This thoughtful guide offers a framework for creating and sustaining learning organizations where both students and educators can truly thrive.
Chapter 1. Attunement
Chapter 2. Alignment
Introduction
This may be one of the first education books you read—though I certainly hope it is not the last—focused on adults rather than children. It is a work centered on identity, goal orientation, capacity strengthening, and community tending in a way not previously explored. Some may see it as self-indulgent in a field so firmly focused on service; others may see it as supporting self-preservation in a profession marked by burnout. Either way, this book is for you. Indulge, preserve, recover. Take all the time you need to soak in its pages, process, and grow. We need you for the long game. Our Collective NeedMy first book, Personalized Professional Learning: A Job-Embedded Pathway for Elevating Teacher Voice (2019), sparked conversations about the need to place greater emphasis on andragogy, or adult learning, in parallel to schools' focus on pedagogy and curriculum. The idea for this book formed shortly after my first book was published, as readers responded to the text and I continued to see adult learning shifting, evolving, and, in some ways, remaining the same or even moving backward. So, I drafted an outline about our collective need to strengthen educators' social-emotional capacity alongside their content mastery and skill development. Many of the educators I've supported struggled with their own self-awareness and self-management challenges (myself included at times), especially as education continues to become an ever-more demanding field, so it seems unfair to look to them as social-emotional models for students without also helping them grow their own social-emotional learning. I wanted to share reflections, tools, and strategies both to strengthen educators' own social-emotional capacity and to better equip them to support students. Little did I know when I compiled that first outline where we would be at the time of publication. To say the need for this work has escalated is an understatement. The boundaries between educators' professional and personal lives are blurred now more than ever before, yet we continue to focus training and workshops almost exclusively on instruction while other fields offer professional learning centered on self-growth (e.g., on such topics as goal setting, prioritization and time management, and collaboration) as much as, if not more than, content expertise and strategy. Systems of Support—For StudentsWe saw a shift toward systemwide capacity building and professional learning centered on students' social-emotional needs as we transitioned back to in-school learning following the closures due to COVID-19 and sought to reacclimate students to social norms. The longer we operated outside the traditional model we had come to understand as "school," the greater the perceived need for social-emotional supports (though such needs have long existed). It is somewhat ironic that we had to remove our social connections—at least those that were place-based—to fully grasp the impact of social-emotional wellness on learning and development. Whole School, Whole Community, Whole ChildThough it may have taken a global pandemic for social-emotional learning (SEL) to find its necessary place in both educator practice and professional learning, frameworks to support SEL have undergone several cycles of development and refinement over the past 25 years. In 1997, ASCD published Promoting Social and Emotional Learning: Guidelines for Educators—the first major work to define and describe social-emotional learning, authored by members of the Research and Guidelines Work Group of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). This text and its iterations continue to guide social-emotional learning at the state, district, and school levels today. In 2006, ASCD convened the Commission on the Whole Child, a cross-section of business and education leaders that published The Learning Compact Redefined: A Call to Action. In this report, the commission noted that the "current educational practice and policy focus is overwhelmingly on academic achievement. This achievement, however, is but one element of student learning and development and only a part of any complete system of educational accountability" (Bramante et al., 2007, p. 3). In 2010, the whole child tenets—students who are healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged—were further defined across 50 indicators, and in 2012 ASCD partnered with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to develop the Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (or WSCC) model (see Figure I.1). This model recognizes the need for education, public health, and school health sectors to become better aligned and collaborate to improve each child's cognitive, physical, social, and emotional development. Twenty-eight states have written "whole child" into their Every Student Succeeds Act consolidated state plans, and 13 states have written the WSCC Model directly into their plans (Slade, 2020). Figure I.1. The Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC) ModelSource: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and ASCD. Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC) model. © 2012 ASCD. Together, ASCD and the CDC identified 10 components for coordinating policy, process, and practice and improving both learning and health. Among these components is employee wellness. "Fostering the physical and mental health of school employees protects school staff and, by doing so, helps support students' health and academic success," notes the CDC (2020, para. 5). "Healthy school employees are more productive and less likely to be absent." While the WSCC model highlights employee wellness as an essential component for supporting the whole child, attention almost exclusively centers on elements of physical health such as healthy eating, active lifestyles, abstaining from tobacco, and avoiding injury and exposure to hazards. Stress and depression receive mention but are not emphasized as much as physical health. SEL CompetenciesAdditional work must be done to build the social-emotional capacities of leaders, teachers, and other adults across our educational systems. Following the collaboration with ASCD, CASEL identified five SEL competencies to guide and assess the effectiveness of SEL programs at the state, district, and school levels. The competencies were originally published in 2012, and the complete "CASEL 5" framework (shown in Figure I.2) was updated in 2020. CASEL's five competencies are as follows:
Figure I.2. The CASEL SEL FrameworkSource: From the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. Used with permission. © 2020b CASEL. As of March 2020, CASEL had found that 18 states had developed K–12 SEL standards or competencies, with 12 utilizing the CASEL 5 framework and the rest using a state-specific SEL model. Of these 18, 6 reference the whole child and 13 include professional learning (CASEL 2020a, p. 5). Despite this progress, a lack of attention to adult SEL remains an obstacle to effective implementation of SEL for students. CASEL's Collaborating Districts Initiative found that "schools are more effective at teaching and reinforcing SEL for students when they also cultivate SEL competencies in adults. Successful SEL implementation depends on how well staff work together to facilitate SEL instruction, foster a positive school community, and model social and emotional competence. This calls on schools to focus on adults' professional growth as educators as well as their own social and emotional learning" (CASEL, n.d.). In a brief report on lessons learned from district leaders who had been implementing SEL since 2011, CASEL highlights this need in greater detail:
The report goes on to highlight the importance of strengthening central office expertise; providing high-quality professional learning for schools; deepening adult social, emotional, and cultural competence; and building staff trust, community, and collective efficacy. Further Evidence of NeedThe need to tend to adult SEL emerges across research bases. In 2019, the Aspen Institute National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development (Aspen Commission) published a landmark two-year study titled From a Nation at Risk to a Nation at Hope. "Too often," the study reports, "teachers and school leaders do not receive preparation and ongoing learning that address the science of human development and how to translate that science into their practice. Teachers, in particular, must understand this work, own it, and help shape it. 'We have to start with adults' social and emotional learning, and then work on kids' social and emotional learning,' said a 4th grade teacher in Seattle" (p. 25). Newer performance-based teacher preparation assessment systems require prospective teachers to attend to SEL by detailing how their understanding of their students' social, emotional, and cognitive development guides their lesson design, selection of materials and activities, and provided supports. In years past, similar performance assessments typically included elements of differentiated instruction (e.g., process, product, content, and environment) but did not directly address students' social-emotional needs. More than 600 educator preparation programs in 40 states and the District of Columbia currently use the Educative Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA), a preparation program developed by the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE), as a preservice assessment, and at least 18 states have or are considering such an assessment for teacher licensure or certification (Aspen Commission, 2019). However, this assessment does not evaluate preservice teachers' social-emotional capacity to respond to an ever-changing environment with evolving student needs. Dr. Stephanie Jones of Harvard's Graduate School of Education is the director of the school's Ecological Approaches to Social-Emotional Learning (EASEL) Laboratory, which explores the effects of high-quality social-emotional interventions. "It is difficult for adults to help students build these skills if they themselves do not possess them," Jones writes. "Research indicates that teachers with stronger social and emotional skills have more positive relationships with students, engage in more effective classroom management, and implement their students' social and emotional programming more effectively. Critically, not only teachers but district administrators, principals, and other school staff need professional training and support in social and emotional development and related practices" (Jones & Kahn, 2017–2018, pp. 20–21). The American Institutes for Research reviewed 136 social-emotional frameworks and found that "many frameworks mention youth, children, or adolescence but do not necessarily provide relevant age ranges. … Eleven frameworks refer to school-age child, 19 refer to children, 11 refer to youth, and three refer to teens. A total of 32 refer to adolescents as a primary age group of