At every level of California’s public education system, a transformation is underway: Educators and students are honing new skills to set goals, nurture thriving relationships, and make healthy decisions. Berkeley Social Welfare Associate Professor Valerie Shapiro and her dedicated team of researchers are helping drive this change.
Dr. Shapiro has spent the past two decades studying the implementation of Social and Emotional Learning and is bringing this expertise to bear as Scientific Director and Special Project Advisor for CalHOPE Student Support, a statewide initiative providing training to teachers and public school support staff, facilitated by the Sacramento County Office of Education
What is Social and Emotional Learning (SEL)?
Social and Emotional Learning develops skills for academic and lifelong success: Self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making (Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning). Some student and adult SEL practices are available to try, courtesy of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center
How California is leading the way in the Social and Emotional Learning
California has long provided national leadership for embedding SEL within the public education system. Beginning in 2011, some California school districts participated in an initiative to implement SEL districtwide with the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. In 2017, a California Department of Education SEL workgroup adopted statewide principles for SEL implementation, including a Silicon Valley-esque approach to “prototype and learn” from diverse SEL implementations.
Then, as 2020 unfolded, the upheaval of COVID and racial reckoning underscored the urgency of strengthening students’ and educators’ emotional resilience. Indeed, Social and Emotional Learning became “an educational framework that could acknowledge the current social and emotional strains on leading, teaching, and learning, and bring educational leaders into connection, capacity-building, and collaboration as they navigated the storm” (“ ‘We Will Build Together’: Sowing the seeds of SEL statewide”).
The origins of CalHOPE Student Support
As educators continued to navigate COVID’s physical, mental, and emotional health disruptions, thankfully, support followed. In October, 2020, CalHOPE Student Support received $6.8 million in federal emergency funding.
To facilitate planning, UC Berkeley researchers surveyed County Offices of Education (COEs) staff who would ultimately provide SEL implementation support to districts and schools across the state. Respondents identified shared challenges in adopting SEL in their counties: competing priorities, a lack of teacher preparation, misunderstandings around SEL as a method to achieving change, and an absence of implementation infrastructure. Yet staff also acknowledged SEL’s importance, an expansion of SEL-related professional development opportunities, and a growing prioritization of mental health in their schools.
These findings led to the creation of key goals for the emerging CalHOPE team:
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Help children and adults in schools recover and improve their wellbeing, engagement, and performance;
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Build awareness, knowledge, skills, and confidence for SEL implementation;
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Provide supports, including training and forums for educators to learn from and with each other.
Operating in the absence of top-down state education standards, CalHOPE Student Support relied heavily on partnerships that bridged geography and varying levels of school administration. Accordingly, the initial CalHOPE Student Support planning team included representatives from two County Offices of Education and UC Berkeley, in close collaboration with 55 County Offices of Education.
The success of this partnered initiative attracted further investment, with the state, via the Department of Health Care Services, bolstering the total to a $122 million initiative.
Impact
CalHOPE Student Support engages all 58 County Offices of Education in California, ultimately partnering with 27,000 administrators and 30,000 pupil services personnel to support over 300,000 teachers and nearly six million public school students.
CalHOPE Student Support
- 58 County Offices of Education
- 27,000 administrators
- 30,000 pupil services personnel
- 300,000 teachers
- 6,000,000 students
Lessons learned from CalHOPE Student Support’s Launch
In December 2023, members of the SHIFT Research Institute, with collaborators, published “ ‘We will build together’: Sowing the seeds of SEL statewide” in Social and Emotional Learning: Research, Practice, and Policy. Their paper, which conveyed lessons from the first phase of the CalHOPE project, is the first research publication to offer guidance around implementing systemic SEL initiatives at the state-level.
In the paper, the authors share the following lessons:
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Build capacity for SEL, but also build capacity for change-making. Aligning educators and students around a unified definition of SEL was an essential first step, but knowledge alone does not drive change. Therefore, the Center for Implementation developed training to build capacity among county leaders to support SEL implementation at scale, translating the science into practice.
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Meet people where they are and differentiate support accordingly. The researchers found that COE, district, and school leaders not only had different goals for incorporating SEL into their educational spaces, but various levels of capacity, infrastructure, and local challenges and strengths. To address these different needs, CalHOPE created a tailored professional development program for education leaders across different roles and school system contexts.
