Youth Development Insight

Minnesota's 2013 teacher of the year works at Open World Learning (OWL) Community, a school that incorporates social and emotional learning (SEL) into every class. Megan Olivia Hall teaches science to seventh- to twelfth-graders at OWL. I spoke with her about the strategies they use to help young people develop SEL skills. LIZ HAGEN: How is social emotional learning taught at OWL? MEGAN OLIVIA HALL: Our school has identified five non-cognitive skills, or "habits of work and learning," to promote. These skills are integrity, perseverance, responsibility, collaboration, and stewardship. We exercise the skills in an advisory class called Crew , after Kurt Hahn's saying, "We are Crew, not passengers." Crew is a safe, low-stakes environment in which kids can actively learn and practice these skills. Crew is a multi-age class including students in grades 6-12, where students may remain with the same Crew leader for up to seven years. Conferences and par...

How do we navigate through the SEL jungle ? Having agreed that now is the time to make this journey I can recommend these valuable resources from Strive Together and its Minnesota network partner, Generation Next . Strive Together Strive is fostering a network of communities building the civic infrastructure necessary to support the success of every child from cradle to career. It has developed a Student Roadmap to Success -- a framework to guide communities in supporting the development of young people from cradle to career to improve youth outcomes and eliminate the achievement gap. The upper half of the visual representation of this roadmap is focused on academic benchmarks, and the lower half on student and family support benchmarks - including the development of social and emotional competence. The problem for many communities using the road map, however, was getting a better sense of how to more explicitly name social and emotional competencies and effectively move the...