interest, often in combination with either children or young adults. The term adults appears 10 times across frameworks" (Berg et al., 2017, p. 37). Although research indicates that personal and social transitions require individuals to develop and refine new social-emotional competencies over time (Hair et al., 2002), existing frameworks do not necessarily reflect this reality. Closing the Gap—For AdultsThis book builds upon current research in social-emotional learning both inside and outside education, exploring the disciplines of attunement, alignment, perspective, collective efficacy, and organizational learning through an andragogical lens and in both theoretical and practical terms. It provides educators with opportunities to pause and reflect as well as anchor their next steps using research-based strategies coupled with adult learners' experiences from the field. Collectively, the strategies, insights, reflections, and integration guides in this book offer a framework for creating and sustaining learning organizations where both students and educators can truly thrive. The Framework for Educator Capacity Building (see Figure I.3) sequences, defines, and outlines the key concepts for each of the disciplines listed above. The framework references related adult learning theories as well as complementary SEL competencies from CASEL. In addition, each chapter in this book has a corresponding appendix containing an integration guide and a capacity-building plan to support individual and organizational implementation and meet the needs of a holistic learning organization from both an intrapersonal and an ecological perspective. Figure I.3. Framework for Educator Capacity BuildingA Note on Capacity Building, Disciplines, and OrganizationsThe United Nations (n.d.) defines capacity building as "the process of developing and strengthening the skills, instincts, abilities, processes and resources that organizations and communities need to survive, adapt, and thrive in a fast-changing world," noting that an "essential ingredient in capacity-building is transformation that is generated and sustained over time from within; transformation of this kind goes beyond performing tasks to changing mindsets and attitudes" (para. 1). Some individuals view this type of professional growth as life skills development; others see it as social-emotional learning. Regardless of the term used, we know from the high numbers of educators leaving the field that stronger and more personalized capacity strengthening is needed for our districts and schools to survive, adapt, and thrive. I selected the term discipline quite intentionally to frame the key concepts of attunement, alignment, perspective, collective efficacy, and organizational learning in this book. I have positioned these disciplines as access points rather than pathways with a target proficiency level; the point of entry will be different for each educator (and, most likely, each discipline). While the disciplines can (and should) be developed individually, they also build upon and support one another. In fact, in reviewing practitioner contributions for this work, it became challenging at times to identify the point of best fit for some insights given the integrated nature of these concepts. Unlike a standard, competency, or skill, we can never fully master a discipline. Instead, we consistently build our capacity to better understand and focus ourselves and to engage more meaningfully with others. As Howard Gardner (2006) notes, "A discipline constitutes a distinctive way of thinking about the world. … [There are] two meanings of discipline: mastery of a craft, and the capacity to renew that craft through regular application over the years" (pp. 26, 43). For adult learners, capacity building requires more than checking off a list of signature practices and related strategies. We must commit to consistently reconsidering and refining our understanding of ourselves and the ways in which this understanding impacts our work with others. Throughout the book, you will see the term organization where you might typically expect to see school or district. One of my goals when developing this book was to make it accessible to as many educators as possible, regardless of position or school type. The term organization applies not only to schools or districts but also to grade-level or content-area teams, grade bands, and education-focused nonprofit or for-profit entities. Regardless of whether you hold a formal leadership position in any of these, this book offers a variety of opportunities for you to strengthen both your individual and organizational capacity. ReflectionsI highly encourage you to make time and space for the reflections included in each chapter and to revisit them at different points in your career, particularly as you transition from one position or school community to another. I distinctly note both time and space here because it is not uncommon for us to designate time on our calendars for professional learning activities without really committing to them and ensuring we're in the right headspace to fully engage, focus, and reflect. We may complete the exercises when we are tired, unfocused, or multitasking. To gain the full benefit of these reflections (as well as of the strategies and implementation guides) requires a commitment of both time and space. If you feel stretched or stressed, complete your reflections in sections, turn them into bulleted lists, or integrate components one at a time into a daily journal. As someone deeply committed to productivity and efficiency, I can assure you that there is great value in deep thinking, intentional pausing, and clear processing free from the distractions that often cloud our profession. Take your time with this piece; consider it a journey to be experienced rather than a task to be completed. If you are in a leadership position, use the reflections from this book as growth opportunities for your teams. Engage with them yourself first, modeling your commitment to the work both inwardly and outwardly. But after that, share—always share. This piece is meant to be a tool for collective efficacy and organizational learning as much as for personal growth. Throughout the book, you will see four icons indicating opportunities for reflection, integration, and extension:
