 We are very appreciative of not only our panel, so you'll get to me in a little while, but for our co-host Senator Murphy of Connecticut and Congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio's 13th District and all of the wonderful efforts of their staff to put this event together. Under ESSA states and districts have an opportunity to broaden their definitions of student success to include student social and emotional learning. Research shows that SEL is associated with higher test scores, increased graduation rates, and improved social behavior. Our panelists today will discuss how and why SEL increases college and career readiness, its important role in advancing equity, its connection to the nation's economic development, and how it can be supported. Before we move into the presentation, we'd like to welcome our co-host to make some opening remarks. We will have Senator Murphy joining us in a little while, so we'll make sure to stop to have to welcome him up to provide some comments. But Senator Murphy represents the state of Connecticut. On my home state, I'm especially proud to have him represent us. He's a member of the Senate Health Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. He's a staunch advocate for civil rights and throughout the ESCA reauthorization process helped to ensure that the final law included some very important equity guardrails for historically underserved students, as well as a number of provisions aimed at ending the school-to-prison pipeline. He successfully led the passage of a major mental health bill that he wrote and brought forward with bipartisan support in the previous administration. And you can see that Senator Murphy is surrounded by a family of educators in his commitment and approach to education. Again, as someone from Connecticut, a state where the racial and economic divide is especially prevalent, it's an honor to have him represent the state and the youth of our nation. So thank you very much to Senator Murphy and his staff for support. We are also doubly lucky to also have Congressman Ryan from Ohio's 13th district as a co-host for the event. He's a member of the House Appropriations Committee and also a relentless advocate for working families in Northeast Ohio. He is a champion of efforts to make college more affordable, revitalize America's cities, and improve the health and well-being of America's families and children. He's also the author of A Mindful Nation, how a simple practice can help us reduce stress, improve performance, and recapture the American spirit. He's introduced the academic social and emotional learning act, and provisions of that bill were included in the final version of ESSA to help expand and make the teaching of social and emotional learning more effective. Representative Ryan is also advocated to support issues related to chronic absenteeism, teacher health, and wellness. Congressman Ryan walks the walk and practices what he preaches. So we are especially honored to have such wonderful co-hosts for this event. I'd like to welcome up Stephen Costeo from his office to provide some comments on behalf of the Congressman. Good morning and thank you all for coming and thank you for the panel coming today to talk on such an important issue. Congressman Ryan wishes he could be here today, but as Jessica said, he's on the Appropriations Committee and is stuck in a mark-up right now. And so, how many teachers or people who used to teach do we have in the audience right now? Okay, quite a few. Well, I used to be a teacher and Congressman Ryan's wife is a teacher. And so what you know in the feedback we've gotten from our constituents is that social emotional learning is really important in the classroom. And that's why last Congress, as Jessica said, Congressman Ryan introduced the academic and social emotional learning act to have language included in the Every Student Succeeds Act. And he's very excited that we're having this conversation today. This Congress, Congressman Ryan introduced the Chronic Absenteeism Reduction Act. And part of that bill goes towards social emotional learning programs that would get students to come to school. Because what we know out of the 6.8 million students who are chronically absent, meaning they miss 10% or more of the school year, that they need social emotional learning and to make better decisions. And one of those decisions is coming to school. And lastly, Congressman Ryan introduced the Teacher Health and Wellness Act. And part of that act funds National Institute of Health Study to be able to not just look at what we know and help students get social emotional learning, but help give teachers the ability to have the professional development to deliver that to their students. Because the teachers in the room know it can be a stressful place sometimes. So using that act to try to increase teacher retention and decrease teacher stress. And so social emotional learning is something that students need in the classroom today. And they can carry those skills into the workforce so that they can build positive relationships. And thank you to the Learning Policy Institute for putting this on and looking forward to a great discussion. Thank you. Before we move into our moderated discussion, I'd like to invite up Linda Darling-Hammon, Learning Policy Institute's CEO and President, Hannah Melnick, our Research and Policy Associated. To share with you how schools might be encouraged to help students develop socially, emotionally, and foster positive school climates in the context of new accountability and improvement systems under ESSA. Well, thanks for being here. It's wonderful to see all of this interest in social and emotional learning. We can always use it in the Congress and everywhere else, so it's great to have you all here. This briefing is to explain what social and emotional learning is and to encourage policymakers to think about how to support it, both through the accountability and continuous improvement systems that ESSA has really launched as a new framework in states and also in both federal and local context. This is the subject of our recent report encouraging SEL in the context of new accountability. Many schools and districts have begun to focus on this kind of learning, given compelling research on the science of learning and human development, as well as the more flexible approach to accountability offered under ESSA. There are many different names for social and emotional learning, which are variously referred to as soft skills, non-cognitive skills, co-cognitive skills, character education, and development, and so on. And some of the examples of the competencies that we often think of as 21st century skills include communication, collaboration, problem solving, but also things like grit, perseverance, resilience, the ability to work well with others and to manage one's own attention and focus and energy. And you can see the framework that CASEL provides, self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision-making, relationship skills and social awareness is one that many people use in thinking about social and emotional skills. Addressing social and emotional learning we found through meta-analyses of hundreds of studies actually leads to significantly higher achievement in school, higher graduation rates, safer schools, prevention of bullying, less teacher stress, improved college and career-ready skills, and the life outcomes that occur really helped disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline as well as preparing young people for college and careers. According to a 2013 survey of employees, half of those surveys said they had trouble finding recent graduates to fill vacancies who actually had the communication, adaptability, decision-making, and problem-solving skills. In fact, if you look at what the top 500, Fortune 500 organizations, corporations, call for in their employees 50 years ago it was reading, writing, and arithmetic that topped the list. Right now it's interpersonal skills, communication, and collaboration and teamwork that topped the list. So this is obviously something that allows young people to be ready for the workforce. And supporting social and emotional learning in the classroom is really something that can be integrated with academic skills. And it's not like it's something onto the