Success in the 21st century requires more than academic achievement alone. Thriving involves a new set of skills, including adaptation, problem solving, emotional intelligence, digital literacy and above all, learning how to learn both in the traditional sense, and through use of the powerful technological tools at our disposal.

Gooru and SCE have embarked on a new project to enhance learning by increasing awareness and discovery of 21st century skills through online learning content.

The goal is to empower educators to go beyond traditional pedagogy and draw out the opportunities for collaboration, problem solving, persistence and empathy inherent to learning any subject, from math and science to the arts.

Gooru, an SCE Digital Learning Challenge winner, offers a personalized learning solution that enables teachers to find, customize and share collections of web resources on any K-12 topic. With SCE’s support, Gooru is extending the platform to support tagging digital resources and collections to 21st century skills, a process that resulted from an analysis of 21st century learning strategies and skills from the 10 largest school districts in the United States and a comprehensive research review. The new taxonomy incorporates the frameworks of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21), the Hewlett Foundation’s Deeper Learning initiative, and David Conley’s Four Keys to College and Career Readiness. Now, educators using Gooru can create and cross-tag content aligned to 21st Century Skills and Common Core State Standards for other educators to remix and use.

In addition, Gooru is developing courses for grades 7-12 that are framed around 21st century interdisciplinary themes including financial literacy, social and emotional learning, and environmental literacy.

Click here to learn more.

Emotional intelligence has matured from a buzzword, or an exciting-yet-untried idea. Now there’s data to back it up. Daniel Goleman has been studying it since the 1990’s, and so have University of New Hampshire’s John Mayer and Yale’s Peter Salovey. As Goleman writes on his website: “Now the case can be made scientifically: helping children improve their self-awareness and confidence, manage their disturbing emotions and impulses, and increase their empathy pays off not just in improved behavior but in measurable academic achievement.”

Eleven years later, Goleman wrote “Social Intelligence,” distilling other powerful truths about how humans learn and interact. He wrote: “Neuroscience has discovered that our brain’s very design makes it sociable, inexorably drawn into an intimate brain-to-brain linkup whenever we engage with another person.”

Yet how do we teach emotional and social intelligence, and non-cognitive smarts—the fundamental skills for life satisfaction and success? And further, how will the explosion of technology play a synergistic role in helping students access every chance to grow and prosper in a changing society?

These questions get to the very heart of the SCE story, what we’re all about, and what we aim to accomplish.

The story of SCE: Susan Crown came to the task of forming SCE after three decades as an executive and foundation CEO, with experience in social and commercial investing, and plenty of hands on work in urban education and global poverty. But she was eager for a better approach and in 2009 launched the Susan Crown Exchange. She persuaded some incredible talents to form a board and get rolling. Why start a new organization when so many nonprofits already exist?

The answer boils down to this: SCE seeks to take bigger risks on innovation in driving educational change. But it is not about creating brand new programs on a whim and hoping they work. This distinction gets to the heart of SCE’s revolutionary exchange model.

Our exchange model: In their groundbreaking book “Enlightened Leadership,” authors Ed Oakley and Doug Krug write, “People tend to resist changes thrust upon them, while they naturally support ideas and changes they help create.” Here’s another way of putting it: The best ideas in social learning are bubbling up already, healthy wellsprings of change and promise created by daring innovators. All they need is a chance to grow and flourish, given the right conditions.

With the exchange model, SCE recognizes this truth. Like detectives on the hunt for clues, we partner with and invest in practitioners doing exceptional work with youth. Working with “ideas and changes they helped create,” rather than believing we are smarter or imposing a strict agenda on them, we hope to offer support —both financial and strategic—to take their outstanding work to a new level. We call this our SEL Challenge (standing for Social and Emotional Learning).

We exist to connect talent and innovation with market forces to drive social change. But it’s not all as complex as you might think. Great ideas that drive social and emotional learning often begin as something simple.

Our mission: In studying this area, we’ve been humbled to learn a few things. One key statistic is that children spend almost 80% of their time outside the formal school environment. As a society we think of classrooms as the places where kids learn, and they do. But in looking at emotional intelligence and “non-cognitive” smarts, here’s the bottom line: Structured yet fun environments outside of school can have true, lasting impact.

That is, informal learning pathways—the kinds of programs that often exist in small pockets beyond the educational system, or school walls—help us to reimagine education as a broad and rich ecosystem for learning beyond academics.