In addition, a QR code provided in each chapter enables you to access editable PDF versions of many of the reflection and action-planning tools within this book. I hope these will support and enhance your reflection, learning, and action planning. Readers can also access all the resources via this link and navigating to the page for each discipline. For readers, all downloads are provided free of charge using the case-sensitive password "StillLearning." InsightsI took extensive care to collect insights from teachers, coaches, leaders, and educational service providers across a variety of organizational types (public, private, charter, independent, nonprofit, for-profit, government), sizes, geographic locations, races, genders, and positions. Having served in a number of the represented positions myself, I understand the importance of seeing yourself in the work rather than viewing concepts through the lens of an outsider. I remain, now and always, a practitioner at heart, committed to a long-term vision of our holistic educational ecosystem as well as to an understanding of the day-to-day implications for those doing the work on the ground. I leaned heavily on my professional learning network in writing this book, and they responded in kind to ensure the most representative picture possible. In these pages, you will find voices of individuals far more experienced than myself; I am humbled that they shared their personal insights and critical learnings with me. While I fully acknowledge that not all readers will find themselves in every contribution, my sincere hope in crafting this work is that you find yourself in at least one and are driven to connect, push deeper, and grow. StrategiesThe strategies outlined in each chapter are just that—strategies. Recognizing the extreme demands on educators' time, I attempted, as much as possible, to distill key findings from critical works to the most salient and applicable actions possible. They are not intended to constitute an all-encompassing program or exhaustive checklist; they are positioned to help educators transition reflections from thought to action and provide a scope of possibilities for what this work has the potential to look like in practice. Please do not confuse these strategies with development targets or evaluative indicators. Doing so diminishes extremely challenging work to a set of checkboxes, columns, and rows. That is in no way the intended application of these strategies. Rather, use them as guideposts as you continue to learn side-by-side with your students. Integration Guides and Capacity-Building PlansAs mentioned previously, each chapter has a corresponding appendix that includes an integration guide and a capacity-building plan to move you from understanding to reflection to action. Synthesizing key findings, and even helping readers find their own position within such findings, lacks value unless it points readers toward growth. The integration guides and capacity-building plans will help you consider which actions might best inform your practice. As noted earlier, the disciplines in this book are intended to be viewed as a continuous journey rather than a set of skills to be mastered. My hope is that you continually revisit this work, each time with new perspectives, lenses, and experiences to enhance its richness and implications for your own practice. And Yes, StudentsAs an educator writing for educators, I would be remiss not to mention our students directly—how they inspire, motivate, and reenergize us, even years after they've left our classroom. Let's be honest, our students are our "why." They get us out of bed in the morning; they keep us awake at night. At its core, education is both "head" work and "heart" work. But for once—yes, just once—I am giving you permission for this to be about you—in the service of our students. Indulge, preserve, recover—but whatever you do, keep yourself in the game. We—they—need you. Printed by for personal use only |
Whatever the reasons, we do not pursue emotional development with the same intensity with which we pursue physical and intellectual development. This is all the more unfortunate because full emotional development offers the greatest degree of leverage in attaining our full potential.
—William O'Brien
This may be one of the first education books you read—though I certainly hope it is not the last—focused on adults rather than children. It is a work centered on identity, goal orientation, capacity strengthening, and community tending in a way not previously explored. Some may see it as self-indulgent in a field so firmly focused on service; others may see it as supporting self-preservation in a profession marked by burnout. Either way, this book is for you. Indulge, preserve, recover. Take all the time you need to soak in its pages, process, and grow. We need you for the long game.