side. You can see a little bit of this in this video. If it works for us, well, let's go back. Yeah, why don't you go ahead? We're not sufficiently hooked up to the sound system. We are hooked up to the sound system, but it's not working. So you can see what the kids are doing. But what the teacher is talking about is how, as he's teaching them to work together in a collaborative space, he's also helping them acquire the skills for the mathematics that they're working on and the language to ask each other's questions, collaborate in a productive way, and integrate that capacity to learn from each other rather than just kind of stepping on top of each other as part of their regular work. And we see this in classrooms now across the entire country. There are many, many districts in a number of states that are supporting that integration of the skills into the academic process that they're engaged with. School climate is the foundation for social and emotional learning. And many states now under ESSA are integrating school climate measures into their examination of what schools are doing and how they're progressing. The positive school climate, when staff work together to create it as safe, creates a sense of belonging, strong relationships, it gets teachers working with each other around the tone and the experience that kids have of the school. Not only makes kids want to come to school, but it also teaches them how to behave in relation to each other and enables them to learn in a much more productive way. Social and emotional learning can be taught through explicit instruction through a curriculum, but it's also kind of caught through observation, through the modeling that students see their peers and teachers engaged in in the school. When there's less disruption in classrooms, obviously learning can take place when kids feel open to being safe and belonging in that context. When they're much more able to learn in a chaotic or punitive context, it's much less likely that the child will be able to work through the learning process. And positive school climates lead to social, emotional and academic learning together. And as I mentioned, you see the opportunity for students to gain in achievement as they exist and learn in an environment like that. There are opportunities for social, emotional learning in ESSA. Some states are taking it on as part of the definition of school success and school quality. It can be part of the funding for continuous improvement and for comprehensive improvement in schools where indicators suggest that both academics are lacking and the climate is unsafe or not productive. There are actual funds for programs in Title IV as well as in Title I and assuming Title II survives. The opportunity to invest in professional development for teachers to learn how to do this kind of teaching will be available. And I'm going to turn now to Hannah who's going to talk about how states are integrating this work into their ESSA and continuous improvement processes. Thank you, thank you Linda. So one of the first ways that states are trying to encourage social and emotional learning in schools is by measuring it and holding schools accountable for what really matters to kids. So they can do that in many ways and it's not just about identifying those bottom 5% of schools and making sure those schools improve. We think of that's an important piece of the puzzle. We call that the fifth indicator under ESSA, the federal indicators. But there are also other ways that one can use measures to encourage SEL. We look at state reported measures, so things that are reported publicly but not used necessarily to identify schools that are failing. State reported measures that can be tools or measures that are given to district locally if they want to measure something, it's not required. And then locally selected measures. For example, many schools are starting to do their own surveys of SEL that you'll hear about later. So in our recent report we took a look at some of these measures that might be most opportune for states to take up under ESSA. And we looked at where they might fit in accountability system. We're really thinking about who is going to be the end user of that data, how might they use it, and if you attach high stakes is that going to change the data you're getting. So some of the first measures we looked at are one's suspension rates and chronic absenteeism rates that were mentioned earlier. These are really not their proxies for school climate or social emotional learning, but they're related because they have to do with how engaged and supported students be on the classroom. And many states are already taking them up in their ESSA plans. So another really important measure of school climate is the school climate surveys of students, teachers, and parents that are already being used in many states. And in some cases for accountability. Climate surveys typically measure some of the things Linda mentioned, safety, relationships, trust among staff, and instructional support. And these surveys, there are several surveys that can produce valid and reliable data that have a long track record. They do spark some concerns in an accountability system. You need to be worried about things like reference bias. A student in a school where kids are really held to high standards might rate their school lower than a student who has low expectations of himself or his peers. So you also might need to worry about gaming. Their issues of, you know, perhaps the respondents will try to rate their school more favorably to give themselves a good score. However, you don't need to worry. We have reason to believe that these might not be such a huge concern because New York City, Alberta, Canada, Chicago have been using surveys in their accountability system for a long time and have found that they are useful school improvement tools. So we therefore recommend that they be used, if not statewide, then to be supported by the state. And here's an example of how Illinois is reporting some of their school climate data. A really critical piece of having school climate surveys is making sure the data are reported to the public in a very clear and understandable way so that people cannot just have this data sit on a shelf but use it in their continuous improvement systems. And here is an example from New York City of how they're reporting their data. And I want to note that three states, Nevada, New Mexico, and Illinois are thinking about using climate surveys in their SS state plans, although they're going to be attaching very low stakes to them initially. And so finally, one of the prominent measures that we focus on as well are surveys of students' social and emotional learning and their own competencies. And other teacher observation tools or performance assessments that one can use to look at the students' learning itself. Districts like Washington, Nevada, which you'll hear about, California's core districts are now using these surveys at scale. And they can be great tools in the classroom to really help understand where students or a whole class or school's needs are and where are their areas of strength. However, we conclude that they are not yet appropriate for high stakes accountability for various reasons, but including that we just don't know about their widespread use in the classroom yet. And we also are concerned that students might not have the best judges of their own competence. However, they really should be supported by the state to be for local use since if used properly, they can be great tools in the classroom. I just want to give a quick example of what I'm talking about when I say a school climate survey or social emotional learning survey. In this slide you can see on the left hand you have some items that might be asked about students' own competencies. For example, I think about what might happen before making a decision. That's the students' level of responsible decision making. Whereas on the right hand side, you'll see questions about how the school is supporting SEL, the school climate question. How does this school encourage students to feel responsible for how they act? Those are the kinds of things we expect that schools should be held responsible for. So I know you're probably wondering what can states do, what can districts do to encourage these really important