academic, social, and emotional development, educators play a critical role. Please stay tuned for our upcoming report in which we uncover patterns, and in many cases, variability in adult SEL approaches. In doing so, we surface components of evidenced-based, high-quality approaches and raise areas of need in this essential, developing field.

Related Posts:

• “We teach who we are, not just what we know.” What Top Researchers Had to Say About Adult SEL
• What We Learned From Focusing on Adult SEL
• What My CASEL Colleagues Have to Say About Adult SEL

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