 So, good morning everyone. I'm just a talking head and we can take everything I say with a grain of salt given what Peter just told us. But in second grade Mrs. Waissaki, my teacher, called my mother. And my mother invited her for dinner. Like it was only like in October and the rest of the year was just, you know, I was done. Because once that family school connection was made and they got socially liked each other, there's no way that I could do anything but behave during the school day. Okay? So, there we are. So, talking about these things is like bringing coals to Newcastle, because I don't want to give you too many compliments today, but there's something changing about the DNA of education in British Columbia that I don't see happening other places. And I know Scott McDonald said that, you know, things are going pretty well. There's lots of changes we need to make even in a great place like B.C. But I want to recognize that the fact that you're having these meetings is remarkable. And the fact that this is both a bottom-up and a top-down attempt at some kind of systems reform is unusual. And we ought to note that these days, these weeks, these couple years are a potential for really making a change in the process of what we'd call caring and healthy schools. And we should celebrate that, even as hard as it is. So, I always disclose that I'm the developer of the PADS curriculum. It's one of the most used social-emotional learning curriculums, and I get a royalty, so there you have it. So, two questions. What is systemic SEL? That's what we've been talking about, social-emotional development, caring, healthy schools, and how can it improve education and community well-being? That's the first question I'll sort of address. And the second is what data should we collect to understand these changes? I think Peter's right, data is just data, but depending on how we construct it and how we use it and interpret it, it can be of more or less value. So, important things I've heard here. I just want to note some of the things I think are important. First is I think President Ono's idea that there's a continuum of life is really important here. Children don't begin in kindergarten and they don't end in 12th grade, and there's a lot of systems that we're going to think about, systems thinking we really need to think about. The second is the systems thinking that Peter and Maple Ridge did a, Smitho did a great job in their panel demonstrating how they're starting to use systems thinking, I think is really useful. It's not the end, there is no single solution, systems thinking is one tool in the process. And systemic support is important. President Ono, the minister talked about the idea of building systemic support for children, and I'll get further into that later. Monique talked about the idea of going beyond the school, and I'll spend a little time on that. The idea of family development and community systems change is important. Children live in families, they don't live in schools. The afternoon panel yesterday I loved. I thought it was a powerful panel. I learned a lot, especially by the power of language and learning from indigenous systems approaches. And as Peter said in his first discussion with Maria, how we talk to each other, but especially how we listen to each other is really critical if this is going to be a systems reform that's really going to take hold in your local communities. And I think everyone here is thinking about a focus on wellness. We're not interested in just the problem of the one child or two children in a class that have disruptive behavior. This is not about tier three work. This is about how to lift all boats. It's about universal interventions and a focus on wellness. Wellness even for children that have difficulties, right? That can help support them. And lastly, I would say that underlying this, there's a mental model here, I hope, which is that as a focus on compassion and caring for others. That's why you're here, that's why we're doing this. We're trying to widen our circle of caring so that all children, teachers, even super, even administrators are part of the process of being cared for. Okay, so a little poll for you first. Let's see, yes or no as I want to see hands raised. First question is, has SEL, Social Emotional Learning, made convincingly shown to improve children's social, emotional, and academic competence? Yes, if your hand's up, no if you're not sure. Okay, fair amount of yeses, not some not sure's probably. So I think it has been convincingly proved, and this gets to do with data and grounding data. There have been actually since then more studies, but 213 studies, about a quarter of a million children in randomized and quasi-experimental trials in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, lots of places that shows that overall when you compare children that are in schools that have SEL in their classrooms and those that are not, you see these changes. You've probably heard this before from Cam or others. You've probably read it, but this is very strong data. It's very convincing data. It's not about one person study with one group of upper middle class kids and some suburb. This is a really wide spectrum of children in schools and basically in western civilization, if you will. And even though it doesn't count studies that are done in other languages like in Dutch and German, et cetera, it pretty much shows exactly the same kinds of findings. And as we know, it not only improves children's social emotional skills, but it improves their academic achievement by approximately 11 percentile points and it reduces their risk for failure. So by teaching kids skills, not only improving their competency, but you're reducing their problems. And this is important because to the extent that we use these universal SEL interventions early in school, we're going to reduce the number of children that need Tier 2 and Tier 3 or whatever you want to call those services later on. And I have a study which I won't spend time today. It's 25 years long