competencies. So the first thing before even measuring some of these skills is setting the standards or guidelines so that people have a common idea of what they're aiming for. State states are working with the Collaborative for Academic and Social and Emotional Learning CASEL to start developing these standards, which you'll hear about soon. You can encourage these surveys or other measures to shine a light on SEL so that can be requiring some of the measures I just mentioned, or it can be providing a vetted clearinghouse of these measures, giving technical assistance or financial support for using them in schools. Once you have this data, what do you do with it? You can need to identify and fund SEL curricula and interventions. This is where federal funding can play a really critical role. Title I and Title IV both provide great opportunities for funding some of these at the district level. And the state can provide a clearinghouse of these vetted programs or interventions like ruler or second step. You can also provide technical assistance and how to implement them or grants for instructional materials. And finally, you can use SEL provides opportunities for teacher training on social and emotional learning via Title I or Title II. So you can have all the great data, you can have the programs, but teachers need to know what to do with it. And luckily, teachers almost universally want more training on social and emotional learning. That can be in service or it can also be pre-service because teacher preparation programs don't currently focus very much on SEL in general. So HEA reauthorization can be a vehicle for reform or state teacher regulations as well. And finally, for folks who are local, what can districts do to support social and emotional learning? So I mentioned some of the tools that might be used to measure SEL. But observation tools are also things that we take a look at in our report such as on school quality reviews or observations of teacher practices or district practices using a rubric to get under the hood. Why are you getting the school climate or suspension data that you are reforming disciplinary practices to really promote that positive school climate? That's the foundation for social and emotional learning and building time for social and emotional learning into the school day and teacher's professional development. Because teachers need the time carved out for them during the classroom day to make sure that they can address these important competencies and they need planning time and they need the professional development time as well. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Leticia who's going to be allowing the panel to get into a lot of these topics and more in depth. But you know who she is. Leticia Guzman Ingram is the 2016 Colorado Teacher of the Year. She is also the recipient of the Virginia French Allen Award for excellence in teaching. Leticia is currently a teacher at Basalt High School and a commissioner for the National Commission on Social, Emotional and Academic Development which I co-chair with former Governor Engler from Michigan and Timothy Schreiber. Thank you. And I'm so honored to be here today and as Linda said, I am currently teaching at Basalt High School which is right in the middle of the mountains, 20 miles down from Aspen, Colorado. And the reason I'm passionate about social and emotional learning is 58% of my students from my high school's first language is not English. It's almost the same percentage for free and reduced lunch. A lot of my students are from El Salvador which is the number one hotspot for gangs and you can't tell me they don't have social and emotional needs. They come over, they're seeking a better life for themselves and they know that education is the key to success but they come with a lot of baggage in their head. And I feel it's so important that as educators that we need to teach them the tools of how to deal with their social and emotional needs. And then let's not forget the other 42%. If you sit in my classroom during lunch, you'll hear the other 42% of the student body talking about divorce and their family, cyberbullying, suicide. So many things they're dealing with, of course with everything else that's going on in the world, terrorists, it all scares them and their friends are being deported. There's so much going on and they're trying to figure out how do I balance this and how can they learn academically if they don't have the tools of social and emotional learning. So I'm very passionate about it and I'm so honored and excited that you're here and that we can work together in solving this issue. So I'd like to introduce the panel first. First of all, there's Stefan Ternopseed who is the Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer for Destination Imagination at the end. He's also the former President of Lego Education North America and the former Executive Director of Strategic Partnerships for Legos Education. Stefan is also the past chairman of the partnership for the 21st Century Skills, a national organization that advocates for the 21st Century readiness for every student. So welcome. We also have Linda Darling-Hammon who you just heard from and she's also, as we say, we work together for the Aspen Institute for the National Commission on Social, Emotional and Academic Needs, besides all the other things that she does and I'm very honored to be a part of that with her. And at the end we have Victoria Blakely who is with the Office for a Safe and Respectful Learning Environment with the State of Nevada Department of Education. She was previously with the Anchorage, Alaska School District leading the social and emotional learning work. So I'm looking forward to hearing all they have to say and you can tell they come from different facets of life, business, research, and with the state. So we'll go ahead and begin with some of the questions. I'm going to begin with Stefan. He was mentioning a quote and I love this quote and I thought it was great to start off this panel discussion today. If you could start off with that and why you think that social and emotional development matters. Let's see if I can get this there. We're all right now. I'm always a little afraid to doing that. Can you hear me? It's always one of those yes, but it may not be any better. You can still hear me. Anyhow, we were just talking earlier about the importance of social emotional learning in the context of civil society and some of you who have had a few many lapses I have on this race of life and some of you have probably heard of it, then 1988 there was a book made popular by Robert Fulcrum which said all ever needed to know I learned in kindergarten. And that's really true when we look at an increasingly tense society, a society where children are increasingly faced with challenges that certainly I did not face as a child growing up and many of you did not face. The ability for them to learn in kindergarten, these success skills, these skills that allow them to understand who they are and understand how to interact with the world more effectively will be critically important as we consider the fact that in a very few short years we're projected to be 11 billion people on this earth. There's 11 billion of us, we're going to have to figure out how to deal with each other differently. And if we don't understand or don't figure out how to deal with each other with our words, not our fists, we deal with our words, we're going to increasingly have challenges and problems in this world that will be almost insurmountable. I personally believe that we have the capacity in our youth and the capacity in our society to deal with the world through our words and that's the direction that we need to pursue and certainly why I think social-emotional learning is critically important for the world of civil society. Thank you. Linda, would you like to add something on that, why you think social-emotional development matters, especially in the academic and college area? Well, as I mentioned, increasingly, you know, employers are asking for this set of skills and the work that you do in college as well is, requires critical thinking and problem solving. The rapid change in knowledge and the expansion of knowledge is almost unheard of, it is unheard of in our experience. In the few years around the year 