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Build relationships and navigate turnover. While the pressures of operating a school system during intersecting crises took its toll, the team found success when they intentionally carved out time to network, dialogue, and build lasting relationships that withstood staff transitions: “Relationships are at the root of every activity, resource, and outcome connected to this project.” Further, they thoughtfully incorporated new members and celebrated transitions of leaders into new roles as a means of spreading the work.
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Embed SEL approaches within SEL implementation. The CalHOPE planning team modeled SEL values and activities in their interactions with education partners. This included centering curiosity, problem-solving, and agency, and daily practices, like beginning meetings with welcoming activity.
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Emphasize equity. The authors also identified the need for an intentional focus on equity when implementing SEL in order to prevent the replication of harmful systems and power dynamics that are present within schools and society, beginning by centering the voices of communities denied access to power.
Celebrating a successful partnership
The CalHOPE Student Support Partnership between UC Berkeley and the Sacramento County Office of Education recently won the 2023-2024 Campus-Community Partnership Award, one of the annual UC Berkeley Chancellor's Awards for Public Service. School of Social Welfare-affiliated individual honorees are Valerie Shapiro, Addison Duane, Ashley Metzger, Kamryn Morris, Alagia Cirolia, Alejandro Nuñez, Andy Peterson, Dana Kowalski, and Aislyn Bryan
Members of the CalHOPE Student Support Partnership team at the Chancellor's Awards for Public Service ceremony. From left to right: Dania Matos, Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion, UC Berkeley; Andy Peterson, Senior Consultant, Learning Design & Technology, School of Social Welfare, UC Berkeley; Mai Xi Lee, Social Emotional Learning Director, Sacramento County Office of Education; Brent Malicote, Assistant Superintendent of Educational Services, Sacramento County Office of Education; Valerie Shapiro, Associate Professor, UC Berkeley; Ashley Metzger, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Innovations for Youth, UC Berkeley; Esmeralda Michel, Research Partnership Coordinator, CalHOPE; Margaret Golden, Education Community Manager, Greater Good Science Center; Chris Williams, Director of School-Based Mental Health and Wellness at the Sacramento County Office of Education; Henry Tsang, Assistant Dean, Extended Education, UC Berkeley; Keith Annis, Project Manager, Education Programs, Extended Education, UC Berkeley; Chris Oakden, Program Manager, Extended Education, UC Berkeley; Aislyn Bryan, Administrative Coordinator, School of Social Welfare, UC Berkeley; Luis Valencia, Manager, Internship and Career Development Programs, UC Berkeley; Dana Kowalski, Assistant Dean of Administration and Finance, School of Social Welfare, UC Berkeley; Joyce Dorado, Associate Dean for Research-Practice Partnerships, School of Social Welfare, UC Berkeley. Photo by Brandon Sanchez Mejia.
This award is the latest in a series of UC Berkeley-wide honors bestowed on School of Social Welfare faculty and students in recent years:
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Erin Kerrison, Assistant Professor, 2022-2023 Faculty Award for Research in the Public Interest
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Tina Marie McClain, student, 2021-2022 Undergraduate Award for Civic Engagement
What’s next
Dr. Shapiro, with the SEL Consulting Collaborative and the California t-SEL Advisory Council, has developed two graduate-level courses in SEL for in-service educators and leaders, which are currently available for UC Berkeley credit at no cost to eligible California educators (Fall 2023 to Spring 2025). So far, this has enabled 1181 educators from 708 schools within 347 districts across 54 counties to increase their capacity for SEL, and complete capstone projects focused on improvements in their local contexts. After Spring 2025, this course is expected to be available to educators throughout the country.
CalHOPE Student Support has also ensured that every district in the state has access to a survey platform, to lift up student and staff voices, to inform real-time planning. Dr. Shapiro and team recommended items from the Berkeley Assessment for Social and Emotional Learning (BASEL) to help schools use data to plan for improvements to wellbeing, climate, and SEL Implementation.
By the end of 2024, Dr. Shapiro believes she will be to “describe the state of well-being of people in schools, statewide. We’re looking at regions, groups (racial, language learning, disability), and at students as well as adults.” Dr. Shapiro’s team is currently analyzing emotional experiences (such as joy, kindness, sadness, playfulness, worry, amazement), as well as experiences of safety/belonging, culturally and linguistically responsive environments, and opportunities for leadership/participation, which will inform the next phase of CalHOPE work.