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.