| Notes |
Toolkit Organization
Purpose
This toolkit is designed to increase administrator and teacher awareness of social and personal
competencies (SPC) and help them integrate it into the daily classroom and school experience
of students. Specifically, this toolkit is designed to link instructional practices that promote SPC
with the Tennessee Educator Accelerator Model (TEAM) teacher evaluation process. Research
on Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), often framed as “teaching the whole child” or “rehumanizing education,” demonstrates that when educators focus on social and emotional skills
of students, they prepare students to participate more fully in instructional activities: by
increasing student’s capacity to learn (Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki, Taylor, & Schellinge, 2011),
enhancing student learning (Elias, 2004), and increasing their motivation to learn and
commitment to schooling (Zins, Weissberg, Wang, & Walberg, 2004). Furthermore, one of the
goals of TEAM evaluation process is to create a positive classroom experience for all students
through defining clear expectations of good practice and providing teachers opportunities to
reflect and grow from those experiences.
The purpose of this toolkit is to demonstrate that SPC is not another add-on to the already busy
agendas of teachers and administrators. Rather, SPC is intertwined with the work teachers and
administrators are already doing and is implicitly embedded throughout the TEAM rubric and
the professional growth afforded within the TEAM process. By using the TEAM process to
integrate SPC, educators can leverage the professional learning opportunities connected with
TEAM to also promote development of student social and personal Competency skills.
Goals
The goals of the toolkit are:
Provide tools, resources, skills, and knowledge to teachers and administrators to help
improve student social and personal competency skills and encourage students to
exhibit positive social behaviors
Enhance teachers and administrators knowledge of what teaching practices that focus
on SPC look like in the classroom
Describe examples of teacher and student behaviors that foster teaching practices to
promote SPC skills
Enhance the ability of administrators and teachers to knowledgeably engage in dialogue
on SPC skills within the TEAM process
Incorporating Social and Personal Competencies into Classroom Instruction and Educator Effectiveness 4
Audience for the Toolkit
The toolkit is designed to be a starting point for school staff to begin integrating SPC skills into
their teaching practices. Administrators and teachers can use this toolkit to find initial strategies
to improve student social, emotional, and academic skills. The information, knowledge, and
tools can be used by individual teachers to develop professionally, by professional learning
communities focused on SPC skills, and by administrators as a resource to support the social
and emotional skills of their teachers and students. Although the toolkit provides information
to integrate SPC skills, those who want to dig deeper into SPC skills should begin to think about
implementing SPC programs and implementing a whole school approach (see For More
Information in the next section).
Toolkit Organization
The toolkit has two primary sections. The first section introduces social and emotional learning,
including its definition, research on its importance, relationship to Tennessee initiatives, steps
to get started, and organizations that offer more information on SPC skills. The second section
reviews 10 teaching practices that promote SPC skills, as defined by the Center on Great
Teachers and Leaders (GTL Center). This section describes each practice, its alignment to the
TEAM rubric indicators, sample teacher activities (demonstrated in videos), teacher practices
and student behaviors that demonstrate what the SPC skills practice looks like in the classroom,
and sample discussion prompts that engage teachers and administrators in a two-way dialogue
on the SPC connections in the teacher’s classroom. |