More About T-SEL
SEL has been shown to have myriad positive impacts on students’ lives and academic performance. Quality SEL instruction and skills can promote positive development, improve academic performance and mental health, predict positive long-term outcomes such as high school graduation and stable employment, as well as improve teacher wellbeing while reducing exhaustion and burnout.
Through addressing the missing equity links in the original SEL framework, we believe T-SEL will have a similar or better effect, especially for children in the cities we serve, where students are impacted daily by persistent inequity and injustice. In line with Urban Teachers’ mission to prepare culturally competent teachers who disrupt systems of socioeconomic and racial inequity, as well as our commitment to anti-racism, we are concerned about the criticism that SEL has faced over failing to meet the needs of students of color. We are also greatly concerned by the disproportionate negative psychosocial impact of COVID-19 on children of color and its corresponding mental health crisis. As such, Urban Teachers deliberately committed to T-SEL as the focus of its professional development program.
Urban Teachers is also conducting a randomized controlled trial of our T-SEL endeavor with our research partner, the American Institutes for Research. The study will determine how the T-SEL modules can support:
— Teachers’ perceptions, knowledge and use of T-SEL in the classroom.
— Students’ perceptions of self, others, school, classroom safety and inclusion.
— Improvement of standardized test scores in math and English language arts.
— Decreased absences and disciplinary incidents.
Additional scholarly resources used to develop our T-SEL program can be found here.