Promotion of Social-Emotional Learning: Building Teacher Capacity through Graduate Programs and Pre-Service Education

The promotion of social-emotional learning (SEL) represents a key prevention strategy for youth violence, including bullying and dating violence. As identified by CASEL, however, building SEL competencies within individual youth relies on the availability of supportive classroom, school and community environments. An important actor within the school environment is the teacher – to create healthy environments, teachers must be able to model and build SEL skills for and with their students. To date, however, limited attention has been paid to building teachers’ capacity to promote SEL within professional faculties. In this paper, we report on the creation, dissemination and success of two efforts to engage teachers in SEL capacity building. This project was supported by a private Canadian foundation focused on fostering youth well-being.

The first approach provides professional development for existing teachers via a year-long post-graduate certificate program entitled “Advancing Healthy & Socially Just Schools & Communities.” The program aims to teach participants the skills necessary to develop safe and caring environments for all youth through course offerings on promoting healthy relationships; developing resilient youth; anti-oppression education; and student advocacy and community. Instructors for this program come from both Education and Social Work, in order to offer students interdisciplinary perspectives on these topics. This program has now been offered for two consecutive years through the Faculty of Education at a large Canadian university, with 30 participants to date. In the first year of the program offering (2015-16), a five wave evaluation of the program was conducted with eighteen graduate students (77.8% female). Data indicate that the vast majority of participants found the program valuable to learning and intellectually challenging, and that the program was associated with significant changes in healthy relationships attitudes and confidence.

The second approach features an inter-professional symposium series for pre-service teachers and social workers. The three-part symposium series will provide training on best practices for building social-emotional competencies and preventing youth violence; advancing social justice and children’s rights in school and community settings; and fostering inter-professional collaboration. The first offering of this series will occur in January 2017, and feedback data will be collected after each session.

This presentation will highlight the process of designing and implementing both of these approaches, and will present evaluation findings to date. This information can be used by researchers and practitioners to develop similar strategies at their own institutions.