Once we identify the best practices and evaluation methods of these organizations, we will then share these findings broadly through an SEL Field Guide. Think of it like this: In these programs, treasures exist for our children. Our agenda is to discover the programs, uncover their treasures, and then give other groups far and wide the roadmap to find them.

Is Social and Emotional Learning the whole of the SCE story and agenda? Far from it. Digital learning investments also make up a large part of what we’re about. Currently, the average American child spends about 7.5 hours per day consuming digital media. Yet many of the billions of kids’ hours spent with digital media (even inside school settings) provide little or no learning value.

We seek to influence the quality of the digital learning media tools that reach low-income youth. But there’s much work to do here. We need to increase the supply and quality of digital learning media. We need to stimulate demand for it. And we intend to help build the digital learning field—hitting all of these goals through our funding initiatives.

Is this an ambitious agenda overall? You bet. But SCE, based in Chicago, reflects the spirit of a great Chicagoan, architect Daniel Burnham: “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.”

How do young people learn to thrive? This is the driving question behind SCE’s Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) Challenge, which aims to decode the art of teaching youth the skills for defining their path in life.

The SEL Challenge brings together experts in youth programming, developmental science, and performance measurement to explore how five SEL skill sets – emotion management, empathy/teamwork, responsibility, initiative/grit, and problem solving – are best cultivated in youth.

Our carefully selected partners are now working together as a Learning Community, to dissect and detail the art of their practice. Researchers are working alongside these top youth organizations to codify their practices using developmental science and performance measurement. The result will be a playbook for youth-serving organizations of all kinds to remix and adapt the SEL practices in their own settings.

So just what has the SEL Challenge project learned so far? At the inaugural convening held in June 2014, the Learning Community came together to develop a shared framework and common language, setting the stage for a game-changing study and ultimately, a field guide, outlining the best practices in SEL.

Building a shared framework

The eight SEL Challenge partners encompass an incredible diversity of youth programming, from inner-city theater production, to back country hiking, to building wooden boats in Philly. To reflect how and why these organizations have been successful—and share the discoveries with any interested practitioner or organization— the Learning Community built a framework for assessing just how SEL processes evolve.

At their first meeting, practitioners mapped out the elements of program design, staff practice, and key youth experience that shape how youth develop and build skills in each domain (empathy, agency, etc.) over the course of a program year.

Each group created a graphic, sketching out where design, practice and experience come together for “aha” moments for youth in each of the five domains. Researchers will work from this basis to develop performance measures revealing how these three elements converge to form learning cycles, the process of social and emotional skill-building.

Demystifying how youth learn social and emotional skills

The three elements framework—program design, staff practice, and key youth experiences—is a practical way to define the learning science of skill-building. Just as kids learn math and reading, learning social and emotional skills requires targeted focus and guided practice, and usually begins with a problem to solve or a goal to meet.

In our eight partner programs, learning is experiential and unfolds through key experiences that entail a cycle of learning – problems emerge, ideas are discussed, energy is gathered, solutions are pursued, and finally, youth think together and with adults about what it means and how to move forward.

These cycles are structured by program designs that offer youth real-world work with real-world challenges and consequences, from organizing school reform campaigns, to building boats, to building their own truths about healthy relationships, sexuality and intimacy.

Within each program, staff practice is focused on stepping in to the youth cycle of learning at the right moment: to create a safe space, to scaffold to a higher level on the next attempt, or to coach as ownership of the work transfers from staff to youth.

From qualitative data to performance data

Here’s how researchers at the Weikart Center designed the methodology for the 18-month exploration:

 

First, staff at each organization were interviewed extensively to build case studies of each program. Using this material, the research team will create a cross-case analysis of SEL practices and processes at each program site. These will yield a set of standards for program designs, staff practices, and key experiences that correspond with skill development in the five domains.

The research team will also talk with program staff about issues that cut across the domains: how does a kid’s exposure to traumatic experience impact program design and objectives? What supports do your staff need to effectively build SEL skills with youth? How do you recruit the right youth for your program design?

The research team will also examine management and staff practices, as well as youth skill growth. Youth skills will be measured at three time points and will capture youth beliefs about their own efficacy, as well as staff ratings of youth behaviors in the program context. The five-domain picture, we know, is not a complete one, but is sufficient to take advantage of an important principle: growth is a dynamic interweaving of many skills, and viewing youth development one skill at a time may obscure as much as it informs.

During the last phase of the project, the research team will create several products: case narratives for each program, a technical report describing methods and findings, the set of standards and performance measures developed during the SEL Challenge, and a guide for promising practices in SEL for adolescents. The guide will then be translated across media formats using the principles of user-centered design, making the findings accessible and actionable for practitioners and programs far and wide.

