Building an Effective Social and Emotional Learning Committee in Dallas

Introducing daily rituals, shared terminology among staff, smaller student communities--and an effective steering committee driving it all.

These innovations were crucial to the success of a partnership between Webster Elementary in Dallas and its out-of-school-time (OST) partner, Thriving Minds Afterschool. Its goal: to boost students’ social and emotional learning (SEL).

Those were the findings of this case study, one of a series detailing how schools and OST programs in six communities collaborated to build students’ social and emotional skills.

Part of a Larger Initiative

The communities were participants in Wallace’s Partnerships for Social and Emotional Learning Initiative. It brought together school districts and their OST partners to develop and put in place SEL activities across learning settings.

Steps to Ensure Sustainability

Webster and Thriving Minds worked together to make SEL sustainable, even in the face of staff turnover and other challenges. They did so by forming an effective steering committee that became the driving force behind their SEL work.

The committee took a variety of steps. They included:

•  Prioritizing particular strategies to cultivate an SEL-focused climate across campus
•  Providing training to school and OST program staff members
•  Monitoring and documenting implementation of these efforts. 

The committee also ensured that staff shared a common terminology to help make new concepts a part of daily life. And it created a system of smaller student-staff communities, called houses, to build camaraderie.

Improvements

The focus on sustainable social and emotional learning resulted in a variety of school and OST improvements. For example: 

• Staff members beyond the steering committee began sharing responsibility for SEL on campus. 
• There were improvements in attendance, school climate, and student behavior. 
• Short SEL rituals became embedded in the campus’s daily schedule before the onset of the pandemic. That helped ease the transition of SEL to hybrid learning.