My first book, Personalized Professional Learning: A Job-Embedded Pathway for Elevating Teacher Voice (2019), sparked conversations about the need to place greater emphasis on andragogy, or adult learning, in parallel to schools' focus on pedagogy and curriculum. The idea for this book formed shortly after my first book was published, as readers responded to the text and I continued to see adult learning shifting, evolving, and, in some ways, remaining the same or even moving backward. So, I drafted an outline about our collective need to strengthen educators' social-emotional capacity alongside their content mastery and skill development. Many of the educators I've supported struggled with their own self-awareness and self-management challenges (myself included at times), especially as education continues to become an ever-more demanding field, so it seems unfair to look to them as social-emotional models for students without also helping them grow their own social-emotional learning. I wanted to share reflections, tools, and strategies both to strengthen educators' own social-emotional capacity and to better equip them to support students.
Little did I know when I compiled that first outline where we would be at the time of publication. To say the need for this work has escalated is an understatement. The boundaries between educators' professional and personal lives are blurred now more than ever before, yet we continue to focus training and workshops almost exclusively on instruction while other fields offer professional learning centered on self-growth (e.g., on such topics as goal setting, prioritization and time management, and collaboration) as much as, if not more than, content expertise and strategy.
We saw a shift toward systemwide capacity building and professional learning centered on students' social-emotional needs as we transitioned back to in-school learning following the closures due to COVID-19 and sought to reacclimate students to social norms. The longer we operated outside the traditional model we had come to understand as "school," the greater the perceived need for social-emotional supports (though such needs have long existed). It is somewhat ironic that we had to remove our social connections—at least those that were place-based—to fully grasp the impact of social-emotional wellness on learning and development.
Though it may have taken a global pandemic for social-emotional learning (SEL) to find its necessary place in both educator practice and professional learning, frameworks to support SEL have undergone several cycles of development and refinement over the past 25 years. In 1997, ASCD published Promoting Social and Emotional Learning: Guidelines for Educators—the first major work to define and describe social-emotional learning, authored by members of the Research and Guidelines Work Group of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). This text and its iterations continue to guide social-emotional learning at the state, district, and school levels today.
In 2006, ASCD convened the Commission on the Whole Child, a cross-section of business and education leaders that published The Learning Compact Redefined: A Call to Action. In this report, the commission noted that the "current educational practice and policy focus is overwhelmingly on academic achievement. This achievement, however, is but one element of student learning and development and only a part of any complete system of educational accountability" (Bramante et al., 2007, p. 3). In 2010, the whole child tenets—students who are healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged—were further defined across 50 indicators, and in 2012 ASCD partnered with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to develop the Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (or WSCC) model (see Figure I.1). This model recognizes the need for education, public health, and school health sectors to become better aligned and collaborate to improve each child's cognitive, physical, social, and emotional development. Twenty-eight states have written "whole child" into their Every Student Succeeds Act consolidated state plans, and 13 states have written the WSCC Model directly into their plans (Slade, 2020).
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and ASCD. Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC) model. © 2012 ASCD.
Together, ASCD and the CDC identified 10 components for coordinating policy, process, and practice and improving both learning and health. Among these components is employee wellness. "Fostering the physical and mental health of school employees protects school staff and, by doing so, helps support students' health and academic success," notes the CDC (2020, para. 5). "Healthy school employees are more productive and less likely to be absent." While the WSCC model highlights employee wellness as an essential component for supporting the whole child, attention almost exclusively centers on elements of physical health such as healthy eating, active lifestyles, abstaining from tobacco, and avoiding injury and exposure to hazards. Stress and depression receive mention but are not emphasized as much as physical health.
Additional work must be done to build the social-emotional capacities of leaders, teachers, and other adults across our educational systems. Following the collaboration with ASCD, CASEL identified five SEL competencies to guide and assess the effectiveness of SEL programs at the state, district, and school levels. The competencies were originally published in 2012, and the complete "CASEL 5" framework (shown in Figure I.2) was updated in 2020. CASEL's five competencies are as follows:
Self-awareness: The abilities to understand one's own emotions, thoughts, and values and how they influence behavior across contexts … capacities to recognize one's strengths and limitations with a well-grounded sense of confidence and purpose.
Self-management: The abilities to manage one's emotions, thoughts, and behaviors effectively in different situations and to achieve goals and aspirations … the capacities to delay gratification, manage stress, and feel motivation and agency to accomplish personal and collective goals.