showing that that's the case. And there's economic value. So economists are interested in this from a policy standpoint. Four reasonably good SEL programs were studied by Henry Levin and Stanford and he showed there's about an $11 saving for every $1 invested. So there's a second question, okay? Yes or no? Is SEL basically a program used by teachers in a classroom? Hands up if you think yes. This is a pretty smart audience, okay? Because a lot of people think that's the case. That if you just, you know, get some money, read the literature, pick a program, do the program that you pretty much have checked this off your list, okay? And it's not. Programs are a critical component. I will argue this very strongly. They're a critical component, but systems change at the level of classrooms or schools has many processes, many components, and many actions. And Maple Ridge's panel was just a good example of discussing that yesterday. Now, well that's the case. And Maria mentioned that I'm one of the founders of CASEL. By the way, CASEL is having the first international social-emotional learning conference ever in Chicago in October of this year. And we got, we have room for 90 breakouts and we got 800 submissions to give you a sense of how much schools are interested in this. CASEL has a model, and this model developed years ago basically says that there are skills. And these skills are really important. I will contend with anyone in this room that the development of these skills is essential. We can make schools wonderful places. We can do great after-school programs. We can do lots of things, but if we don't teach children skills, just like in reading, just like in math, just like in STEM, we will not have the kind of competence in our society of strong citizenship that we want. So the skills are important, and I won't go through them. I don't want to waste the time on that today. But those skills are part of curriculum and instruction. And they go on in the classroom. And they're part of a broader issue as a teacher creating a class climate and social relations that really make children feel loved and belonging, that they feel belonged and connected. And that especially becomes important as we get to middle and high school. All kids like school pretty much 95% even in the highest crime and highest delinquency neighborhoods in the United States till about fourth grade. And then it starts to change. The second level is school-wide practices and policies. And that has to do with what the school's culture and climate are like. And then lastly, we've got lots of layers. I can make layers here that would go all across the room, but we have family and school partnerships, parenting and out-of-school time. We've got policies of boards. We've got policies of municipalities. We've got policies of provinces. We've got policies of the federal government. There are all these different layers that we can think about and thinking about this as a system. And behind all that is probably what Peter has talked about in systems thinking is mental models. So one big mental model is that people have is that SEL is a program. Another big mental model is if we just deal with those aggressive ADHD kids and give them treatment, that's the issue. It's really not about our own well-being. It's really about just dealing with the children that are problematic. But we know that that's not the case. I showed you the data from the 213 studies that that's not true. And CAS has been at us for a long time, starting in a publication we call SEL 101, Promoting Social and Emotional Learning about 20 years ago and more recently the Handbook on Social and Emotional Learning. Peter, by the way, has a chapter in there. Kim has a chapter in there, et cetera. And so the question is what do we know about this early development? How do early social and emotional competencies? Why am I focusing not just on the system but on these skills, these competencies? And I'm one of the directors of a very large study involved thousands of children in four cities in the United States called the Fast Track Study. And in that study we had a normative control group of children in each of the cities and we tracked them from when they were age five till they were at 25. And when they were six years of age we had teachers rate their social-emotional competence. Just when they entered grade one. And we wanted to know the answer to the question. What teachers say about children's social-emotional competence in grade one, does it predict anything later on? And you will say to me, well, that's impossible to predict because there's all kinds of other things in the way. And those are things like their differences by boys and girls. We know girls are a little more emotionally competent than boys on average. But pretty much everyone agree to that. Would the men agree to that on average? Socioeconomic status of the family. We know that poverty has a big influence on adult outcomes, right? We know that race ethnicity, especially given the problems we have in our society, predicts outcomes. We know that teen parenthood predicts differences in outcomes overall. We know the ratings of the quality of the home environment predict adult outcomes. We know that early IQ predicts adult outcomes. We know that children's reading abilities when they enter kindergarten predicts their academic and maybe their occupational outcomes. We know that teachers' ratings of children's aggression, not their competence, but their aggression early on, predicts long-term outcomes. So what we did is we managed through statistical modeling, it was very complicated, won't get into it today, we managed to control for all those. We modeled all those possibilities of how they affect adult outcomes. We modeled those out of the data. And then when we said the question is this 8-item teacher rating, which has to do with children's ability to get along with others, basically calm down when they're upset and maintain attention in the classroom. And what we found is when you look at that controlled for everything