Get ready to connect, learn, and lead!
At the 2024 SEL Exchange, you’ll find more than 100 carefully curated sessions to excite and inspire you. Explore hands-on strategies, innovative practices, and global perspectives that will energize your approach to social and emotional learning.
Pre-Conference Sessions
Get the Exchange experience started early by choosing from six immersive sessions, facilitated by CASEL experts and partners. All sessions are held 1:00-4:00 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 12. Lunch is provided to all pre-conference attendees prior to the session
Designing Class Periods: Straightforward Strategies for SEL Integration
Experience four distinct strategies for bringing research-aligned SEL practices to classrooms: 1) Using the SEL 3 Signature Practices; 2) Centering student identity, agency, and belonging; 3) Aligning SEL and academic objectives; and 4) Incorporating student interaction, collaborative problem-solving, and group reflection. Come away with concrete tools to help share strategies and guide discussion with the teachers you support.
Consistent yet customized: How one district supports SEL implementation across campuses
Chicago Public Schools supports SEL implementation in hundreds of unique schools, and their approach balances local decision-making with centralized resources and cross-campus learning. Join us to hear how they have developed their menu of resources, learning, and coaching and how school leaders build knowledge about schoolwide SEL, guide a campus SEL team, and create and execute an implementation plan. Build on their example as you weigh the balance of campus autonomy and districtwide consistency for your context.
Systemic Social and Emotional Learning Implementation: Putting Policy, Perception, & Student Academic Performance into Action
CASEL and RAND’s 2024 National Implementation Study offers insights into how SEL is being practiced at the school, district, and state level. The study investigates the relationship between policy and strong systemic implementation of SEL and, in turn, its linkages to student academic performance. Examining the results of the study, participants will consider how the research can help inform decision-making in their local contexts, including as policy makers, educators, and community members.
Making it Yours: Building Capacity to Sow and Grow the Foundations of SEL
Deepen your understanding of the basics of what SEL is (and isn’t) and the central role it plays in everyday interactions. CASEL facilitators will guide you through interactive and reflective experiences, offering opportunities to apply learning in real time to enhance skillfulness in leading similar sessions in your community.
Politically Turbulent Times: How to Remain Committed to Advancing Students’ Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning in Public Policy
SEL has unfortunately been swept up in the recent, divisive political discourse. This session will cover the state of play and trends related to SEL and SEL-related policy across the country. Additionally, it will address 1) how states are fighting (and succeeding!) against a wave of anti-SEL legislation over the past several years and 2) the proactive advocacy and messaging strategies that are essential to advancing and protecting SEL at the local, state, and federal levels.
Promoting Authentic School-Family-Community Partnerships
Learning occurs everywhere and young people benefit from having supportive adults and peers throughout the school community. This session actively examines approaches, strategies, resources and practices that foster healthy relationships and developmentally appropriate learning opportunities for young people, adults and those that support them.
Breakout Sessions
Choose from more than 100 breakout sessions throughout the Exchange. Here are just a few examples of engaging sessions that you’ll find during four breakout times over two days:
PRACTICAL STRATEGIES
No Time for SEL? Integrating SEL Techniques Into a Core Science Lesson
How do you hold schools accountable for implementing SEL into their already tight school day with limited resources, time, and tools? Make it a part of the lesson they are already going to teach during core instruction. Instead of being a separate lesson, SEL should be woven into every part of every lesson your teachers uses daily. This session will help you show teachers how to marry and align SEL with their core instruction.
Thriving Through Conversation: Student-Teacher Partnerships for Success
Join us to explore the Focal Student Learning Partnership Conversation, a key data practice that has been an instrumental tool in the SEL Lead Learner Inquiry Group, a 13-year partnership between Lead by Learning and Oakland Unified School District. This important practice creates a pathway to equity by empowering students as partners and positioning teachers as listeners and learners. We will observe, reflect, and plan how this equity-centered practice will spark change in your teaching.
