 Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today and sorry for the slide delay. We are experiencing some connection issues on my side and not only, but I think that it is safe to start the webinar and then other participants can join in the meanwhile. So welcome again to our webinar entitled Social and Emotional Education in the European Union. It is a pleasure to welcome you all on this Friday for this webinar. My name is Cosmin Nada and I am a research fellow at the Centre for Research and Intervention in Education at the University of Porto. And I also act as administrative coordinator of the NESED network and as a member of the editorial board of the European Toolkit for Schools. And the webinar that we are holding now is in fact organized by the European Toolkit for Schools. And the European Toolkit for Schools is a platform of relevant resources and promising practices hosted on the European Commission's School Education Gateway. The toolkit is available in all EU languages and gathers promising practices from all over Europe on how to tackle early school living, promote inclusive education and implement the whole school approach. Today we are going to discuss social and emotional learning, a topic of particular interest in the context of increased awareness towards the importance of student well-being and the formation of knowledgeable and active citizens through education. A few challenges remain regarding the implementation of social and emotional education in schools, namely in regard to its assessment. We will learn more about this from our first speaker, Carmel Cefai, who will present us the results of a report that him and his colleagues produced for the NESED network. And this report is entitled a formative inclusive whole school approach to the assessment of social and emotional education in the EU. In the second part of our webinar, we will get to know some concrete examples of how German schools foster social emotional competencies from our speakers, Marianne Schubbach and Heike Moyano. I will proceed with presenting then our first speaker, so Carmel Cefai is the founding director of the Center for Resilience and Social Emotional Health and professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Malta. He is joined honorary chair of the European Network for Social and Emotional Competence and also joined founding editor of the International Journal of Emotional Education. He is a member of the coordinating team at NESED. His research interests are focused on how to create healthy spaces that promote resilience, well-being and mental health of children and young people. He has led various national, European and international research projects in social and emotional education and children's well-being and resilience. He has published extensively including the rest recent NESED reports entitled Strengthening Social and Emotional Education as a Key Curricular Area in the EU from 2018. And again, the report that we are going to learn more about today, a formative inclusive whole school approach to the assessment of social and emotional education in the EU, which is from 2021. Before I give the floor to Carmel, we would like to hear from you, our participants today, and I have the impression, even though I cannot see that information at the moment, I have the impression that we are perhaps over 100 in this virtual room. So it would be interesting to hear from you regarding social and emotional education. So I'm going to invite you now to go to menti.com where you can introduce this code that you see here on the screen. So it's menti.com and the code is 505-2945. And we would like to hear from you regarding social and emotional education as an integral part of the curriculum. So the options are, yes, social and emotional education are an integral part, are at the core of our curriculum to some extent, not at all, or I don't know, of course, in case you don't have information on this matter. So for the moment, as you are seeing, we are already receiving answers from our participants and the three answers that we got so far were that social and emotional education are not at all an integral part of the curriculum. Now we are getting more answers that to some extent social and emotional education are included in the curriculum. So thank you so much for answering so timely to this consultation. It is great that we can interact a little bit through this means. So I can say that when we were preparing this webinar, we were thinking about the expected answers to this question. And indeed, what you are currently contributing is aligned with our expectations, knowing this field of social and emotional education. We know that indeed in some context, there are no concerns in the curriculum regarding this aspect and we have at the moment, more than 10 answers illustrating this. And in the majority of context, there is some concern already regarding this dimension, this area, but not at the core of the curriculum. So thank you so much for for your answers. And then I will invite you to a second round of of questions, which is our social and emotional education formally assessed in your educational system. And here the answers are a little bit more straightforward. Yes, to some extent, no, or I don't know. And here we can already see this tendency towards no no social and emotional education are not formally assessed in in my educational system. And I think this is actually a question that that Carmel can can build on and and start his presentation. So kind of if you want to comment a little bit on the incoming results and then take the floor, I would appreciate. Thank you, Cosman. In fact, as you said, the results are quite expected as predicted that in most cases we have 22. And social and emotional education is not formally assessed. And this was also our main finding in the report. And it's also interesting, though, that there are at least nine who there is some sort of evaluation, so it would be interesting and five who say yes. And so I think this is a very good way to start the discussion. Okay, and let me share. Apologies for this. Let me try again. So share clicks today is not the best way for