else, kindergartners with higher competence were more likely to graduate from high school, they were more likely to complete a college degree, obtain stable employment in young adulthood, they had fewer years on medication if they were in special needs classrooms, and they were less likely to be living in public housing, receiving public assistance to be involved with the police, arrested and convicted, and to be in an detention facility. Now this isn't surprising to you, is it? Because you may all work in schools. You know the kids that are in the office are not there because they have IQ problems. They're hard because they have regulatory problems. It's really the gold here is emotion regulation. And we know that in our own lives, we know that people who can regulate their emotions effectively are more competent. And we know that when we don't regulate our emotions well and we do things we later regret for one reason or another, usually because we couldn't calm down or we didn't use our thinking skills, we become incompetent. This is not news, is it? So these skills are important. And everything we should be doing in some way should be helping children to gain these skills. And we teach them very differently with a four-year-old and a 14-year-old, right? But we need to think about how these skills are learned. It's not just about us. We'll talk about us later. We're a big part of the problem and the solution. But it's about these skills. Just like we think about reading skills, math skills, and STEM skills, right? So how do we create a caring school? I would say there's a couple things here. First, you wouldn't be surprised, given what I've said already, that both children and adult could need emotion regulation skills. Kim has shown in very convincing causal data that teachers who are not doing well emotionally have children at the end of the year who are not doing well emotionally and are more likely to show higher circulating stress reactivity, cortisol in their systems that how teachers are feeling and doing affects kids. Is that any surprise to anyone here? Right? So we need to think about the adults. Second thing is schools need to adopt practices that create shared communities of caring. Healthy norms and a safe environment. Right? It's basic, right? But we often don't think about these issues. That's one of the reasons why these, I think these meetings are being held. This can include using high quality SEL skills or programs, mindfulness skills. Kim's shown great work, for example, in expressing caring and gratitude and its effects on kids, volunteering, service learning. There's lots of ways to go about this. There's no single way. And we think developmentally, from a three-year-old to an 18-year-old, we think about different approaches at different times, right? We have to be flexible in our thinking about this. There's no single bullet. But this requires at the building level, because all this happens in buildings. It doesn't happen in school boards. It happens in buildings. This requires principal leadership. And if there's one area in which I think we have not focused, it's the issue of principals, and I'll come back to that. And it also requires systems planning at the board level. Right? And we can go through more circles. It requires thinking about things at the level of the municipality and the province and the nation. So both children and adult need emotion regulation skills. SEL programs have shown that children can be taught to better understand expressing, regulate their emotions. We have shown this convincingly. Multiple times, many places around the world, from places I've worked in, in Indigenous Australia, where people have to drive six hours to go to training, to downtown Los Angeles. Okay? For example, in my own work with the PAS curriculum, which I've been doing for almost 40 years, we've been able to show, just as an example, that we can improve children's emotional understanding and their ability to appropriately express their emotions. We can improve their executive functions, their ability to plan ahead, because when they calm down, they regulate their emotions, they can use their cognitive skills more effectively. We can reduce aggressive and disruptive hyperactive behavior. We can improve caring, positive peer relationships by both teacher and peers' own reports. And we can have greater engagement and attention in the classroom. And that's by teaching kids the skills, okay? So the skills have to be central to this. It's really important. As Castle says, SEL in the classroom is a three-legged stool. There's three components to what we think about SEL in the classroom. There's a supportive classroom environment, critically important. Nothing worse than seeing a teacher teach an SEL lesson and yell at the kids inappropriately. Explicit SEL instruction I've been talking about and integrating it SEL into the rest of the curriculum, into language arts, into social studies, into STEM, into math. So I've been working on models of this for a long time. I like models because, as Peter said, data without a model isn't very useful. Years ago, we wrote a paper called the pro-social classroom model where we said, well, look, the outcome we're really interested in is student social, emotional, and academic development. And we know that that's going to flourish in healthy classrooms, right? So what leads to healthy classrooms? Well, healthy student-teacher relationships. Good management. Good management is important, right? We all know that when we don't manage things well, things fall apart. And we think effective SEL implementation. But those are all dependent on the teacher. We're back to the teacher again, right? We're back to teachers and their own social-emotional competence, their own training, and their own well-being. Because when teachers aren't well, things don't go well, right? So then we can go up and we can say, well, yeah, the classroom's important, but then we go to the system of the pro-social school. And we think about those same outcomes where we can think