2000, there was more new knowledge in the world created than in the entire history of the world preceding you have to figure out how you're going to learn to learn, you're going to have to take risks in order to do that, you've got to be resilient, you've got to be able to surmount obstacles, people can't spoon feed you the knowledge that you need, which means there are actually a lot of character traits that are needed of grit and perseverance and persistence and risk taking that are needed to learn in that kind of a context, both for college and then for the world beyond. Most of the most in demand jobs 10, 15 years from now do not even exist today, so people are going to have to be flexible and adaptable and continually figuring out how to deal with challenges and new technologies and so on that don't exist and a lot of that is the social and emotional apparatus we bring to the world as much as it is the intellectual apparatus. Thank you. Vicky, I wanted to address the next question to you. Is social and emotional learning development something that is done in addition to academic learning? I know a lot of teachers I talk to sometimes they feel like it's just another add-on, so I'd like you to expand on that and also in furtherance of academic learning. Sure, thank you. So when you talk about if it's one more thing added to the plate, sort of the saying that we say in social and emotional learning is it's not something that we're adding to the plate, it's the plate itself because if a student comes without the emotional and social readiness to learn, they can't learn. So if they, for example, don't know how to listen to other people, to communicate effectively, to listen to other perspectives and learn from those things, if they are emotionally hijacked, they're afraid of what's happening on the playground that afternoon, things like that, then they are not in a readiness place to learn. So in terms of whether it's something that is one more thing or whether it works in furtherance of academics, then it is, it's a mutually reinforcing skill. Can you tell me that classroom story you were talking about? Sure. So I had the pleasure of teaching high school English. I was a high school English teacher at Service High School in Anchorage, Alaska, and I had a group of students that were considered, they were chosen to be in this class because they were considered not likely to pass the high school qualifying exams, and it was a new year to us, so we were trying to figure out what kind of supports we needed for those kids. Coincidentally, at the same time that I started teaching that class, I was reading one of your books, and I became really interested in social-emotional learning, and I used them as my experiment. So I would teach language arts along with social-emotional skills. So for example, the skills of how do you have, you call it grit or persistence, how do you delay gratification, how do you not care what's going on around you and focus your own attention on what it is you're trying to do. So we also built a lot of relationships. So when you talked about school climate and the importance of school climate, this was a group of kids that had not yet been engaged in a school system. Teachers didn't really know them, they didn't know teachers, they didn't have peers. So we started taking care of their social and emotional needs as well as, and by we I had a co-teacher so it was fabulous, as well as their physical needs and then their academic needs. And the outcome for these kids, first of all, the fact that they became just this really lovely close-knit group of friends and they wanted to come to school because they wanted to see each other, right? If you don't have friends and you don't have a climate, you don't think that teachers care if you're there, why would you show up? But now they believed that they belonged and they felt like they were part of something. And then they went to take their tests and we had at that year a 93% success rate on our high school qualifying exams when the school average was 68%. And these were the kids not likely to make it, right? It was beautiful. That's fantastic. Yeah. That's awesome. Thank you. Stefan, how and why should social and emotional learning matter to business and industry and does it strengthen our economy? And you talked about the fourth industrial revolution when we were discussing it before. I'd love for you to expand on that. And congratulations. All of you here are recipients of the fourth industrial revolution. You are living it. You are making it real and likely will live through it. And possibly a fifth industrial revolution is at the rate of technological change. As you know, the changes that are going on now are being driven strongly by the Internet of Things, by the connectivity, by the networking of human capital and physical capital. And this networking is creating exponential growth and exponential challenges. As we network more, as we gain more experience and more capacity, if you will, in business and industry, we face some interesting challenges. This is the first time in modern history when we've had four generations, all co-existent working in the same workforce. Three was reasonably common with a fairly small percentage at the higher age ranges today. You may know this, but the number one group in ages 40 to 65 that are changing jobs, they're not 40-year-olds, they're not 50-year-olds, they're the 60-plus-year-olds that are changing jobs. It's completely disrupting how we think about the relationships in the networking. So you can imagine how important it is that we be able to talk, we be able to communicate, we be able to collaborate across geography, across time zones, across cultures. And into this world, we are spending almost $5 billion a year in the U.S. alone on simply interpersonal skills training, teaching people how to talk to each other, things that you should reasonably expect to have learned in kindergarten, however, somehow have gone lacking for a variety of reasons, and we can go into all the reasons and probably add ad nauseam. It doesn't really matter how we got here, the fact is we are here. And we have another generation that are coming through a system that was designed 100 years ago, and that system has served us well, the system of education, and it is not broken. It is doing exactly what it's designed to do. However, the economy, the society is changing far greater at a far greater pace than education can currently keep up. One of the areas that are so important in business and industry is our ability to take these people and actually create useful work. And these are super important things that are necessary, and the policies that you create are the ones that allow us to let this happen. I'll step down off my soapbox here because this is actually a 45-minute rant. And I'm going to condense it because I'm looking at the clock, and I know I'm going to be respectful of your time. Social emotional learning is absolutely critical to the future of our society and the future of our business, and the more we can do to support that at earlier grades, the better we will be. Stephon, that gets me fired up. Thank you for that. I'm sorry. I think it's like, go, you go. Linda, could you add some more comments? I just want to add a little bit about what the pedagogies are that have to change and why you need professional development, resources, and support, and I know you could add a lot more to this from what you do in Nevada. In the old learning environment, it was kind of sit and get. It was transmission curriculum. I'm the teacher. I know what I'm going to say it out loud to you. Tell you to read the chapter. Answer the questions at the end of the chapter. Take notes when I'm talking, and you mostly kind of regurgitate the things that the textbook and I tell you. In this arena and what the needs that Stephon just described, you've got to be able to create a classroom in which kids are actually constructing the knowledge together where they can productively engage in work with each other. How many of you have had bad experiences with group work? Okay, I got almost 100%. And that's because quite often as teachers are learning to do this new work, they haven't learned the skills necessarily, haven't been taught the skills, for how do you construct collaborative work in a productive way that