Memphis Teacher Residency, and Green County Schools are among those using program to help educators improve their SEL skills
Social and emotional learning (SEL) is a significant focus for schools this year, yet too often teachers don’t have enough opportunities for SEL training or to reflect on their own SEL skills. To address this, more and more schools are turning to the SEL professional development program, EdSERT, by Aperture Education.
EdSERT, short for Educator Social-Emotional Reflection and Training, helps educators enhance their own social and emotional skills and improve their SEL teaching practices. Aperture has reported a significant increase in customers using the program this year including:
- The Memphis Teacher Residency (MTR) which is using EdSERT in its teacher preparation program to better equip educators to teach SEL in the classroom.
- Greene County Schools in North Carolina, which is using EdSERT for its teachers and administrators.
“This increase in demand for our EdSERT program highlights the acute need being felt by schools to provide educators resources to help them improve their SEL instruction,” said Jessica Adamson, CEO of Aperture Education. “It’s been a challenging 18 months and we have to remember that teachers have been impacted too. It’s important to make sure they have resources to help them both build their own SEL skills and grow their SEL practice so they can better address the needs of their students.”
EdSERT is offered in paper-based and digital versions. It has eight professional development modules focusing on eight essential social and emotional competencies aligned to the CASEL Framework: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, goal-directed behavior, personal responsibility, decision-making, and optimistic thinking. It provides educators with self-reflective assessments, personal development guides, and self-directed strategies to help them strengthen their social and emotional teaching practices and model those skills in the classroom.
“It was a really powerful experience for teachers to reflect on themselves – that’s just a key part of SEL,” said Danielle Ringold, instructional coach and licensing manager for MTR about the EdSERT program.” You can’t teach something or share something you haven’t worked on for yourself. By creating space for that we saw really positive outcomes.”
Added Larissa Gregory, the former social and emotional learning (SEL) department chair for the program: “I saw changes in classroom practices because teachers saw and understood what SEL looked like for them and what it could look like when they applied the practices from EdSERT into their classroom approaches.”
For more information about the EdSERT program, visit apertureed.com/educator-sel/.