about now a healthy school climate and we can think about healthy principal-staff relations, healthy organizational school culture created by leadership, not by one person, not just by the principal, by the community, and effective principal-community relations. Well, what's that depend on? That depends on a well-effective principal, right? And I don't know if you know this, but principals are even more stressed than teachers. And at least in the United States, there's more data that I could find in Canada. Principal turnover is even faster than teacher turnover, right? It's a really, really tough job. So I was very excited to see that the ministry and put out a report in 2017 on leadership development in the BC education sector. Now, reports are one thing and action is another, but this is a start on the idea that we should really be thinking about the leadership development of principals is important. And I would say that at least in the United States, maybe it's been true in Canada, that mostly principals have learned to be managers and there's been a lot of discussion about being instructional leaders. I really don't think that the role of a principal is to be an instructional leader. I think it's really misconstrued what we... I think the role of a principal is to be the SEL leader, the person that creates the healthy caring school in which everyone feels connected and belongs. And when that happens, learning occurs. So then we can think about the pro-social school board. Imagine that. Right, where we have school board trustees that have a deep understanding of what SEL is. And I know there's some trustees here, which is fantastic. And that means they have clear goals for what their districts... their board's well-being to be. They have effective board administrator community relations rather than antagonistic. They have long-term financial commitment to this kind of systems change to make healthy, caring, creative schools. That creates a healthy board climate. It affects everything else down the line. And then we can think about the pro-social community. Right? We can think about community well-being as an outcome. And we can think about clear public health goals for well-being. This is why the Ministry on Substance Abuse, the new one, is so important. And why a conference on education and mental health coordinated is important. We can think about effective community school agency collaboration, coordination about prevention, promotion, and treatment, how they can get coordinated together in a community, which leads to better community climate and better outcomes for children and families. Now, I could go on with these models forever, but I'll just do one more. And that's the pro-social family because children live in families. And our families are always going to be our most important influence. That doesn't mean that teachers cannot be extremely powerful influences on children's development, but just by the nature of life families are critical. So we can think about parents' own social and emotional well-being. And we know when parents aren't well for a variety of reasons, many, many reasons children often struggle greatly. So we can think about how we build healthy parent relationships, effective parent management skills, how we can help parents model compassion and caring and respect. And how that leads to a healthy family climate that affects children's outcomes. So this is systems thinking here, right? We got to think about these systems and how they interrelate. Can't do everything at once, right? One step at a time. But if we don't think about how these are all interconnected, we won't get to the point which is our goal. And I think our goal, I will say, is to create a healthy society in which we have strong democratic principles and people that live as citizens in harmony with each other, right? It's not about how much money people make, it's about our ability to live in harmony as a society. So a holistic picture just of the school part of this, how do we support effective academic, social, and emotional development, well-being? To have these healthy caring schools, we need three things, I think. We need effective conditions for learning. That's good management, good norms of caring. We need explicit social and emotional skill development. We need to teach kids the skills, okay? And we need teacher and staff well-being. Teacher and staff well-being. This is the part that's almost always left out. And without it, none of this is really going to work. That's my conclusion. So Yogi Berra said once, in theory there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is, okay? And so I can put up all these models. Peter can talk about systems and letters of inference and icebergs, but the question is, how do we actually get to practice on these things? And I think Maple Ridge discussion was a great example where they were creating a capacity for reflective conversations, really taking the time to do that and to really listen and taking the time to use data to really think about where they're going. And so I want to spend a little time talking about what kind of data might be useful because it may not be the data that you think I'm going to talk about. Okay, so we've got to understand the right conditions for all this to thrive. So I've been doing this for 40 years, 40 years. I was only nine when I started. And I have way more failures than successes. I've been in so many schools that want to do a social-emotional learning program. And actually, even participating in a randomized trial with me. In the randomized trial, I show that their schools, their students are doing better after two years socially, emotionally, and cognitively than other schools. And I go back a year later and no one's doing it. Well, you could say, well, education is just trendy, principles change. And they'd say, well, I've got a new idea, et cetera, et cetera. But it's more than that. It's the lack of infrastructure. It's infrastructure is really important. As a 60s hippie, I didn't like the idea of structure. But