teaches people how to work effectively with each other, that intervenes in relationships that need to be adjusted, helps people figure that out. When that doesn't happen, and you've all had that bad experience with group work, that's exactly the phenomenon that leads to the $5 billion industry for training and interpersonal skills that Stephon talked about. So we need to bring that into schools, help teachers actually get the skill set. It's a very specific skill set to create a different kind of classroom, a different kind of learning experience, and a different kind of collaboration skill set for all of the kids that they have. And to build on that a little bit, Linda, sorry for jumping in again, but to build on that a little bit, all too often we've relegated the so-called soft skills to the beyond school environment, to the speech and debate or the destination imaginations or the clubs and activities. And I think you're making the great point. It's not good enough to delegate it to that area. It's got to come in the classroom. It's got to come in the classroom to be effective. It does. It needs to be integrated with everything, every content. Anyway, Vicky, you are also, I know that you are from Nevada, and Governor Sandoval is also a part of the commission for the Aspen Institute on Social Emotional and Academic Needs, and your state is working on the Office of Workforce Innovation. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yes, actually, and especially in light with how social emotional learning leads to economic improvement, et cetera. So the governor has just started the Office of Workforce Innovation, and I had the pleasure of meeting with one of the workers in this particular office, and they have just put out a briefing. And the reason that I was mentioning that is when you talk about it with economics, even locally the sectors of employment in Nevada were asked what skills they were looking for, in their employers, and they broke it down by entry level, middle level, and senior level positions. And even at the entry level, the skills that showed up in those columns were the social and emotional skills, just like you've been talking about. They want people who can show reliability, people who can communicate well, people who can work in teams, and then as it went further up, it became leadership skills. So when you look at the skills that we're looking for, we're looking for the social and emotional skills, not to mention the fact that in Nevada we've also done some research in Washoe County, and we'll talk a little bit more about that later. And they've done a strong correlation between social emotional skills and social emotional implementation and graduation rates. And so we're able to graduate more students when we focus on their social and emotional needs. And of course that adds to a stronger economy. It adds to the workforce. It does, definitely. So sometimes social and emotional learning and school climate get conflated. What is their relationship and how to both contribute to ending the school to prison pipeline and advancing equity? Stefan, could you address that, especially with your experience in Alabama? Well, I live in the great state of Alabama. And I won't make any jokes about that. It is a great state for us. However, we have a lot of challenges in our state, as we do in many other states. We have challenges of equity. We have huge issues of educational imbalance across the socioeconomic and racial lines. And into this world, very often as a result of perhaps unintended consequence of the high stakes testing, perhaps other societal issues, what we really find out is that the skill sets get mixed up with the culture, the deep abiding values of the area and the climate, how this culture is experienced. And in business and industry, we separate those three. We talk about the skill set, the culture and the climate. And when you put them all together in a soup, what you really get is a lack of understanding on the part of the people that are involved as to what they're trying to learn, why they're trying to learn it, and how it's going to impact their experience in work and in school. And in school, when you create that environment in school, you create, again, an environment that only exists in school. I don't know if you guys know this, but the only place in the entire world, well, let's confine it to the U.S. The only place in the U.S. that actually looks like school is school. There is no other, there is no work environment that parallels sitting like you're sitting now. This is, by the way, this is called instructionism. I'm telling you what I think is important. And if I were in a school, I would give you a test and you would prove to me I was correct. Okay? That's not how we do it. That's not how you do it in the world in which you live. And so to prepare children for that world, we have to separate very discreetly. These are the skills, the self-awareness, the self-management, the social skills, and these transcend just the school setting. And the climate is how you experience those in this classroom. They experience the climate of growth and excitement as opposed to perhaps other classrooms in the school or in the area. And then the culture, one of the values, the underpinnings that make this, that we in civil society have declared to be appropriate and effective. As you know, I grew up in the South and we have a storytelling in the South as a survival skill. It's not actually an art form. And so my dear O'Daddy used to say, manners are cheap. There's no excuse not to have good manners. And when you think about it, there's really no excuse for not having good manners. They're easy to teach. They're easy to learn. And to your point, they're more caught than they are taught. And I would suggest that when you conflate these three areas, you make it very difficult for a child to sort this out. And you have to be much more clear about these three basic areas, at least in my opinion. Linda, would you like to add something about how school climate gets conflated and the relationship on how they both contribute to ending the school to prison pipeline also? I think that was a very good explanation. I'm going to let that stand. It did be a good job summing that up. Okay, well let's go on to the next one. How can states and districts support social and emotional learning in the systems of continuous improvement? I'd love to hear some examples. And Vicki, I know the state of Nevada has supported social and emotional learning. Could you give us some examples? Sure, it's a pleasure. I am fortunate to be working in Nevada's Department of Education right now. And currently I work in something called the office for a safe and respectful learning environment. And the first way that I feel like Nevada has really done good by our students is the formation of this office in the first place. So we are one of only two offices in the Department of Education that is legislated. The other one is family engagement. So we have been legislated to be a part of the Department of Education, which I believe shows a really strong level of support for the building of safe and respectful learning environments. We have a director, we have coworkers and myself working in that office. And one of the ways that we work to support the building of social emotional learning in our students, and this is also another way that the state of Nevada has really stood up social emotional learning and supports, is that we have been given the opportunity to place social workers in schools across the state. So we have $11.2 million a year that the legislators have given us to spread social workers into our schools and then they become the voice for us of talking to schools about how to build social emotional learning. The other thing that we have in legislation is the formation of multi-tiered systems of integrated supports. And so we want to help our students learn these social skills through strong universal teaching of social emotional learning. And then if they need extra supports, how can we offer them extra support? And then we also have, like I said, our social workers in the schools that can help get there. So I feel like they've done a really lovely job of trying to put some of their money and their policies and their people behind the work that they're doing. We also have a