Steps to Schoolwide Success: Systemic Practices for Connecting Social-Emotional and Academic Learning

Steps to Schoolwide Success makes a powerful case for the implementation of a school reform that bridges academic and social-emotional learning systems in high schools. Based on a multi-year project in Broward County, Florida, the book describes how the biggest difference in academic success from school to school was not in instructional practice but in the systematic attention to personal relationships between adults and students. In the higher performing schools, educators made deliberate efforts to engage with students; established organizational structures to support students; and encouraged a language and culture of personalization.

Working with the National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools, a research-practice partnership that included Vanderbilt University, Florida State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, educators in Broward County identified five core practices and specific implementation strategies to improve student academic, social-emotional, and behavioral outcomes---practices whose efficacy is supported by prior research and theory. This approach, called Personalization for Academic and Social Emotional Learning (PASL), emphasizes systemic personalization where adults intentionally attend to practices in schools that improve relationships between adults and students. Drawing on multiple sources, the book delves into the five components of PASL, providing stories from educators and students to illustrate how they were adapted in different schools through a process of continuous improvement.

Steps to Schoolwide Success challenges conventional, fragmented, and top-down efforts at reform, and points the way to a new generation of efforts that emphasize continuous, systematic improvement. Readers will learn how high schools can be made stronger and more responsive places when educators employ strategies that bridge academic and social emotional systems.