I slowly learned that you got to have it. And so infrastructure is very important. For example, I work in the Chicago Public Schools. It has 685 schools. It's a big district. And they have 30 full-time social-emotional learning coordinators, 30 full-time. To ensure that at every school, social-emotional learning is doing well. Adult wellness is a priority of the school, et cetera. That's an infrastructure. Just like we have curriculum specialists in reading, right, in districts. And we have them in math. We have them in STEM. This is not something for the firemen, for the counselors and the school psychologists and the social workers. It's not about dealing with the kids that we're struggling. It's building the kind of society we want it by building in both curriculum and norms and wellness through all aspects of the school experience. So these programs won't grow and germinate in the wrong situation. You've all been through this before. You've been through school reform before. You could tell me this. I don't need to tell you. We need to understand the keys to what those organizational changes are. And principal leadership training is a key factor because we know that principals who lead their schools as caring social-emotional leaders have teachers who feel free to innovate in ways that are creative to build relationships with kids, to make their classrooms the kind of family environments that they want them to be. So we need to understand the key issue is relationships. Learning is about relationships. Teacher to student. Parent to student. Parent to teacher. Administrator to teacher, et cetera. It's all about everybody walking the talk together. So how do we become more systemic in our thinking? So I was, my wife is, Christ is the developer of the care curriculum. Abel Ridge talked about teacher wellness work yesterday. And I was just picking her up. I drove up to Coquitlam to pick her up and I was just walking around in Coquitlam. And I found this amazing graphic. Anybody from Coquitlam recognize this? All right. Now it's just a model. But the idea was to really think, they thought really systemically about what it means. Now, I don't know how much of it you carried out. No criticism here. But the idea of thinking through what it means to be a mindful leader, what the capacities are, what the training is necessary, is a really critical step. This is systemic thinking at its best. Castle has a more simple model of this, which is more of a linear model, not just linear. There's lots of interrelationships. But we need to think about how to establish a shared vision, how to assess our resources and our needs, how to establish professional learning, how to pick programs that we think are effective for our context, how to go school-wide, how to communicate this to parents, to community members, et cetera. How to use data to transform. In fact, yesterday, Castle just put online for free for anyone, anyone in the world, what's called the Castle School Guide, which is a very advanced interactive school guide which schools can use around the world to create, it tells them how to create teams to work on these issues. It has communication plans. Castle's worked with 21 large school districts in the United States for the last seven years, and they use all the learnings of those 21 school districts. It's all online to provide people with ideas about how they go about this process over time, over multiple years of building a healthy and caring school. Castle has 10 indicators. It might be a little hard to read, but I'll just tell you a little bit about them. You think about it as a rubric. You think about your school, you could measure, or your board, you could measure, we haven't started this, we've started, but we're not very far, we're doing pretty well in this one. Or we're really, this is one we don't need to pay a lot of attention to right now. How much explicit SEL instruction is going on in your school? Is SEL being integrated with the rest of instruction? Are teachers integrating SEL ideas into novel reading, for example, or into journal writing, or into social studies? When they're talking about an event, are they using the ideas of people's emotions and understanding and the idea of compassion as part of the process of explaining what's happening in the world? Is there supportive school and classroom climates? If you walk into the school, do you already feel that you belong? What does that mean? Where are we on that in our school? How much youth voice and engagement is there? This is a very important topic this morning. How much focus is there on adult SEL relationships? Not just does the school have a volleyball team, but more than that. Are we really focused on supporting the well-being of each other? Is there supportive discipline strategies, like restorative justice models, for example? Is there a continuum of integrated supports? Is SEL integrated with tier two and tier three, with a psychologist and a social worker, et cetera? Is there a system for continuous improvement? Is data being gathered to say, well, maybe we're getting a little bit better at this, but there's some things we're getting worse at and we need to really pay attention to? Are there authentic family partnerships and are there aligned community partnerships? These are 10 indicators that we believe can be used as a rubric that any school could look at and then decide which ones, systemically, they want to work on or integrating them together systemically. So what's worth measuring? Well, I'll tell you, that's worth measuring. And it would be interesting to have your staff measure these things. Of course, it would be interesting in middle schools and high schools to have the kids give you reports on some of these things. But also, it's worth measuring the child epidemiology. So you have the grace of having help here in BC, the EDI to tell us how ready kids are for school, the MDI to show the importance of youth voice in the latency just before adolescence period. You have the BC Adolescent Health Survey. There's going