technology. Can you see the PowerPoint? Yes, we can. Okay, so thank you very much Cosman for inviting me to this webinar and also both to Neset and the school education toolkit. In fact, I can start straight away. And this is a little bit a reflection of what we have seen in the mental meter. A social and emotional education is becoming more integrated in the curriculum across member states. Questions are being still raised about its assessment. So this is a relatively new phenomenon in social and emotional education, at least as we are structuring it. So we were expecting this sort about issues about assessment. And there are still people who ask, however, can it be assessed this content area? And then other people say, do we need to assess it? And then there is another question, should it be formally assessed, like other content areas of the curriculum? And some others say, are there any potential risks if we assess social and emotional competencies? These are some of the questions we are trying to address in our report. And before I start, I would like also to say that this report, which we produced for Neset last year, was co-authored with two colleagues who are not present today. Professor Paul Downs from Dublin City University and in Ireland and Dr. Valerio Cavione from the University of Milano Bicocca, Italy. Right, so on the basis of the review of international literature and also we looked at what EU policies, communications and actions say about this area, we developed an assessment framework to guide the assessment of social and emotional education in Europe. We took a particular approach, which we saw to provide a more formative, collaborative, inclusive and systemic European identity for social and emotional education assessment in contrast to other individualistic personality and character-based modes of assessment, which may be problematic for particular reasons. In this presentation today, we have only 20 minutes, so we'll discuss briefly this framework and share with you some examples of formative assessment tools from our report. If you are interested, what I'm going to say is explained in more detail with more examples in the report, which Cosmin has provided the link to. Okay, so let's look a little bit at the framework. We'll go a little bit step by step how we developed this framework on the evidence of the existing literature. Okay, and we start from the outside circle. We base this framework on nine guiding principles which should inform, according to our report, the assessment of social and emotional education. And we need to start from the very first on the respecting the rights of the children in assessment. In a way that when we are assessing social and emotional education, we do not violate or impinge on the rights of the child. In what way? The right for self-expression, so the child needs to have a voice in the assessment, co-designing and co-assessing the assessment. Also the right for privacy and confidentiality, especially situations where children and others share information, sensitive information about others, and also the rights to well-being and mental health. So we need to make sure that assessment does not inflict harm through discrimination, labeling, stigmatization, or social exclusion. Secondly, the second principle in assessing social and emotional education is that it needs to be inclusive and equity-driven. And here we are arguing that the forms and tools of assessment which we use provide an equal opportunity to all learners to demonstrate their learning and progress. Some traditional forms and approaches to assessment, such as those relying heavily on written and variable tasks, may not be suitable, for example, as you know, those who are coming from practice in education for students with specific learning difficulties or communication difficulties. Such students and students, for example, with special educational needs and disability, would benefit from more flexible and innovative ways in assessment, such as, for example, use of technology, what you call technology enhanced, assessment use of puppets, pictures, and so on. Third principle is that assessment of C, so when I'm going to use C for brevity, is social-emotional education, SEE. It's universal in terms of assessment is for all learners in the classroom. It assesses the learning process of the key competence in the curriculum. Fourthly, it's strengths-based. Assessment of C is not about the identification and diagnosis of social-emotional difficulties or personality problems or behaviour difficulties as such, but a formative evaluation of social-emotional competence in an educational context by teachers and students. And students' strengths and how such strengths are being developed and may be improved following instruction is at the core of this assessment. And we believe this approach is very important, this strength-based approach, to avoid labelling students as vulnerable, other, the other, failures, what we call the diminished self. Right. The fourth is that we believe that assessment should be collaborative with learners and peers, the other students in the classroom, being active agents in the assessment process. This provides students to be actively engaged in the learning process as reflective, collaborative, and self-reliant learners, both as individual self-regulated learners and as critical peers. Here, one issue which sometimes comes up is, since we are arguing very strongly on the voice of the children and the learners being involved in their own assessment, one of the challenges is the lack of accuracy that learners, for example, might overestimate or underestimate their learning and also maybe intentionally inflate their learning due to social desirability. Formative assessment, however, is not a high-stake form of assessment where students are compared and ranked or are afraid of failing and therefore this helps to reduce this challenge. Also, very, very important, students need to be trained by teachers how to assess themselves and give imprints. We will have an example later on. And this will help to reduce inaccuracy. Also, accurate teacher feedback is very essential to enhance student self-regulation