statewide school climate social emotional learning survey, like you heard about in the opening. And we're very excited about what we're going to be able to learn from that survey and how we're going to include that survey in our systems and as part of our ESSA plan. And then we have called out social emotional learning as part of our ESSA plan. So our goal actually says students and adults will have social and emotional competencies. So we didn't forget that the teacher has to have the competencies, which we're really excited about. And so to get there, we are now actively working to develop statewide social emotional learning standards. And we're trying to do that in a volunteer way. We don't want to force the teachers on the ground to be teaching social emotional learning. We just want to provide the technical assistance and support so that they can teach social emotional learning. And so to do that, first we believe that we need to be able to tell them what students should know and be able to do. So we're working on bringing together teachers, educators, parents, students. Just a wide group of stakeholders who are interested in this topic and we're developing statewide SEL standards as we speak, hopefully to go to adoption soon. It's exciting. Go ahead, Stefan. I know Victoria, you and I were actually speaking and I don't think there's any longitudinal data on it at this point. But I would suspect that this is going to have a huge impact on lowering this whole school to pipeline, our school to prison pipeline issue, which is actually destroying so much human capital. And it's disproportionately seen in the African-American community. If you're an African-American male, you're four to six times more likely to be in prison than if you're white. And in many cases it's because of a lack of these skill sets on both sides that happen. And so I'm going to be very interested to see how that plays out in the bottom. One of our favorite, and we talked about this a little bit, one of our favorite projects or my favorite projects right now is that when students are at some of those vulnerable decision-making points, for example, they've made it to the principal's office for some reason. We have a district that I'm really proud of, Lyon County, who is working on doing a behavior health screener instead so that they can say, now was this really a discipline issue? Oh, it looks like I'm going to be usurped very well. I'm excited to have you come. I will stop and give you space. Well, we had a wonderful introduction. Thank you, Senator Murphy, for all your efforts on behalf of, I'm from the state of Connecticut, so especially proud to have you represent us and all your work during ESSA, the provisions that were included in the final bill to support social emotional learning and ending the school-to-prison pipeline. So thank you for your tireless advocacy and the important equity guardrails and ESSA and your continued work. So we would love to have some welcoming comments. Oh, mid welcoming comments from here. You'd love to have an interruption is what you mean. Well, listen, I just want to thank you all for achieving a capacity crowd here to talk about one of the most important subjects right now to our kids. And that's the ability to understand what our children need today, which is not just learning basic skills and reading, writing, and math, but also the skills to be able to cope as productive workers, as productive collaborators, as productive adults with all of the ability to deal with the tumult and turbulence that is often thrown at them. So I've been a great admirer of Linda's work for a long time. She works very closely. Her organization has with my wife, who's spent her career in education, now working in education policy. And I'm proud of the steps that we took in ESSA to put social emotional learning on a fast track. Listen, I don't love everything that's in that bill. That is a compromise in every sense of the word. It was the author of the accountability provisions in that bill. But it is a big, big bet on states. We are giving enormous ability to states to innovate when it comes to their accountability systems. And we are really putting a lot of faith in local parent communities, local activist communities to hold states accountable to the commitments that they make inside those accountability plans. One of the most exciting shifts that happens in ESSA is the recognition that we have to have a much more holistic view about what makes a great school. And the ability now to include in your accountability system things like school climate are going to beg for more and more instruction, more and more curriculum in social emotional learning, because now you are going to be rewarded for doing that through the law. And yet we know we still have a lot of work to do to understand how to communicate these subjects to kids, understand what works and what doesn't, and then how to assess whether what we're doing in social emotional instruction is paying the dividends that we want. And that's why in Connecticut we're so proud of the work that Yale does in particular to try to do the research that is long overdue in this field. So I'm just really excited to take a look at this report. You should all feel really lucky to be in education policy at this moment, but also feel a tremendous burden because lots of states can get this new system very right, but lots of states could potentially get it very wrong. And letting states know that this is a time that you can take a leap of faith and prioritize social emotional learning, and letting them know that with good data and good information like such that's included in this report is really, really critical. And I'm one of a very small minority in the United States Senate, which is a parent of young children. So we have a very small cabal of us that have kids in the public school system, and so I've got an incoming third grader and an incoming kindergartener, and so this is both a personal and professional endeavor here. And I really wanted to welcome you all and thank you for doing this great work. Huge opportunities in ESSA to promote social emotional learning, but big unanswered questions for a lot of teachers and principals about how to do it right, and still big unanswered questions for policymakers at the state level as to whether they can measure this in a way that's meaningful to them. You're going to be engaged over the course of the next months and years in answering those questions. So to lend it to all of the members of the panel here to everybody that took some time out of your day to be part of it, thank you. Thank you to Tim Ryan for caring about this in the House of Representatives as well, and I look forward to working with you all. I'm going to go vote, so thank you everybody. Thank you. Thank you Senator, and thank you for behalf of all our educators for pushing that and being our voice, because we really, really need that. So thank you. So I think this is a good time to go on to questions. So we have about 15 minutes. So I'd love to hear some questions that you have in the audience for our panelists. So just raise your hand and we will hear your questions. Okay, right here at the front. And just talk loud. Yes. In the arts and in the athletics and in technology with healthier and across the board attention to social emotional learning. I'm particularly concerned in a time that's paid to play that we are separating out those access for those things. And I also wonder if there is a workforce there that can help teachers learn from other teachers. Okay, who wants to jump at that? Sorry. I'll start, but I'll let you jump in with the research, because I just have the practical experience. Never say just. Oh, I do have the practical experience. So in the Anchorage School District where I started social emotional learning was, we started by writing some SEL standards and then we went out to, actually we went to Connecticut by the way, but he's gone now to see what it looked like. And then we began going from classroom to classroom and school to school and seeing what teachers wanted to do and how they wanted to build it. And we found that our music teacher, that's what made me think of that, our music teachers were some of the first bought into this. Because for them to make beautiful music together, the kids had to work together, they