Social awareness: The abilities to understand the perspectives of and empathize with others, including those from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and contexts … the capacities to feel compassion for others, understand broader historical and social norms for behavior in different settings, and recognize family, school, and community resources and supports.
Relationship skills: The abilities to establish and maintain healthy and supportive relationships and to effectively navigate settings with diverse individuals and groups … the capacities to communicate clearly, listen actively, cooperate, work collaboratively to problem solve and negotiate conflict constructively, navigate settings with differing social and cultural demands and opportunities, provide leadership, and seek or offer help when needed.
Responsible decision-making: The abilities to make caring and constructive choices about personal behavior and social interactions across diverse situations … the capacities to consider ethical standards and safety concerns, and to evaluate the benefits and consequences of various actions for personal, social, and collective well-being. (CASEL, 2020b)
Source: From the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. Used with permission. © 2020b CASEL.
As of March 2020, CASEL had found that 18 states had developed K–12 SEL standards or competencies, with 12 utilizing the CASEL 5 framework and the rest using a state-specific SEL model. Of these 18, 6 reference the whole child and 13 include professional learning (CASEL 2020a, p. 5).
Despite this progress, a lack of attention to adult SEL remains an obstacle to effective implementation of SEL for students. CASEL's Collaborating Districts Initiative found that "schools are more effective at teaching and reinforcing SEL for students when they also cultivate SEL competencies in adults. Successful SEL implementation depends on how well staff work together to facilitate SEL instruction, foster a positive school community, and model social and emotional competence. This calls on schools to focus on adults' professional growth as educators as well as their own social and emotional learning" (CASEL, n.d.). In a brief report on lessons learned from district leaders who had been implementing SEL since 2011, CASEL highlights this need in greater detail:
While each [district leader] offered unique insights about how they would do things differently if they all started over, they all had one common lesson: We should have focused more on the adults in the beginning. Time and time again, districts said they mistakenly focused entirely on building the social and emotional competence of students without also considering the SEL needs of adults who are engaging with students every day. In order to create conditions for students to effectively engage in SEL, adults themselves need to feel empowered, supported, and valued. This calls on districts to foster a supportive staff community and promote adults' own SEL. (CASEL, 2019, p. 1)
The report goes on to highlight the importance of strengthening central office expertise; providing high-quality professional learning for schools; deepening adult social, emotional, and cultural competence; and building staff trust, community, and collective efficacy.
The need to tend to adult SEL emerges across research bases. In 2019, the Aspen Institute National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development (Aspen Commission) published a landmark two-year study titled From a Nation at Risk to a Nation at Hope. "Too often," the study reports, "teachers and school leaders do not receive preparation and ongoing learning that address the science of human development and how to translate that science into their practice. Teachers, in particular, must understand this work, own it, and help shape it. 'We have to start with adults' social and emotional learning, and then work on kids' social and emotional learning,' said a 4th grade teacher in Seattle" (p. 25).
Newer performance-based teacher preparation assessment systems require prospective teachers to attend to SEL by detailing how their understanding of their students' social, emotional, and cognitive development guides their lesson design, selection of materials and activities, and provided supports. In years past, similar performance assessments typically included elements of differentiated instruction (e.g., process, product, content, and environment) but did not directly address students' social-emotional needs.
More than 600 educator preparation programs in 40 states and the District of Columbia currently use the Educative Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA), a preparation program developed by the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE), as a preservice assessment, and at least 18 states have or are considering such an assessment for teacher licensure or certification (Aspen Commission, 2019). However, this assessment does not evaluate preservice teachers' social-emotional capacity to respond to an ever-changing environment with evolving student needs.
Dr. Stephanie Jones of Harvard's Graduate School of Education is the director of the school's Ecological Approaches to Social-Emotional Learning (EASEL) Laboratory, which explores the effects of high-quality social-emotional interventions. "It is difficult for adults to help students build these skills if they themselves do not possess them," Jones writes. "Research indicates that teachers with stronger social and emotional skills have more positive relationships with students, engage in more effective classroom management, and implement their students' social and emotional programming more effectively. Critically, not only teachers but district administrators, principals, and other school staff need professional training and support in social and emotional development and related practices" (Jones & Kahn, 2017–2018, pp. 20–21).