in assessment. In our framework, assessment is also systemic and ecological. So, besides assessing the individual learners, we also propose the assessment of the classroom and the whole school context. Also, these will be assessed formatively in relation to their enhancement of social-emotional education. The report underlines the social embeddedness of social-emotional education with learning more likely to walk care, learning in disrespect, in context promoting attitudes and practices which resonate with social-emotional competencies such as relatedness, connectedness, collaboration, democracy, participation, safety, care, and so on. We also in the report developed two checklists which teachers and educators and school staff can use to evaluate the whole classroom and to evaluate the whole school system. They are available in the report. A very important point is assessment needs to be culturally relevant, taken into consideration and effectively addressing the social and cultural diversity of learners so that all students respective of individual or cultural characteristics have equal opportunity to demonstrate their learning proficiency. We need to make sure that content is culturally relevant, that assessment reflects cultural variations, and that C is not used to reinforce the individual deficit approach with educators using data even inadvertently to underline individually based inequalities while disregarding the broader social context which might have contributed to that inequality. And one way of preventing that is, we believe, is also to assess the context itself, the classroom and whole school climate and the nature of formative assessment itself with its focus on personalized and individualized learning and assessment helps to prevent such an eventuality. Assessment of C should also be developmentally appropriate and it needs to reflect the developmental shifts, changes taking place at different ages from childhood to middle childhood to adolescence. We cannot have one form of assessment across the board because the assessment has to take into consideration these shifts. For example, if we take an example of social competence in early childhood, there may be a focus on the social development and task of positive engagement. In middle adulthood, we might have to focus more on navigating peer inclusion, acceptance and friendship and emotional regulation. In adolescence, there may be a bit more focus on development of intimate relationships dealing with peer pressure and establishing autonomy in adolescence. And in order to make sure that it is developmentally appropriate in devising the tools for assessment, we need to include both the teachers and the learners themselves. And finally, assessment is effective. So rather than labeling students as successes or failures by comparing them according to standardized group norms, progress is measured according to the learner's own learning over time. So how much progress one is doing. And it is more likely to promote students' motivation, engagement and inclusion. So that's the first part of the framework. Now, let's go now towards the inside through the framework itself and we'll say first what we are going to assess. We are proposing, we wrote the report just as the Life Comp framework by the Joint Research Committee of the European Union developed this framework in 2020. And it's composed of three domains, personal, social competencies and learning to learn. And we are basing sort of this general framework on this Life Comp framework which has been developed specifically for Europe. And we will give you the link to this framework later on towards the end of the presentation. Okay, then the second layer is who is going to do the assessment and we start with the learners themselves. So it's very important that the students themselves, as I said, participated learning. Then of course there is the teacher, but and also the peers, okay. In order to do this, it's very important that the learners are trained adequately to assess themselves and to assess each other. Okay, and what is going, who and what is going to be assessed. So of course we start with the individual learners, but as I said with the note stops there, there is also the class from climate and there is also the whole school climate. Here where we have the whole school community participating in its own self-improvement formative assessment with students, staff of all levels of staff and parents participating in this self-assessment process. And the final circuit is the enabling factors which will enable the formative assessment of C. First we underline that assessment needs to be aligned with the curriculum. And the key social-emotional competencies need to be well defined in school curricula with assessment adopted to the key competencies. This entire systemic coordination between embedding the specific C competencies in the curriculum. Development of these competencies through instruction and then the assessment of students development of the competencies at different ages and then we do the assessment. In fact, as the Mentimeter has shown us and Cosmin well said, one of the challenges in DU is this common framework of assessment being aligned with the curriculum. Okay, and one of the challenges in our educational systems is to clearly identify the key competencies in sufficient detail. So as to be able to plan and assess learning in alignment with the curriculum. And as we said already, the life-comp framework, personal social learning to learn, I think it's a good basis which provides a European-wide set of competencies which can be adapted then at individual member states according to their own context in collaboration with the children themselves, the learners, the staff and the parents. Another important thing. Carmel, five more minutes. Five more minutes. So I have to really hurry up because I would like to show you some examples tools. So professional learning of teachers and educators, extremely important part of assessment. That's where we have to start. Okay, training teachers, informative assessment and specifically formative assessment or SCL. So mentoring and support and the implementation at