From data to action

While the discussion of social and emotional learning involves very few new ideas, the field is currently caught in an obstacle course where the bewildering array of terms, theories, curricula, and measures leads to either inaction or uncoordinated action. The result has been a lack of cumulative evidence around best practices for helping youth grow in SEL domains.  Our hope is to extend the conversation about social and emotional learning to include the “how “of cultivating these essential skills that can make us happier, more productive, thriving people.

SCE Announces the Social and Emotional Learning Challenge Partners

For the next 18 months, eight informal learning programs for teens—ranging from a wooden boat building program in Philadelphia to a performing arts/community action hub in New York City—will join SCE as partners in the Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) Challenge.

The initiative aims to elevate the importance of social and emotional learning through an intensive effort with an exceptional cohort of teen programs. The finalists were chosen from among 250 youth organizations, making this an exceptional group of youth programs that have shown striking results in their work.

SCE’s Social and Emotional Learning Challenge will explore the best practices in SEL. The collaboration teams up SCE with a research team from the David P. Weikart Center for Youth Program Quality, and the following eight high-impact organizations:

• AHA! (Attitude, Harmony, Achievement)
• Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Milwaukee
• The Possibility Project
• Philadelphia Wooden Boat Factory
• Voyageur Outward Bound School
• Wyman
• Youth on Board
• YWCA Boston

The chosen partners represent some of the nation’s best-in-class programming across a range of activities from the arts, outdoor education, leadership development and activism.

Just as youth learn in these programs, SCE will learn as well—and pass on the results to youth programs everywhere. The SEL Challenge partners will form a Learning Community to identify the best practices for equipping the rising generation with the social and emotional skills of resilience, empathy, agency, self-regulation, and grit. Then, an SEL Field Guide will share the learnings of this exploration with youth workers, agency leaders, policy makers, teachers, parents and others invested in equipping the rising generation with tools needed to thrive in the 21^st century.

SCE is a social investment organization that connects talent and innovation with market forces to drive social change. Our newly launched Social and Emotional Learning Program reimagines education as a broad and rich ecosystem for learning, anytime, anywhere. Learn more about theSCE story.

The Social and Emotional Learning Challenge aims to distill and codify the practices of the SEL field’s best programs for teens to elevate the impact and importance of social and emotional learning.

Click here for the official press release announcing the Social and Emotional Learning Challenge finalists!

We are pleased to announce that the Weikart Center for Youth Program Quality will be the evaluation partner on SCE’s Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) Challenge. This open, national challenge seeks to explore and expand the capacities of afterschool programs skillfully promoting social and emotional competencies that equip youth for life success.

As the evaluators for this project, the Weikart Center will:

• draw stories of practice from exemplary programs;
• synthesize these practices in terms of a framework for building specific SEL skills developed from the field’s leading-edge evidence base with major contributions by Reed Larson;
• provide technical guidance for implementation of a program evaluation of these practices; and
• publish a Guide for Building Social and Emotional Skills with Vulnerable Youth that will inventory best practices anchored in case studies of exemplary programs, provide a program evaluation design that is feasible for program providers to implement, present a discussion of cross-site findings from program evaluations and provide a technical appendix of the results of the study.

Letters of inquiry were submitted in January. Requests for proposals will be released in March, and grantees will be announced in April. We invite you to learn more about the Weikart Center: http://www.cypq.org/

Thriving in the 21^st century world requires a robust skill set. At SCE, we believe this toolkit includes social and emotional skills such as grit, resilience, empathy, self-regulation and agency. Through our most recent initiative, the Social and Emotional Learning Challenge, SCE and a group of partners will explore how teens are best supported in developing these skills and many others through informal out-of-school learning.

The SEL Challenge puts youth program practitioners in the driver’s seat of this exploration; we truly seek to learn alongside our partners and use the findings to guide smart investments in social and emotional interventions for youth.

At SCE, we know we don’t have all the answers. The five skills we identified are just a starting point for investigating the different tools that help youth manage healthy relationships, engage in their communities, plan for the future, and achieve personal success.

We also know that conceptual clarity and consensus around definitions of the various social and emotional skills continues to evade the field, reflecting the very personal and subjective nature of social and emotional growth itself. So how do we move forward in measuring (much less advancing) SEL if we aren’t all “speaking the same language”? We’re starting with the best information the field has about how young people thrive, and have partnered with an exceptionally talented research team to help us find definition where it matters most: in aligning measures across a cohort of stellar programs to uniformly track youth growth in particular social and emotional domains.

