Self-Assessing Social and Emotional Instruction and Competencies

Instructions

Before you begin

• The Center on Great Teachers and Leaders identified 10 teaching practices that promote social, emotional, and academic skills. These 10 practices can be further divided into two types of teaching approaches: those that focus on social teaching practices and those that focus on instructional teaching practices. See Figure 1 below. (For more information on these ten practices, read the brief Teaching the Whole Child: Instructional Practices That Support Social and Emotional Learning in Three Teacher Evaluation Frameworks.)

• To implement these practices successfully, teachers must strengthen their own social and emotional skills. For example, modeling and encouraging positive student interactions requires teachers to communicate effectively and to handle stressful situations that can occur in classrooms. And teachers who are socially and emotionally competent develop supportive relationships with students, create activities that build on the strengths of students, and help students develop basic social and emotional skills to participate in classrooms.

The Assessment Tool Format

• This tool is divided into three sections, with Section 1 and Section 2 each divided into two parts:
  • Section 1: Social Interaction Assessment
    • Part A: Self-assess implementation of teaching practices
    • Part B: Self-assess teachers’ own SEL competencies
  • Section 2: Instructional Interaction Assessment
    • Part A: Self-assess implementation of teaching practices
    • Part B: Self-assess teachers’ own SEL competencies
  • Section 3: Culminating Activities and Action Planning
    To download a pdf of the entire assessment and scoring sheet in one document, click here. Otherwise, each assessment has been broken down by section into the pdfs listed below.

ASSESSMENT #1: Section 1: Social Interactions, Part A. Teaching Practices

• Think about how often you implement teaching practices that focus on positive social interactions.
• Take the assessment here.

ASSESSMENT #2: Section 1: Social Interactions, Part B. Teacher Social and Emotional Competencies

• Now think about your own social and emotional competencies and how those competencies influence your ability to implement the social interaction teaching practices.
• Take the assessment here.

ASSESSMENT #3: Section 2: Instructional Interactions, Part A. Teaching Practices

• Think about how often you implement teaching practices that focus on positive instructional interactions.
• Take the assessment here.

ASSESSMENT #4: Section 2: Instructional Interactions, Part B. Teacher Social and Emotional Competency

• Now think about your own social and emotional competencies and how those competencies influence your ability to implement the instructional interaction teaching practices.
• Take the assessment here.

Scoring, Reflection, and Action Planning

• To score yourself and reflect on your scores using specific questions, click here.
• Once you have reflected on your scores, celebrate what you are already doing well!
• Next, choose one or two items that you would like to work on and make an action plan for doing so.

Source

This practice is part of Self-Assessing Social and Emotional Instruction and Competencies: A Tool for Teachers by Nick Yoder, Ph.D., for the Center on Great Teachers and Leaders for the American Institutes for Research, 2014. Click here for more information.

Evidence That It Works

The 10 research-based teaching practices that promote social-emotional competencies cross-reference well with three popular professional teaching frameworks (CLASS, Danielson’s Framework for Teaching, and the Marzano Observational Protocol), illustrating how the instructional practices that are already used to evaluate teachers are similar to the instructional strategies used to promote social, emotional, and cognitive development.

Thus, if teachers are enacting good pedagogy based on the strategies identified in their teacher evaluations, they are also doing things that promote student social-emotional competencies.

In addition, ongoing support and training is key to successfully implementing SEL into schools. Indeed, researchers have found that SEL program implementation is more successful when all stakeholders in a school are committed to SEL as part of their professional development.

Why Does It Matter?

Many of these 10 teaching practices are already being implemented by classroom teachers and are included in several common professional teaching frameworks in teacher evaluation systems. Yet, even though these teaching practices are commonly used, they are rarely thought of in terms of SEL.

For example, a teacher may implement cooperative learning groups but may not focus on ensuring that students are working together using positive relationship skills. Through these 10 practices, teachers can connect what they are already doing to also promote student social-emotional competencies.