both pre-service and in-service. Teachers need adequate training and in developing, adapting and using a range of formative assessment tools, including technology enhanced tools. And of course to do that they need support and training at the school in ensuring that tools are developmentally appropriate and culturally responsive and also in guiding and supporting students in self and peer assessment. Learning communities have been found to be very, very effective for teachers to help them develop this skill. Then the fourth, the third enabling factor is the use of multiple sources and various modes of assessment. Multi-informant rating systems such as self, peer and teacher reports based on classroom observation and self-reflection. So there is not, as we shall see later on, there is not one tool for SC, but the teachers need to make, educators need to make use of comprehensive toolkit as we shall see later on. And finally, assessment needs to be feasible and practical. And this is a very, very important point if we want educators and students to use formative assessment. Assessment has to be practical, feasible, user-friendly, meaningful assessments which are time consuming, complex, not easy to complete are unlikely to be used regularly and effectively by students. In order to do this, of course, we need support. Right. I'm going in the last few minutes. So that is the framework in general. Then from that framework, we also made a number of recommendations in the report. And we also have a chapter on examples of assessment tools. So I'm just to give you a taste of such tools, because we have no time for this, but you can have in more detail. These tools are in the report and also the European toolkit is presently developing a specific toolkit on wellbeing, which includes a number of assessment tools also, which may be used for SC. So this is an example from an EU project, ATS 2020. Okay. And here is teacher's formative assessment scaffolding tool of students' competencies, collaboration and communication. So here, the teacher evaluates that competence at three levels of proficiency. The same assessment is done then by the students, the learners themselves. Same competence. Okay. And as you can see here, the Likert scale, it's more child-friendly and divided into number of steps. Okay. This is, for example, an example of a checklist for teachers and learners in self-control teacher. The learner set still when was supposed to do and there are a number of responses. The learner here would say, I can wait in line patiently and then assesses herself, himself, a number of responses. Social competence, the teacher, for example, would say, the learner cooperated with peers without prompting. The learners say, I can solve a problem with my peers on my own. This is from the Learning to be Project, another EU-funded project, a classroom observation tool for teachers. Well, on the column, there will be the students' names. And then on self-awareness, there are two key competencies which are evaluated by the teacher. Okay. This is a rubric which teachers can use. It's also in our report to evaluate the progress of children systematically starting from score zero where even with help, the student has no success at achieving the social motion skill proficiency. It goes up to level one, two, three, four, where eventually at the very top, the student has mastered that skill and is able to apply it in different situations. This is another tool, a questionnaire which has been developed by another EU project, EAP-SCL, and it evaluates social competence. So it gives a set of scenarios where students are asked about social situations. For example, here, Matthew has been throwing a rubber at Emma the entire lesson. In the end, Emma gets angry and throws it back. Just then, the teacher comes in and gets mad at Emma saying, what have I said about throwing razors? Stop it immediately so she got the blame. So here, according to Emma's social competence level, we'll have a number of responses which measure her proficiency on this competence and expressing herself. First, on the left-hand column, how does she feel? So if she scores three, that's a lower score. If she scores eight, that's a higher level of proficiency. And the second, the right-hand column, what does Emma do? This is a self-assessment card for students, myself, and the others from the Learning to Be project. As I said, these tools, we are going to make them available on the European Toolkit in the coming weeks. These are the instructions which are given to the students. Since I don't have time to explain it, but basically, on the right-hand, left-hand corner, you have the competence. For example, I understand which feelings help me to learn and which ones distract me from learning. Then, my evaluation, how often is this true? Never, sometimes, often always. Middle column. If you say that this happens often, that I have achieved this competence, what evidence do you have for that? So describe an activity which explains whether you have achieved it or not. Then, give this to the teacher, where the teacher will give her own comment and also to the peers. And there is a variation of this for young children. Can you wrap up in one minute, please? Yes, yes. Thank you. Okay. So this is another example to help students' self-evaluation from another EU project, ATS 2020. For example, the reflective sentences started. These are helping students how to engage in self-evaluation. For example, when reflecting upon her work, the learner said, this is good work because... Or the next time, I will focus more... Or I was surprised to learn that... Or one question I still have is... Or one area I still need help to improve, I need to... Doing this made me wonder if... Okay. This is learning portfolio. And nowadays it's becoming more digital. E-portfolio is a very, very important tool for assessment. It also lends itself extremely well to formative assessment. We don't have time to do this, but this is also from the program ATS 2020. Assessment with young children. For example, use of puppets where you have Iggy Ziggy presenting a situation to a child. So Iggy says, I have lots of friends. Ziggy says, I don't have lots of friends. And then Iggy asks the child, how about you? And the child identifies with the puppet who is most like him. As I said, the European toolkit for schools will be having a specific section in the coming weeks with some of these tools. This is, I conclude with this. This is from the book, Alice in Wonderland, as you know. And there is this famous Coakish phrase. And in the Coakish phrase, you run at your own pace. And you will be guaranteed to win a prize. No wonder how fast or how slow you run. And as you can see at the top, there is not one cup, but there is a cup for every runner. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Carmel, for this insightful presentation and for having included concrete examples that unfortunately there is not enough time to go through in detail. But as you very well explained, they are going to be available on the European toolkit for schools in the upcoming weeks. And teachers and other interested participants can consult these resources more in depth. Now I'm going to present our second speakers for today who are going to provide you a more concrete example on how social and emotional education can be implemented based on the German case. They have conducted research in some regions in Germany. So I can tell you that our next speakers are Marianne Schubbach, who is professor and chair in primary education at Frey University in Berlin. And the researcher who primarily focuses on extended education all day school after school and others predominantly in Switzerland and Germany. School career transitions as grade retention, school teaching and education. She has carried out different studies, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the German Research Foundation, and from the federal Ministry of Education. She also has been an assistant professor of research on teaching and school at the Institute of Educational Sciences, University of Bern, and the chair in primary education at the Institute of Educational Science, University of Bamberg, also in Germany. Together with Marianne, Heike will present for us today. She's a PhD student and works as a research associate in the Frey University at the chair of Professor Marianne, who I just presented. Her research interests are in the quality and effectiveness of all day schools in Germany. She studied education for her bachelor's and educational sciences for her master's degree at the University of Bamberg as well. Also to mention before I give the floor to Marianne and Heike that at the end we will have a dedicated time for questions. So the questions that you would like to pose throughout their presentation or at the very end you are more than welcome to write them in the chat for us. So please, Marianne. Yes, thank you very much for the invitation. And we would like to welcome you to our presentation today entitled A Strong Journey with the Group. Development of a program to foster social emotional competencies and intervention study. Today, as you already heard, Heike Mojano and me, myself, we will present this paper as you can see here. Can you see the full presentation? Yes. Can you go forward to the next? Yes. Okay. Here you can see the order of presentation. We will start with the introduction. Then we introduce the theoretical framework on social competence. Next we give a research overview on the impact of all day schools in schools on student social competencies and pro-social behavior. In the following, we present the research question methods and our program fostering social competencies. We will end up with the expected results and an outlook. After 2000, the first PSA study had revealed that students skills were only average in international comparison in Germany. Additionally, the students' social and cultural background impacted their skills more than in almost any other industrialized country. From 2003 to 2009, the German federal government decided to invest 4 billion euros into the expansion of all day schools. The expectation was and still is today that all day schools provide an optimal framework for reconciliation between family and work, better education and equal opportunities. Today, about 70% of primary schools in Germany are all day schools and offer extended school days and expanded learning beyond the regular classes. Now, coming to the next point, now the federal government is once again investing a lot of money, specifically 3.5 billion euros in the expansion of all day schools in Germany. The reason for the high investment is a law that will guarantee every child of a primary school age place in all day schools from 2026. How can the German all day school be characterized? The German all day school in general comprises compulsory lessons, remedial lessons and offerings in terms of the timetable as well as additional extracurricular offerings which are intended to form a pedagogical and structural unity together with the lessons. However, this pedagogical and structural unity can only be found at the view all day schools in Germany. In addition, all day schools offer their students a lunch. All elements of the all day school shown here are under the overall responsibility of the school principles. In the following, the focus is on the extracurricular offerings. All day schools can take different forms with respect to the obligation of students participation. About 60% of all day primary schools are non mandatory. It is distinguished by the fact that individual students can participate in the extracurricular offerings of the school if they want to. Also, the extent of participation can be freely chosen by the students or their parents. Due to this voluntary nature participation in the extracurricular offerings of the all day primary schools varies greatly. Some students leave school after mandatory lessons in the morning while other students stay for lunch but leave afterwards or take part in their schools extracurricular offerings in the afternoon. Either some days of the week or every day. Academic and cross-cultural competencies are to be promoted in equal measure in school. Therefore, the acquisition of social competencies is considered an important learning achievement