An essential guide to using social and emotional assessment in support of teaching and learning. Assessing children’s social and emotional learning skills is a critical and underappreciated element of all SEL programming. This book provides educators with practical information that they can use to clarify their assessment goals, identify viable assessment options that meet their needs, and understand and use assessment data to inform their practice and improve student outcomes.

Selected as a "Favorite Book for Educators in 2019" by Greater Good. Mindfulness provides a strong foundation for other social and emotional skills and is making inroads into classrooms as teachers seek ways to center and focus their own attention as well as that of their distracted students. Trish Broderick describes the particular relevance of mindfulness to the teaching of adolescent students, including its potential to alleviate stress, foster motivation, engagement, and compassion—and ultimately, to improve both learning and social relationships. Her book is a guide to applying mindfulness to day-to-day classroom challenges; every chapter contains authentic vignettes of secondary teachers and students, brief practices to try, and a set of takeaway points and reflection questions.

How to foster social and emotional learning, even when teaching remotely. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic posed multiple dilemmas for educators; the most immediate one, when schools closed their physical doors, was how to switch nimbly from classroom instruction to emergency remote teaching. But educators also face a related, ongoing challenge: how to meet the social and emotional needs of their learners when separated by distance, whether in the middle of a traumatic event or on an unremarkable day of schooling. In this essential volume of the SEL Solutions Series, online learning expert Stephanie Louise Moore shows how teachers can seamlessly integrate effective SEL practices into their online instruction, beginning with the all-important creation of a social learning community. Strategies and resources are provided throughout to help with every step, including: understanding the individual needs of diverse distanced learners; developing students’ navigational and focusing skills in the digital learning environment; increasing the level of interaction in online lessons; building in flexibility and choice; and assessing learning in a remote context.

Tips and tools for promoting calm and focused attention in the classroom. This volume from the editor of the SEL Solutions Series provides a concise introduction to mindfulness for teachers and others who work in preschool and elementary-school settings. Each chapter includes simple, research- tested, practical activities that can be integrated into the school day to help kids calm down and pay attention.

Lessons to begin using from the first day of school. Teachers are trained to manage misbehavior in the classroom, but receive little guidance about how to cultivate positive, prosocial behavior. With this book in hand, elementary teachers will be ready to launch the school year with confidence, using the concrete strategies in each chapter for improving students’ SEL skills in the five categories defined by CASEL (the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning): communication skills, emotion management, emotional awareness, social awareness, and decision-making skills. This handy guide breaks down instruction of these skills into small, sequenced steps, making it easy to foster students’ skills from the start of school and build on them as the year progresses.

Leveraging Socio-Emotional Assessment to Foster Children’s Human Rights focuses on teaching and assessing students’ social and emotional attributes within the broader context of children’s rights. School teachers are charged with more than just academic development – every day, they have opportunities to guide children toward humanistic, justice-orientated perspectives and to serve as role models and relationship-builders. Built from a growing body of research on the benefits of socio-emotional learning and assessment in classrooms, this book prepares pre-service and in-service teachers to take on the shifting mindset that is required for learning processes that promote dignity and respectful relations in the classroom. These concise, accessible chapters address the value and effects of positive student-teacher relationships, classroom implementation and assessment methods, student- and parent-inclusive feedback and more.

The authors draw upon scientific studies, theories, site visits, nd their own extensive experiences to describe approaches to social and emotional learning for all levels.