A hallmark of academic and SEL instruction in District 59 is students taking responsibility for their own learning. Teachers guide and facilitate the learning, instead of delivering a lesson: Whether in Circles or a hands-on activity illustrating and building an SEL skill, students are constantly talking to one another, practicing interactions and contributing their own ideas. In ways small, such as voting on the gestures and mnemonics their class will use to identify an abstract concept, and large, like generating and iterating a list of classroom values, students are empowered to identify how they’d like to be treated and how they will contribute to creating a healthy classroom environment.

Student agency, a key feature of instruction in District 59, shows how SEL can be integrated in pedagogy and classroom environment, which in turn supports SEL within the context of an academic curriculum. Often, “SEL integration” is understood to mean the infusion of SEL concepts or content into academic content like math or English Language Arts. District 59 teachers model how SEL instructional practices also can pave the way for students to engage in new ways of self-directed learning, like the Writer’s Workshop and Math Workshop models the district has recently rolled out. To be effective, these modern academic approaches require students to be capable of setting goals and organizing their time, to be aware and respectful of their classmates’ needs and to approach new academic content with self-efficacy and self-motivation. These are all SEL competencies that District 59 teachers work to build in their students. In addition, the agency and participation that students practice during SEL lessons create good habits for their hands-on academic learning.

In classrooms across District 59, teachers and students are engaging in creative, hands-on SEL lessons. Students join teams and scramble to make a longer paper chain than their classmates, squirm as they resist the urge to pop bubbles floating by, or read funny stories about an elementary schooler erupting like a volcano. Each of these tasks is anchored in SEL competencies, and are part of direct instructional lessons that will help students build, and eventually master, SEL skills. Teachers start lesson planning by drawing on the CASEL competencies, identifying the competencies most relevant to their students. Based on the district-wide principle that teachers should be the designers on their own curriculum in all subject areas, these educators do not follow a formal or mandated SEL curriculum or scope and sequence. Yet they have extensive access to quality, research-based SEL instructional materials like Second Step and Skillstreaming, and to popular read-alouds with SEL themes by authors like Julia Cook. With support from district-based coaches and one another, they use those materials, along with district-created guides, to develop activities, discussion prompts, and guided questions. While there’s plenty of room for creativity along the way, most direct instruction lessons begin and end with Circles, as students reflect on what they’ve learned about the SEL skill being taught; practice new SEL vocabulary; and make connections to the academic work they will engage in throughout the rest of their school day.

For educators in District 59, teaching is driven by a personal knowledge of each students’ needs and strengths. This personal knowledge is developed through SEL, especially daily practices like Circles that help build authentic relationships between teachers and students. And in turn, this personal knowledge shapes all SEL and academic instruction. Teachers are constantly adjusting their planning – deciding which CASEL competencies to focus on, which strategies they will emphasize, and what materials they will use – based on the needs of their individual students and their class as a whole.

Those needs aren’t just identified through teachers’ intuition. Teachers gather data, such as pre- and post-assessments, to evaluate how their students’ SEL skills are developing. They “conference” with other teachers about how individual students are progressing on their academic and SEL growth paths. At the middle school level, where students have multiple teachers, those teachers work as a team to document different interventions using shared tools like Google Docs. And teachers invite in school- and district-based coaches to their classrooms to demonstrate and observe lessons so that they have a partner in reflecting about whether students are truly mastering an SEL concept.

As a result of all this data-gathering and analysis, SEL instruction in District 59 feels personal: Teachers communicate to their students why they are studying and engaging with a particular SEL skill or concept, and they can effectively adapt their SEL instruction for smaller and larger classes and students who may be at different levels of their social and emotional development.