at school. In the school law and curricula of the federal states in Germany passages on this can be found. All day schools should particularly support social learning across different classes through offers that promote social activities, respectful interaction and social competencies. Especially in all day schools this should be promoted. High quality after school programs for care and education support children and young people in their social, emotional and physical development. Students can receive individual support beyond the teacher hours. In this way their motivation and self-esteem can be increased. Both citations are here from the Federal Department for Families, Seniors, Women and Youth in Germany. In this presentation we will focus specifically on the promotion of students' social competencies. Why is it so important to promote primary school age children's social competencies? I give now the floor to my colleague Heike Moiano to explain this. Thank you Marianne and good afternoon also from me. I will now continue with the theoretical background of social competencies and the importance especially in the primary school context. First, the promotion of social skills is embodied in school laws and curricula in Germany. We have just heard examples of this from Marianne. Second, the primary school age is an important phase of social development because from preschool age non-family interactions increase, for example with peers or with educational staff in kindergarten or school. Meaning the social environment expands to include non-family socialization systems. Furthermore, the developmental phase of preschool and elementary school age manifests social behaviors and possible also problems that can positively or negatively influence the further behavioral development of children. Therefore, promoting and increasing social skills is especially important during this developmental phase. All the findings of research show there is a correlation between social emotional skills, positive social behavior and school achievement. But what do we mean when we talk about social competence? A universal understanding of the construct of social competence is almost impossible to find in the literature. The term social competence is used in many different ways. Kaning differentiates in his definition between social competence and social competence behavior. By social competence, he means the totality of a person's knowledge, skills and abilities that promote the quality of one's own social behavior in the meaning of socially competent. Whereas social competence behavior means behavior of a person that in a specific situation contributes to the achievement of one's own goals while keeping the behavior socially acceptable. According to this, a person keeps his or her own interest in focus in a social interaction and also takes into account the needs and wishes of his or her other person. Competence is seen here as a potential. There is no guarantee that this will be utilized by a person in any situation. That is, if I have social competence, it does not mean that I always use it in every situation. The social competencies they are important for children are based on a very heterogeneous field of different abilities. Calderella and Merrell assign social competence to these five basic abilities according to a meta-analysis. And these are peer relations. What is meaning of these? For example, offers help or assistance to peers when needed be able to compliment others. Self-management, that means in the sense of following rules, controls temper when angry or even regulating personal feelings. Academic competencies, for example, a student is able to follow the instructions of teacher or other educational stuff. Compliance, that means, for example, a student is able to accepting social rules or sharing. Assertion, such as initiating conversations or activities. We're coming to the research overview. How is the impact of all day schools on students' social competencies and pro-social behavior? Studies on promotion of social competencies in all day schools in Germany and Switzerland show both positive and unsatisfactory results. Sauerwein et al. assume that it is not the participation in all day activities that is significant for the improvement of pro-social behavior, but also the quality of the programs. According to Fischer et al., important issues for extracurricular activities are duration, intensity, quality, good student-student and student-stuff relationship. Fri et al. find no effect on the development of behavior and increase in internalizing behavior when participating in all day schools extracurricular offerings in Switzerland. A current example of an intervention study carried out in all day schools is from the nationwide study on the development of all day schools called Steg and its reading study. This intervention study in all day schools extracurricular offerings showed an improvement of reading competence of fourth grade students. This result let us conclude that similar results can be achieved in other areas of competence such as social competencies in Germany all day schools. Now we are coming to the research overview of US studies. By participation in all day school programs has a positive effect on social behavior and reduces behavioral problems, especially for students from low income families and of different ethnic backgrounds. Programs aimed at promoting social skills have a positive impact on students' self perception, attachment to school, social behavior, school performance and problem behaviors. Programs that have structured sequence include activities for learning, focus on promoting specific behaviors and include clear and explicit learning aims are more effective than those that do not take this approach. Dulag et al. described this with the acronym SAFE, sequence, active, focus and explicit. If social and emotional learning programs integrates all four SAFE aspects, it is more likely to positively influence participants' social and emotional learning development. In order to better promote students' social competencies in Germany, one opportunity is fostering social competencies in a specific program implemented