to be a YDI at some point. And the idea is hearing students voice. Scott McDonald talked about the learning survey. There's lots of data that can be used already and as Peter said, how you use it's important. How are we going to interpret this data? What is the meaning of it? What leads us to think that something is a priority or not? So I just took this from Maple Ridge's report, Maple Ridge Bits Meadow, and so they're looking at their data. They have charts from 2004 to 2016, five different ways of data of their EDI data of how ready children are when they get to school. Unfortunately, social-emotionally, they're getting just a tiny bit worse, not better. And that says we know families are struggling to pay attention to their kids in this complex society. Listening and learning from teachers I think is sort of the best way to figure out what's going on because if teachers aren't doing well, don't feel supported, don't feel they have autonomy, don't feel they're cared for, then we're not going to have the kind of schools we want. So you probably know that the stressing well-being of teachers, I don't need to tell you, is high. The serious crisis of teacher retention, it's not just in the United States. I've seen in Israel, Croatia, China, the UK, you have it in Canada. Teaching is now rated as the most highly stressful profession in the United States. Same level as nursing now. We need to support teachers' own social-emotional learning and their growth. And there have now been at least six good randomized trials showing that when teachers are supported to use their own skills better, that they improve in their well-being and actually in their instruction. And both Karen Smart are examples that are both in NBC. Canadian Teachers Federation put out a report in 2014. 30% of new teachers leave in the first five years in Canada. So what is that saying about our system? We spend an enormous amount of public support to create and to educate teachers and to support them to begin. If that many are leaving in the first five years, something's not going well. They're not feeling supported. 79% of Canadian teachers believe their stresses related to work-life imbalance have increased over the past five years. This was in 2014. And 85% report their work-life imbalance is affecting their ability to teach. As the stresses at work, which also affect their family life, are affecting the way they come to the classroom. Now, the problem here is that we could be blaming the victim. You have to be careful here because I don't want you to think that I'm saying that the problem is if teachers just had more social-emotional competence, that everything would be fine. It's their problem. It's a systems problem, right? We're now back to the systems. We're back to how union negotiations occur. Have you ever had a union negotiation in which teacher wellness was on the negotiating table? Nobody does, right? It's all about benefits and sorry. Of course, they're important in other things. But what about wellness? What about negotiations on wellness as a factor? We know it affects everything, and yet it's the hidden mental model of the system. So what's worth measuring is teachers' well-being, their turnover, their absenteeism, their healthcare utilization. I was at a meeting in Wisconsin. It has a one healthcare system for all teachers in the state, and it's estimated that about 22% of teachers are on depressive medication on any single day in Wisconsin. I don't know what it's like in BC, but I bet you it's over 10%, maybe over 15%. So these are all costs. They're costs to people and they're costs to the system. Educators' perceptions of the board and administrators' support for innovation in creating healthcare in schools. We need to hear from teachers and staff what their feelings are about the ability to innovate to create caring schools. We need to see what the baseline is. We need to see as you use your funds, as the mission of this in the ministry continues over time, can we change those baseline scores? If we don't, then something's wrong. I'm not talking about child outcome. I'm not talking about student achievement here. I'm talking about the proximal effects that we should have to create these healthier caring schools. One of the most important proximal effects should be teachers' sense that they are more well, they're more connected, they're more supported, and they can innovate around these issues. Parents' reports, I think, are worth measuring, especially if school-family relationships and of child well-being. Parents have a different perspective on both of these than anybody else, and I think they're also worth measuring. So we can then go beyond the school day, creating collaborative action with communities. It's not easy. It's probably the most difficult part of this for schools. Ontario Mental Health Assist, probably some of you know the work of Kathy Short and Ontario Mental Health Assist, a great group. Unfortunately, Ontario is not a place that's thriving right now from an educational or political standpoint, they have five key strategic priorities, establishing the right organizational conditions, building their capacity, introducing evidence-based mental health promotion programming, SEL programming, supporting specific populations that need more support and contributing to systems coordination across sectors. So we have this tiered intervention model. This is actually Kathy Short's model from Ontario, but I think we have two parts of this. You see schools are on the left side of the triangle. Schools are mostly about building universally healthy, caring conditions, supporting everyone so that people feel they belong, they're connected, schools are a place that they'll thrive and learn. And then of course we need to do some targeted prevention for children that are having more problems, but that's not the main focus. Community partners, their focus is primarily on the clinical intervention, and they're there also to some extent depends on the community to support these universal approaches in the schools. So