Our thinking on social and emotional learning has been greatly informed by the knowledge and expertise of thought leaders such as the author of Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman; grit researcher, Angela Duckworth; founder of the Ashoka Empathy Initiative, Bill Drayton; neuroscientist Richie Davidson; economist Jim Heckman and many others.

Below we share our understanding of the five social and emotional skills of particular interest to SCE, as defined by experts in the field:

Empathy is the ability to understand or sense what other people are feeling and to guide one’s actions in response.[1] We use empathy when we take on others’ perspectives, or when we mirror what another person is feeling.

Self-regulation refers to one’s ability to control responses, impulses and behaviors in alignment with particular societal or circumstantial expectations, or personal goals.[2] This range of skills help us moderate emotional, mental or other stimulus, and are at work when we plan and think ahead, inhibit negative responses or delay gratification.[3]

Grit is defined as “perseverance and passion for long term goals. Grit entails working strenuously toward challenges, and maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress.”[4]

Resilience is a complex process of positive adjustment in the face of significant adversity. Resilience emerges when we call upon internal, interpersonal and external support systems in challenging times. [5]

Agency is the belief in our own ability to affect change in our lives. Agency provides us with the platform to rally our other skills in order to guide and direct our lives.[6]

Of course this is hardly an exhaustive list; after all, life success requires much more of us than mastery of these five skills alone. That is why we’ve approached the SEL Challenge as a way to gather practitioners and researchers around the same table, accept the limitations that conceptual ambiguity presents, and proceed toward discovering concrete practices that promise to put more youth on the path to success.

We appreciate your comments, questions, and feedback! We encourage you to comment on this post if you want to learn more about our process, perspectives, or approach to the SEL Challenge. We hope that you stay tuned as we embark on this collaborative and exploratory journey!

At SCE we are keenly interested in learning about learning.

Our new SEL initiative is an effort to better understand the non-cognitive skills—grit, resilience, and agency- that fortify and sustain us through challenges, and keep us on course to reach our goals.

We are very pleased (and surprised) by the level of interest in this program.  Over 200 potential partners joined our conference call outlining the effort to prospective partners, and over 4,000 have visited our Challenge Grant website.  We take this as a strong indication that many are as intrigued by this topic as we are.

Thank you for the time you are investing in this undertaking. We hope we have useful insights and protocols to share one year from now. Thanks, too, for your work equipping the rising generation with the skills and tools needed to thrive in the 21st century.

—Susan Crown

At SCE, we are investing considerable time growing our Social and Emotional Learning Program (SEL), a portfolio of initiatives aimed at shaping ecosystems that broaden and enrich opportunities for learning beyond academics and outside school walls. The SEL Program emphasizes emotional intelligence (EQ) and “non-cognitive” smarts as key drivers of life success.

Through both SEL and Digital Learning investments, SCE aims to influence the way markets function across fields and sectors to build out an infrastructure for anytime, anywhere 21st century learning.  Read on to find out more about where we started, what we’re learning, and how we’ve chosen to move  forward.

Our exploration into social and emotional learning began with an inquiry: why do some young people achieve success despite adversity? Are there pivotal moments or transformational experiences that shift young people’s trajectories toward success or failure? We wanted to discover what inputs along the pipeline propel vulnerable youth onto positive life paths, so we started investigating.

We engaged experts and practitioners in virtually every related field: researchers in various sectors of psychology, developmental science and applied youth development; policy leaders at institutions such as the American Institutes for Research and the National Research Council; and experts at advocacy organizations like the Forum for Youth Investment and the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL). We read dozens of books, articles, white papers and reports on topics ranging from neuroscience and early childhood literacy, to personality theory and economics.

Along the way, we discovered that the phenomenon we were interested in could not be distilled into a single experience, but was the result of a complex and nonlinear process of growth and positive adjustment throughout life, called thriving, and that it takes a network of supports and opportunities to help youth foster the skills they need to get there. Social and emotional skills, particularly empathy, resilience, grit, self-regulation, and agency—sometimes considered outcomes— were the very “inputs” for life success that our exploration set out to uncover.

We define social and emotional learning as the process through which people learn fundamental skills to recognize and manage their emotions and social relationships. Our SEL Program leverages the unique ability of informal learning pathways to structure experiences for teens in creative ways that encourage them to connect to positive futures.

SCE will soon be launching the first SEL Program initiative to partner with and invest in practitioners who are doing exceptional work with youth. Watch this space for up-to-date information about a forthcoming request for proposals.