in all day schools. This can be investigated in an intervention study. For the present research project, we expect that participation in a specific program promote social competencies. The following research question will therefore be investigated. What impact does participation in the program, a strong journey with the group, have on social competencies of second to fourth grade primary students in open attendance all day schools compared to students in open attendance all day schools who do not participate in the program? Specifically, is there an increase in pro-social behavior, social integration, cooperation, empathy and readiness to help and reasonable assertiveness? Furthermore, we are interested in how do the pedagogical staff involved in the implementation of the program estimate the implementation of the program a strong journey with the group? And to what extent is the program accepted by the participating students? We come now to the methods. First, the research design. Heike, just to let you know that you have around six minutes left. So perhaps the methods part can be presented a little bit quickly so that we can get also to the expected outcomes. Thank you. We conduct an intervention study with primary school students in open all day schools in extended education. That means in extracurricular offering. The intervention program is called a strong journey with the group and the program took place during a period of 10 weeks in school year 2021, 2022. This is based on a quasi-experimental design with pre-post and follow-up measurements in the treatment group by students who participate in extracurricular offerings in general and participate in this specific program intervention. In the control group by students who participate in extracurricular offerings in general and do not participate in this specific program. The sample consists of 160 students from second to fourth grade at 10 primary open attendance all day schools from one school district in the federal state of Bavaria, Germany. One primitive and effective intervention in the field of education is the program a strong journey with a school class from a school class by Machinke and Frank. The program has been originally developed for school classes and teachers and we adapted the program for our research project fostering social competences in primary all day schools. Why did we adapt the program? First, we do not have classes with students of the same grade in the open all day school, but mixed age groups and mixed grade groups from the primary level of the all day school. And second, in our study, the program isn't implemented and guided by teachers in school classes, but by pedagogical staff during extracurricular offerings in mixed age groups. And further in the original program of Machinke and Frank, one session lasts 90 minutes and in our setting this was too long, so we shortened it to 60 minutes. The individual sessions of the program are framed in a story and are easy for the children to understand and follow. In this program, students go on a journey together by train. The plan you see here shows the course of the journey. Over a 10 week period, the train will make 10 stops. At the beginning of the journey, the plan is still empty. You can see that by the white cells. Once a week, when a stop is made, there is a sticker to put on plan. The sticker are always related to the content of the individual session. In order to make the train journey, a song is always sung at the beginning and at the end of the session. In each session, students become active together. They play a game together according to the topic of the session. Also different exercise papers are filled in and each session is structured in the same way. I will show you this in more detail in a moment. In this picture, I show you the focus of each session that will be driven during 10 weeks. The program address is different topics and foci in different competences during the journey. Every week, one stop is made for this aim. The beginning is an introduction to the journey. The second session is aimed at the group feeling and then the group looks at their own feelings and the feelings of the others. How to manage unpleasant feelings and situations is the topic of the fourth session. In the fifth week, the focus is on strengthening the self-concept and self-esteem. In the sixth session, the theme is fostering self-efficacy and in the strengthening cohesion and cooperation then at the seventh stop. At the next stop, we look at solving disputes and conflicts. Then follows the topic of finding, giving and accepting help. The last session then concludes the journey with a summary. What about the structure of a session? This table shows us the structure of an individual session. The procedure are opening, introduction of the topic, activity time, reflection and conclusion. And every session has the same structure reflecting the safe aspects indicated by Dullack et al. as already mentioned earlier. These are sequence, active, focused and explicit. As underlined earlier, if social and emotional learning programs integrates all four safe aspects according to Dullack and colleagues, it is more likely to foster participants' social and emotional learning. Heike, I'm afraid we will have to wrap up in one minute if you can please. Thank you. This is our schedule of our investigation. We are just finishing the second measurement point. And what results do we expect? With this intervention study, we are investigating with a participation in a guided universal and specific program. A strong journey to the group promotes the social competencies of students attending primary, all-day schools. And we expect that the treatment group who participates in extracurricular offerings in general and participate in the specific program over 10 weeks will develop their social competencies more successfully than the control group who participate in extracurricular offerings but does not participate in this specific program. And what outlook do we have? We have just completed the second measurement point and we are very excited about the first results in Winter 2022 and 2023. Thank you for your attention. Thank