we need to think about how to coordinate this all together. That means we have a task of integration. We need to integrate across the ecologies of the child's life, that is the classroom, the school, the family, the neighborhood, and across tiers of service so that what we're doing in the SEL programs is being reinforced, for example, in treatment. So for example, I work in the UK a lot, and in the UK we have about 60 schools that have the PAS curriculum in their elementary schools, their K-8 schools, but they also have a second level, what are called friendship groups, which are used targeted for children to have additional difficulties, but the same skills that they learned in the classroom are now also being retaught in small groups more intensively, so it's coordinated. And when parents come, they're also learning the same skills. It's a coordination across the tiers of the system. Rather than having clinicians come in and do things that no one knows what they're doing, and they have no idea what the school's doing. I would say the best measure of if you have good community partner coordination with your clinical fellows is if they're invited to the Christmas party. Do they park in the visitor's parking lot? Do they actually think they belong to the school or they're an outside visitor? Are they part of the fabric of things? In most places no one thinks about them for the Christmas party or the parking lot. Because they know that they're not a full member of what's going on in the school. So we've got coordination work to do and communication. So the challenges are cultivating community school-based prevention that work that's focused on strategic, what's strategic and what the focus should be is really going to depend on your own board and your own conditions. There's no simple formula to tell you what to do. Increase carefully planned adoption of evidence-based practices. Use the evidence space. It doesn't mean it's perfect. Peer's right, it's not perfect at all. There are lots of things we don't know, we don't understand. There are some things that we thought worked 20 years ago and now we don't use them anymore. You don't get the same back operation now. We should expect that science proves some things that work but we find things that work better and things that we thought worked and they don't work. It's just the nature of things, it's how science progresses. We should most importantly ensure high-quality implementation because it's not worth doing all this if we don't do it well because there's lots of evidence to show that when we don't do it well it has no impact. It's better to do fewer things well and try to do everything and divert your attention to so many places at once that everything is done with a half-assed approach that has no impact. Do a few things well and then let it grow. And lastly, we need to sustain programs long-term because schools have to are contexts that have their own personality and the way a program begins no one really likes a program the first year very much, do they? So we need to adapt. We need to see how it can fit in and become part of the culture and the fabric of a building. It's a process over time. It's not a matter of we like the program or we didn't like the program. We have this program now let's think about what does it mean to really make it our own? And this takes time. I'm being conservative, I'm sorry I'm being liberal here for more than 10 years. But you've got exploration of the program idea you have first installed and do an initial implementation you'll learn what's good and what's not so good about it you figure out how to integrate it with the other things you're doing you integrate it with other academic subjects you go to a full implementation you learn more in that full implementation and then you move towards how to sustain the best parts of it. Not rigidly exactly the rule and everything it's figuring how to flexibly use the best ideas in your context. So what do we know? High quality SEL programs exist they're all different kinds there's a castle select program guide for example you can go on the web and look at there's PrevNet from Ontario it's a very nice list of good programs programs are not the answer alone but they're important they need to be integrated with policies and practices policies and practices that support teachers, families and coordinate with communities and by programs I don't mean just for kids I mean for us as adults this requires policy change and infrastructure development the infrastructure development is important because if you don't have these coordinators you don't have people whose job is to make sure this this goes well we learn what works and doesn't work we make revisions then it's just like stuff I've done in the past where program works everybody likes it nobody uses it you've been there? have you all been there with this? let's not do it again it's just not worth our time and effort and BC is in a unique position to create real change as it's coming from both the bottom up which is most important and now I think the top down which is unusual you're in a really unusual context in which I think you have the opportunity to really make change and so go to it we have a vision in CASEL a vision of social learning in the classroom, the school the board, the province, the nation educators, students and community members work together to support healthy development of students all children and youth are engaged so we have a vision of social learners who are self aware, caring, respectful etc and students are contributing in positive ways their schools and communities that's the bottom line we're a democracy, we're trying to build citizenship skills so that there's a wide circle of compassion and caring and we make the right decisions for our society so that's our vision our vision is not about a program it's not about a systems change I think that's why you are all here that's why you are in this work in the first place and I hope to see changes as I come back over time in BC so thank you very much