had to be willing to practice on their own. They had to have those social emotional skills that we believe in. And then they had to follow direction and try to make sure that they blended instead of stood out alone all the time and things like that. So our music teachers and our art teachers and our specialists became extremely passionate about the work that we were doing. In fact, we used some of our specialists to be the curriculum teachers of the social emotional curriculum that we'd adopted because they see every student. So it's a little different than myself as a high school English teacher who saw the 120 students that were assigned to me, for example. Our specialists in our elementary school saw every student in the school. And so they could help bring these skills to the kids in a way that transcended what was happening in the classroom. So I don't know that that particularly answers your question, but I believe that our specialists have a huge role in this. And then of course the ability to creatively express yourself and to paint the world a more beautiful place through the fine arts and through those things and through physical health. There's a direct connection between physical health and emotional health, right? There's so much research about that. All you have to do now, I can even show it to you, just turn to the people around you and smile for a second. Read smile at somebody, okay? Now you notice what happens in the room when you do that. You physically change your lips and the whole room starts giggling and laughing. There's a connection between your physical and your emotional health, right? So the more that we take care of the social emotional needs of kids, the more that we're taking care of the physical health of kids as well. That's great. That's why it saddens me sometimes when you hear about them cutting the arts too, because I believe it has a strong correlation with social and emotional needs because that's the way a lot of kids express themselves. Okay, so does anyone know about the research with that and the arts? Well, there's a lot of research about the benefits of the arts. And, you know, for academics and cognitive development, certainly in the expressive arts there is research about the therapeutic benefits, which have emotional components of engaging in the arts and using that self-expression as a means to be actually emotionally healing and so on. I don't know if there's, you know, particular research on the advance of social emotional skills, but you would expect it to be so. And all the evidence we do have suggests that it is, as you say, a workforce that could be deployed in this cause. Okay, thank you, ladies. Is there another question? This gentleman right here. I'm Tom Linsley with ACT and the science and the research behind this has really grown exponentially in the last five years for reliability. So with that foundation just continuing to get better, more schools of teacher preparation are beginning to look at it and build it into curriculum. Can you talk or elaborate a little bit more on where you see that being done well and the difference between that and professional development as a place for this to occur best? So I will say a little word about that because it's a passion of mine. I have been in the teacher education program at Stanford University for a long time and we've brought in quite a bit of work on social emotional learning for both teachers so that they can be well-centered and good models and able to manage their own stress and interact appropriately with their students but also for students. And so there are some places that are beginning to do that. We're doing case studies right now of some schools of education as well as some schools that are good exemplars. And one of those is San Jose State University where there's a really strong initiative to infuse social emotional learning pre-service for teachers and also to work in professional development with surrounding communities and it can range the gamut from mindfulness practices which are centering and calming and allow people to stop and think and behave, take the next steps more appropriately to conflict resolution strategies that both teachers and kids can learn so that when a disagreement occurs or when there's some misunderstanding people have tools and skills in common. Teachers just like anyone else learn how to interact with others from whatever happened in their family or in their background which may or may not have been particularly sophisticated or skillful. We all have different experiences in our homes so they also need to learn these skills but having everyone in a school with the same tools can allow the culture to build around that so that's something else that can be taught. And then ways to teach collaboration. We have a whole course in our program about how to teach kids to collaborate effectively and do group work that is productive of higher skills and achievement. So all of these things are things that teachers can learn. Practices like helping kids engage in self-assessment with rubrics and peer assessment and then revising their work actually teach them an academic growth mindset that if I get feedback and follow it, my work will improve, it demonstrates that I'm competent. There's so many ways in which this integrates with the academics but also can be taught as a set of support skills for teachers. It's exciting, there are a few other places that are taking this up. There's some work in Canada around pre-service. There are some consortia that are connecting within AACTE so it's a good time but there's a lot of work to be done. A lot of work to be done. And I've seen this change a lot because I want to tell you exactly how many years ago I graduated college was a long time ago but I don't think I had one class on social and emotional dealing with that so it's encouraging to hear that colleges or not the teacher prep programs are really trying to integrate it. Thank you for that question. Next question? Up here in the front, can you state your name? Where are you from? My question was, is there bipartisan support for ESL and ESL programs? And if not, how do you see that affecting the future of SCL? Okay, Linda, I think that one's for you again. I'll start it off and others can add on but I'll begin by noting that Senator from Nevada, I mean the governor of Nevada, Sandoval is a Republican and supportive of social-emotional learning and the Nevada Department of Education, the arena that Victoria leads is one of the few required parts of the department which is on this point co-chair of the Social-Emotional and Academic Development Commission former Governor Angler from Michigan is a Republican and was the head of the business roundtable until very recently. Of course Tim Ryan and Chris Murphy who you just heard about or from are both Democrats so you can see that there is support on both sides of the aisle but when you get right down to it in the states and in communities there is I think a recognition from human beings who care about getting things done in the world that these are the skills that are really important and that's a bipartisan and nonpartisan agenda. I can certainly say that from business and industry it is definitely bipartisan. We all are going to sink or rise on this ocean and regardless of your political affiliation you're going to have to do business and we need to do business in an effective way with an effective and informed consumer base and an effective and informed work group and this type of learning is critical to both. It gets more important that we all work together at this time. Thank you. Okay the gentleman at the blue shirt right there. Caleb Hedinger intern with NASBE Do you have any kind of concern in light of the recent rejection of some of the SS State Plans that SEL components of future state plans might not be of a high enough standard and what can states do to really compensate for that? Okay. Was SEL something that was confronted in any of that feedback? I don't remember that it drew any. Yeah, I don't think that that was a source of any concern and I think in school quality and student success indicators in the law there might have been even a mention of... Yeah, the ideas of students climate surveys were mentioned. The Department of Education has put out a climate survey which it's advocated