Integrating SEL and Academics: Learnings and Results From Washington State
Explore how an intensified approach in mathematics integrates SEL competencies with academics to increase student achievement, positive self-beliefs, and motivation. Engage in an experience as a community of learners, hear about recent data from the field, learn from educators in Washington state about successful strategies, and collaborate to apply ideas to various contexts.
INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES
SEL Goes Global: The 2023 OECD Survey on Social and Emotional Skills
What can 68,000 students and their teachers and principals in 15 countries tell us about SEL and academic learning? Quite a lot. This session presents the new findings from the OECD’s 2023 Survey on Social and Emotional Skills (SSES), the world’s only large-scale measure of these skills. Learn which skills predict life outcomes; how teaching, schools, gender, and background affect skill development; and innovations from emerging SEL hubs in other countries.
International Perspectives on Assessment and Intervention With Educator SEL
Explore exciting work on educator SEL conducted around the world as you hear three talks and engage in discussion. You’ll hear from a Portuguese study about a new model of adult SEL assessment, findings of the largest educator SEL study to date from Mexico, and educator SEL and its economic benefits.
INCLUSIVE PRACTICES
SEL for All? The Problem (and Solution?) in Assuming Universal Impact in SEL Evaluation
Current research approaches are poorly suited to capture variations in impact across individuals, meaning research is at risk of misrepresenting SEL program success. In this session, you’ll reflect on these concerns and explore potential solutions through novel data analysis techniques (LPA), using a worked example in an evaluation of the FRIENDS Program. Through demonstration and discussion, we’ll consider whether research techniques allow us to see if SEL programs offer success for all.
Creating Inclusive and Connected Communities Through Integrated Instruction
Integrated instruction connects SEL and academic learning through inclusive strategies, practices, and procedures. Learn from K-12 educators representing various content areas as they share compelling connections through video, student artifacts, and standard alignment documents. You’ll come away with research-based strategies to create connected learning communities at every level.
Pulling it All Together: SEL, Equity, Restorative, Inclusion, and Trauma-Responsive Practices to Enhance Student Achievement
Many school districts face a big challenge: working on the critical areas of SEL, restorative, equity, inclusion, and trauma-responsive practices in isolation. In this session, you’ll hear from leaders from one DuPage, IL, school/district about how they align, integrate, and promote SEL, equity, inclusion, trauma-responsive practices, and restorative discipline across their district to enhance school climate and foster student achievement.
Using Social-Emotional Practices to Combat Racism: What Challenges do Educators See?
Explore a research paper that uses an implementation science framework to describe the challenges educators see with implementing social-emotional practices to combat racism. Learn how these qualitative findings can help researchers and practitioners develop novel implementation strategies as they design innovative interventions to support educators and students.
NAVIGATING POLITICS & BUILDING BUY-IN
Sustaining SEL Policy in a Challenging Climate
Support for SEL remains, but SEL policy is largely no longer a subject of active state and federal legislation. Due to backlash, field maturation, recent elections, post-pandemic issues, and financial woes, advocates will need to create opportunities to sustain SEL policy. How can we ensure that SEL remains pertinent in policy discussions? How can we safeguard and even improve existing SEL policies? This session will highlight relevant bills, trends, and case studies to equip advocates for effective policy advancement.
The Three Cs: Compelling, Customized, and Clear Communications for SEL Stakeholders
Are you finding it hard to explain the importance of SEL to various stakeholders? Drawing on our extensive experience in education, SEL, and marketing, we understand the challenges, objections and importance of communicating SEL’s contribution to academic success and lifelong learning. Let’s work together to think more like marketers! Try out tips and techniques for really targeting your messages to connect with different audiences, what they care most about and to address their concerns.
AI & TECHNOLOGY
The Robots Aren’t Our Enemies: Leveraging AI for Your SEL and Academic Standards Crosswalk Journey
Discover how artificial intelligence (AI) can simplify the process of integrating SEL into academic standards, accelerating student learning. Dive into your state’s standards with the CASEL framework using AI, making this formally arduous task effortless. Engage in discussions on AI ethics in SEL and collaborate with experts in tech, special education, and SEL to streamline your work.
And much more…!
