Teaching the Whole Child: Instructional Practices That Support Social-Emotional Learning in Three Teacher Evaluation Frameworks - How can teacher evaluation systems help teachers develop students’ social-emotional competencies? This paper first identifies instructional practices that promote student social-emotional learning which in turn promote student academic learning, then shows how three popular teacher evaluation systems (the Danielson Framework for Teaching, the Classroom Assessment Scoring System observation instrument, and the Marzano observation protocol) feature practices that influence not only student academic learning but also student social and emotional competencies. (Nicholas Yoder, American Institutes for Research, August 2013)...

Measuring School Climate for Gauging Principal Performance: A Review of the Validity and Reliability of Publicly Accessible Measures - Maintaining that principals have more control over school-level conditions than classroom instruction or teacher quality, the authors suggest a measure of school climate should be included in principal evaluation. Thirteen school climate surveys are analyzed. (Matthew Clifford et al., American Institutes for Research, April 2012)...

The Impact of Pupil Behavior and Wellbeing on Educational Outcomes - How are various dimensions of children's wellbeing associated with their educational outcomes? The authors found that as children move through school, emotional and behavioral wellbeing become more important in explaining school engagement, while demographic and other characteristics become less so. Also, children with high levels of emotional, behavioral, social, and school wellbeing do better academically and are more engaged in school. Bullied children are less engaged in primary school. (Leslie Morrison Gutman and John Vorhaus, Institute of Education at the University of London, November 2013)...

Teaching Adolescents to Become Learners - An argument for a shift away from test-score emphasis to development of cognitive and noncognitive factors that lead students to earn high course grades. In addition to what students learn, the authors argue for leveraging an understanding of noncognitive factors to teach adolescents how to become effective learners.(Farrington et al., Consortium on Chicago School Research, June 2012)...

State Learning Standards to Advance Social and Emotional Learning - A state scan to understand whether and how states currently address social and emotional learning finds infant/toddler and prekindergarten learning standards for social and emotional learning are well-developed and disseminated nationwide. K-12 standards take three directions: free-standing and comprehensive, free-standing focusing on one ore more dimensions of social and emotional learning, and integration of goals and benchmarks related to social and emotional learning in other sets of learning standards, for example social studies. (Linda Dusenbury, Jessy Zadrazil, Amy Mart, Roger Weissberg, CASEL, April 2011)...