for states to use. I'm doing some work in New York right now and they're using the US Department of Education climate survey as a pilot intending for it to eventually potentially become statewide. So I think that the notion that at least this work around climate surveys that give you information about supportive environment and students opportunities to learn these skills are well established in the law and probably unlikely to be you know, contravened in any way. Hey, would you like to add a comment there? Just to comment that we've been using employee pulse. There's many different things but we use something called an employee pulse routinely in industry which is essentially a climate assessment and it would be unusual to me to imagine that what we have so successfully managed to use in business in our way would be rejected in schools is oh well that doesn't work. What I would just say of all the things that are going to be indicators for school people to use to try to improve continuously improve their schools getting data from student surveys about how they're experiencing the school and from other potentially parent surveys and teacher surveys is some of the best data I've worked in many schools, I've started some schools when you can sit down with those data and say well how's our trend line going? Oh, we've been working on this and we can see the results in what kids and parents are saying is very motivating and informative for educators so it's one of the most productive kinds of improvement tools, an engine for ongoing improvement that we have and I think people are beginning to see the value of that where they're using it and I think if there were any discouragement that were to appear there would be a lot of advocates explaining why this is really central to improving the school environment. I know we do surveys at our school and we really look at what's going on with when we see our students climate and I see oh I got a low score on that and I go talk to my class and I'm like well how can I do this better? Make sure you feel safe and it really helps. It helps me a lot and so and of course when you get high school you're all excited that they feel really safe but that's what you want and as a teacher you want your kids to and as you educators in the room know you want your kids to feel comfortable and safe in your classroom. They do better, they blossom. When they know you believe in them they grow academically you know and socially emotionally always. Just like when your boss believes in you you blossom and when he doesn't believe in you you wither it's the same thing with our kids so the surveys help a lot. Thank you. Okay we have time for one more question. The lady in the back. Okay let's do two questions because I know you had your hand up first sorry. We'll do two questions. There's two over there and one over here. Hi my name is Julie. I'm with the after school alliance. I really appreciate the attention to trauma informed education and how SEL plays a huge component. With that and the conversation of how emotional is linked with physical and is linked with the academia side of learning. With the current administration's budget proposal for education and the huge cuts that our states and communities are facing how what road map do you recommend for underserved communities who are already lacking the resources to carry out the basic education needs and health needs of their students how do you recommend that they still integrate this SEL component. Great question. I would obviously there's a big answer to that which has to do with the equalization of school funding across communities and states and there's litigation in 40 states trying to accomplish that every state has a state flag and a state school finance lawsuit. But beyond that for schools that are identified for comprehensive intervention and improvement and the same thing for schools identified for targeted improvement there will be resources available. There's a huge pot of money in title one and in settings where in fact there is significant poverty, trauma, etc. Some of that money can be used for the wraparound services. We just did a big report at the Learning Policy Institute on community schools took a look at 125 studies which demonstrate that both the pillars of community schools the integrated supports, the extended time, the after school the family engagement meets the evidence about their development and attainment is strong enough to meet the ESSA standard for an evidence-based intervention and so you would hope that in some of those settings that resource will be put to use and in that kind of context social emotional learning and development as you will know from your own work can really be planted and nurtured and thrive. Okay, question over here. Senator, I'm Yoder with the American Institutes for Research. Senator Murphy mentioned there's a lot of unanswered questions still from measurement and a lot of them have been addressed here from trauma to teacher prep to connection to industry. What do you see as one of the biggest challenges and how do you see your work moving forward and answering those biggest challenges? That's a big question there. Well AIR and SRI and many other organizations that you know RAND Corporation is involved in work on SEL measures and I think in our case we're very interested in how policies play out and affect student learning and achievement and growth. So we'll be looking very much at how are people taking up these tools how are they using them effectively what are the conditions under which you see gains made how can that inform future policy and we'll leave it to many other research organizations to fine tune the measures and some of the other pieces of the puzzle that need to be part of what gets worked on. And I think speaking on behalf of teachers I think that one of the biggest challenges or barriers is that we need to really support the adult in the building because it's an tiring exhausting stressful job and the more that I sometimes felt like I had to fight for the right to do my job and I just feel like teachers should be lifted up and taken care of and the more that we can teach them mindfulness skills and the more that we can help them to feel that they have efficacy and that they matter and that these skills matter to them then they can model them the way that you were talking about them being modeled and then it's not necessarily one more thing on the plate because it's their way of being and I think that that is a huge barrier when an educator is so burned out that they feel like if you ask them to do this one more thing it might break them rather than helping them to have the time and the space for this to be who they are so that it's just the way that they teach. Stefan would you like to make the last comment? I just make a comment to all business people policy makers all of parents grandparents we have to get off the porch this is our fight it's not the fight of any particular group we have been treating education far too long as a rental unit we rent it for the 12 years we need it and then we abandon it that is not acceptable if we're going to have an economy that is vibrant a society that grows into this future that is so wonderful we are going to have to treat education as an investment we're going to have to invest our time and our energy no matter what our background is and it's not a fight that we can just relegate to the policy makers or to the teachers I firmly believe that if we are successful in liberating the classroom from the things that are done that are not instructional that their teachers are required to do and I don't mean chaos I mean liberating the classroom so that teachers and children can have the relationship that they need in order to effectively have a learning environment if we're successful in doing that we will have solved so much of the issues that then the content issues the instructional issues those things will begin to be solvable but right now we don't even have that in front of everybody and I call on everybody all business people, parents, grandparents get off the porch and get in this fight because if we don't get in it we're going to lose it I think it's a great way to end it and let's go work together to liberate the classroom and thank you so much for being here I appreciate it, thank you guys