The American Institutes for Research reviewed 136 social-emotional frameworks and found that "many frameworks mention youth, children, or adolescence but do not necessarily provide relevant age ranges. … Eleven frameworks refer to school-age child, 19 refer to children, 11 refer to youth, and three refer to teens. A total of 32 refer to adolescents as a primary age group of interest, often in combination with either children or young adults. The term adults appears 10 times across frameworks" (Berg et al., 2017, p. 37). Although research indicates that personal and social transitions require individuals to develop and refine new social-emotional competencies over time (Hair et al., 2002), existing frameworks do not necessarily reflect this reality.
This book builds upon current research in social-emotional learning both inside and outside education, exploring the disciplines of attunement, alignment, perspective, collective efficacy, and organizational learning through an andragogical lens and in both theoretical and practical terms. It provides educators with opportunities to pause and reflect as well as anchor their next steps using research-based strategies coupled with adult learners' experiences from the field. Collectively, the strategies, insights, reflections, and integration guides in this book offer a framework for creating and sustaining learning organizations where both students and educators can truly thrive.
The Framework for Educator Capacity Building (see Figure I.3) sequences, defines, and outlines the key concepts for each of the disciplines listed above. The framework references related adult learning theories as well as complementary SEL competencies from CASEL. In addition, each chapter in this book has a corresponding appendix containing an integration guide and a capacity-building plan to support individual and organizational implementation and meet the needs of a holistic learning organization from both an intrapersonal and an ecological perspective.
The United Nations (n.d.) defines capacity building as "the process of developing and strengthening the skills, instincts, abilities, processes and resources that organizations and communities need to survive, adapt, and thrive in a fast-changing world," noting that an "essential ingredient in capacity-building is transformation that is generated and sustained over time from within; transformation of this kind goes beyond performing tasks to changing mindsets and attitudes" (para. 1). Some individuals view this type of professional growth as life skills development; others see it as social-emotional learning. Regardless of the term used, we know from the high numbers of educators leaving the field that stronger and more personalized capacity strengthening is needed for our districts and schools to survive, adapt, and thrive.
I selected the term discipline quite intentionally to frame the key concepts of attunement, alignment, perspective, collective efficacy, and organizational learning in this book. I have positioned these disciplines as access points rather than pathways with a target proficiency level; the point of entry will be different for each educator (and, most likely, each discipline). While the disciplines can (and should) be developed individually, they also build upon and support one another. In fact, in reviewing practitioner contributions for this work, it became challenging at times to identify the point of best fit for some insights given the integrated nature of these concepts.
Unlike a standard, competency, or skill, we can never fully master a discipline. Instead, we consistently build our capacity to better understand and focus ourselves and to engage more meaningfully with others. As Howard Gardner (2006) notes, "A discipline constitutes a distinctive way of thinking about the world. … [There are] two meanings of discipline: mastery of a craft, and the capacity to renew that craft through regular application over the years" (pp. 26, 43). For adult learners, capacity building requires more than checking off a list of signature practices and related strategies. We must commit to consistently reconsidering and refining our understanding of ourselves and the ways in which this understanding impacts our work with others.
Throughout the book, you will see the term organization where you might typically expect to see school or district. One of my goals when developing this book was to make it accessible to as many educators as possible, regardless of position or school type. The term organization applies not only to schools or districts but also to grade-level or content-area teams, grade bands, and education-focused nonprofit or for-profit entities. Regardless of whether you hold a formal leadership position in any of these, this book offers a variety of opportunities for you to strengthen both your individual and organizational capacity.
I highly encourage you to make time and space for the reflections included in each chapter and to revisit them at different points in your career, particularly as you transition from one position or school community to another. I distinctly note both time and space here because it is not uncommon for us to designate time on our calendars for professional learning activities without really committing to them and ensuring we're in the right headspace to fully engage, focus, and reflect. We may complete the exercises when we are tired, unfocused, or multitasking. To gain the full benefit of these reflections (as well as of the strategies and implementation guides) requires a commitment of both time and space.