you so much Heike and thank you Marianne for this presentation and for sharing with us the research that you have been conducting in the German context. I think we got to see quite a few interesting resources there as well. Particularly the train journey I found very interesting and also very engaging for children and young people. And also with some advantages I imagine at the implementation level. I believe that here on the chat we did not get very, very big questions as to speak only clarification questions. Either if we are going to share the slides or if the webinar is going to be recorded and those are being answered. But yes, all the information, the webinar recording and the slides will be available on the webinar page where you found the information on this very webinar. But before we close I would like perhaps to ask our speakers to comment on one element because I believe it is interesting for our participants. Starting from the assumption that quite a few of our participants are teachers regarding social and emotional learning and strengthening social and emotional competencies. And specifically based on Carmel's presentation we saw that in order to implement this framework there is a need for a holistic and systemic action. And quite often teachers share with us their daily struggles, how busy they are with several aspects of their work, with bureaucratic issues and a diverse array of responsibilities that does not often allow them to focus on what we often envision as more systemic or more structured approaches. So what would be the recommendations that you would make to teachers from all over Europe regarding this, how can we work with social and emotional competencies whilst we recognize also that our daily professional lives are not always easy. So if you want to start Carmel with some recommendations and then we hand to Marianne and Heike as well. Thank you. Okay, thank you Cosman. I think various points but just make a couple of points here. First I think it's very important for social and emotional education to be put on the front burner, to be recognized as a priority by governments, local authorities and schools. This will help teachers and schools to find more time on their already crowded curriculum if it is already recognized that this is a very important area of children's development. I think the COVID has helped us in this to put more emphasis on education, being more caring and compassionate. What's happening in Europe as well is also raising the issue of mental health and well-being. I think related to this, I think teachers may be already doing a lot in related to social and emotional education even if they don't call it as such. So I think we emphasize a lot teachers own attitudes and behaviors, the way they deal with conflict management in the classroom, the way they build relationships with the students, the way they promote collaboration and openness to diversity in their classroom. So I think these are very, very important skills that teachers could role model for their students, even if there is no time where they are doing the other more important topics of the curriculum. Related to that, I think extremely important that teachers are supported in this venture. Okay, they cannot do it against the grain without support or with obstacles on the way. They need to provide it with adequate training. So if it's about assessment, how to organize and develop formative assessment tools, how to use technology which has been found very teacher friendly. It reduces a lot of time from the teachers and precious time that they would need. Otherwise, if they have to fill a lot of forms. But in order to do this, they need to be trained, supported, provided by the resources and by the schools and the local educational authorities. I think that's my message more or less. Thank you so much, Carmel. Very interesting insights. Marianne or Heike, would you like to comment on this as well? Yes, I'm totally agree with your statement. I think teachers do a lot of social, emotional, fostering, learning of fostering students. And as we already mentioned, it is an important, it's also important and written down in the curricula. For example, in Germany, I know it from Switzerland. So it's really an important part in school. So as you could see in our presentation, there are programs, there are special programs to foster students in their social, emotional learning. And so I think it's important that teachers know about that. They can just find programs, special programs as this journey with a group and they can easily implement it in their daily school day. And so I think this is really important to know. It's also important to know there are such programs also for non-formal learning. You know, our part in the extracurricular part, this is the non-formal part and there are special programs for this area. So I think we should also foster the future teacher because we are doing, we are doing, we are doing train teachers, training at Freie Universität and so this is really an important part that we do not just focus on academic learning. So it's important to focus also on social emotional learning. Thank you so much, Marianne, for your comment. And I believe that we can soon close since we started indeed a little bit later due to some small technical issues, but I think that the participants have forgiven us and stayed with us for longer. And from what I see in the chat, the content of the webinar was useful, so we are very happy to hear that and to have that feedback. So now I would like to highlight once more that more resources and more structured work is currently being developed and you will have access to the results of this work in the upcoming one, two months on the European Toolkit for Schools. And also to keep an eye on the European Toolkit for Schools upcoming webinars, we are going to have more webinars in May. They are not yet announced on the website, but in a matter of one or two weeks, you will have all the information and the registration link as well. So thank you all for joining us on this Friday. Thank you, Carmel, Marianne and Heike, for your contributions and I wish you all a great weekend.