The National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development final report: tools you can use from Engaging Schools

We at Engaging Schools were eager to see the final report from the Aspen Institute’s National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development. We wholeheartedly support all of its recommendations. While all are in our wheelhouse, we’d like to highlight one in particular:

“Change instruction to teach students social, emotional, and cognitive skills; embed these skills in academics and in schoolwide practices.”

In case you missed it, here’s the white paper we released in 2017 called Embedding Social and Emotional Learning in High School classrooms.

It outlines a framework for what has long been considered a difficult challenge:  how to infuse social and emotional learning into secondary schools in an integral way rather than as an add-on.

One of the innovations we have developed is what we call Learning and Life Competencies for High School, College, and Career Success (LLCs) for students. Drawing on the latest research on the science of learning, these build upon longstanding SEL skills and include academic efficacy. When integrated well into daily life in the classroom, LLCs lead to desired student behaviors, which in turn develop and strengthen their positive mindsets. The system is dynamic and self-renewing. You can find the LLCs on pages 15-16 of the white paper.

The LLCs can be explicitly modeled, taught, practiced, and assessed within any classroom by teachers of all subjects in the course of daily lessons.