If you feel stretched or stressed, complete your reflections in sections, turn them into bulleted lists, or integrate components one at a time into a daily journal. As someone deeply committed to productivity and efficiency, I can assure you that there is great value in deep thinking, intentional pausing, and clear processing free from the distractions that often cloud our profession. Take your time with this piece; consider it a journey to be experienced rather than a task to be completed.
If you are in a leadership position, use the reflections from this book as growth opportunities for your teams. Engage with them yourself first, modeling your commitment to the work both inwardly and outwardly. But after that, share—always share. This piece is meant to be a tool for collective efficacy and organizational learning as much as for personal growth.
Throughout the book, you will see four icons indicating opportunities for reflection, integration, and extension:
The pause icon highlights moments for you to slow down and thoughtfully consider and respond to "Pause and Reflect" prompts.
The leaf icon indicates "Cultivate Your Capacity" learning opportunities, which focus on strengthening individual capacity.
The tree icon signals "Cultivate Organizational Capacity" integration activities, which focus on strengthening your broader organization's capacity—whether that is your team, school, or system.
The loop icon features "Extend the Learning Loop" sections, which provide resources for additional exploration and deeper learning.
In addition, a QR code provided in each chapter enables you to access editable PDF versions of many of the reflection and action-planning tools within this book. I hope these will support and enhance your reflection, learning, and action planning. Readers can also access all the resources via this link and navigating to the page for each discipline. For readers, all downloads are provided free of charge using the case-sensitive password "StillLearning."
I took extensive care to collect insights from teachers, coaches, leaders, and educational service providers across a variety of organizational types (public, private, charter, independent, nonprofit, for-profit, government), sizes, geographic locations, races, genders, and positions. Having served in a number of the represented positions myself, I understand the importance of seeing yourself in the work rather than viewing concepts through the lens of an outsider. I remain, now and always, a practitioner at heart, committed to a long-term vision of our holistic educational ecosystem as well as to an understanding of the day-to-day implications for those doing the work on the ground.
I leaned heavily on my professional learning network in writing this book, and they responded in kind to ensure the most representative picture possible. In these pages, you will find voices of individuals far more experienced than myself; I am humbled that they shared their personal insights and critical learnings with me. While I fully acknowledge that not all readers will find themselves in every contribution, my sincere hope in crafting this work is that you find yourself in at least one and are driven to connect, push deeper, and grow.
The strategies outlined in each chapter are just that—strategies. Recognizing the extreme demands on educators' time, I attempted, as much as possible, to distill key findings from critical works to the most salient and applicable actions possible. They are not intended to constitute an all-encompassing program or exhaustive checklist; they are positioned to help educators transition reflections from thought to action and provide a scope of possibilities for what this work has the potential to look like in practice.
Please do not confuse these strategies with development targets or evaluative indicators. Doing so diminishes extremely challenging work to a set of checkboxes, columns, and rows. That is in no way the intended application of these strategies. Rather, use them as guideposts as you continue to learn side-by-side with your students.
As mentioned previously, each chapter has a corresponding appendix that includes an integration guide and a capacity-building plan to move you from understanding to reflection to action. Synthesizing key findings, and even helping readers find their own position within such findings, lacks value unless it points readers toward growth. The integration guides and capacity-building plans will help you consider which actions might best inform your practice. As noted earlier, the disciplines in this book are intended to be viewed as a continuous journey rather than a set of skills to be mastered. My hope is that you continually revisit this work, each time with new perspectives, lenses, and experiences to enhance its richness and implications for your own practice.
As an educator writing for educators, I would be remiss not to mention our students directly—how they inspire, motivate, and reenergize us, even years after they've left our classroom. Let's be honest, our students are our "why." They get us out of bed in the morning; they keep us awake at night. At its core, education is both "head" work and "heart" work. But for once—yes, just once—I am giving you permission for this to be about you—in the service of our students. Indulge, preserve, recover—but whatever you do, keep yourself in the game. We—they—need you.
