This guide is part of a suite of resources on participatory systems change for equity, an approach to systems change that centers the wisdom and motivations of those closest to systemic equity challenges to make sense of and transform system conditions toward opportunity and well-being through collective action. The guide offers a set of leadership competencies—skills, knowledge, and dispositions—necessary to lead participatory systems change, along with reflection questions and resources to support strengthening these competencies.
Safe and Supportive Learning Environments
Essential Conditions for Advancing and Sustaining Cross-Sector Collaboration: A Reflection Guide for Child-, Youth-, and Family-Serving Agencies
The work toward cross-sector collaboration has never been more urgent. Through a global pandemic, an increasingly polarized society, intensified violence locally and abroad, societal reckoning with injustices, and a surge in adolescent mental health challenges, many child-, youth-, and family-serving agencies have invested greater resources in supporting systems improvement.
These efforts include California’s recent multibillion-dollar investments in community schools and children and youth behavioral health. Such efforts motivate state and local agencies to work together across education, health, social services, and other sectors to align their efforts toward a shared, coherent purpose.
This guide from The California Center for School Climate shares strategies for creating and sustaining seven essential conditions for effective cross-sector collaboration to improve equitable access, experiences, and outcomes for young people, families, and communities:
- Collaborative Leadership Capacity
- Diverse and Inclusive Representation
- Relational Trust
- Collective Vision and Purpose
- Clear Structures and Approaches to Teamwork
- Continuous Improvement Routines and Infrastructure
- Adequate Resources and Abundance Mindsets
For each condition, the guide describes indicators of implementation that leaders and cross-sector teams can use to identify strengths, gaps, and opportunities in the design and implementation of their own collaboration efforts. The guide also offers tips for how to begin or strengthen each condition and points readers to further resources.
California Center for School Climate Audio Gallery
The California Center for School Climate features examples of how schools nurture positive school climates across California. This audio gallery includes stories of public schools across California who are serving the whole-person needs of their communities with practices rooted in equity.
Each story will include promising and evidence-based resources and a discussion guide to help educators adapt what they hear for their local contexts.
Serving the Whole Person: An Alignment and Coherence Guide for State Education Agencies
To advance equity, districts and schools must serve the whole person. Equitable outcomes are more likely to result when whole-person initiatives are implemented within an aligned and coherent system.
If educators at every level of the K–12 system — from the state level to the classroom — work in aligned and coherent ways to sustain the conditions that support whole-person learning and development, every student will have experiences that support personal purpose, healthy relationships, a sense of place in community, success in school and the workplace, and engaged citizenship.
This Alignment and Coherence Guide’s central purpose is to help state education agency (SEA) leaders implement conditions for equitable learning and development for students, families, and educators, through their work to improve the alignment and coherence of their whole-person initiatives.
This guide includes five chapters:
Chapter 1. Establish a Shared Vision and Theory of Change
Chapter 2. Inventory Whole-Person Initiatives
Chapter 3. Analyze Interrelationships for Alignment and Coherence and Create an Action Plan
Chapter 4. Implement the Action Plan and Monitor Progress
Chapter 5. Refine the Alignment and Coherence Process
This comprehensive, adaptable, research-informed, and field-tested guide is also the basis of a related WestEd service. Discover how our technical assistance team can lead you through a structured yet flexible process to improve the alignment and coherence of whole-person efforts.
Serving the Whole Person: An Alignment and Coherence Guide for Local Education Agencies
Educators in K–12 school systems are increasingly acknowledging the importance of serving the “whole person” as an essential foundation for achieving equitable outcomes. The guide is based on the idea that equitable outcomes are more likely to result when whole-person initiatives are implemented in an aligned and coherent way.
If educators at every level of the K–12 system — from the state level to the classroom — work in aligned and coherent ways to sustain the conditions that support whole-person learning and development, every student will have experiences that support personal purpose, healthy relationships, a sense of place in community, success in school and the workplace, and engaged citizenship.
This Alignment and Coherence Guide’s central purpose is to help local education agency (LEA) leaders implement conditions for equitable learning and development for students, families, and educators, through their work to improve the alignment and coherence of their whole-person initiatives.
With this guide, leaders will:
- Understand what serving the whole person means, and how this work can contribute to equitable outcomes for students, their families, and their communities.
- Connect their district or school whole-person initiatives to a broader vision for whole-person outcomes.
Tailor the implementation of whole-person initiatives so that they are more aligned and coherent. - Communicate — in a clear and compelling way — and about why and how their district or school serves the whole person.This comprehensive, adaptable, research-informed, and field-tested guide is also the basis of a related WestEd service. Discover how our technical assistance team can lead you through a structured yet flexible process to improve the alignment and coherence of whole-person efforts.
Spotlighting Whole-Person Success: A Guide for Using Statewide Data to Identify Exemplar Districts in SEL and School Climate
Across the United States, educators and education leaders are increasingly recognizing the value of social and emotional learning (SEL), school climate, and related whole-person efforts as keys to enabling student success.
If educators at every level of the K–12 system — from the state level to the classroom — work in aligned and coherent ways to sustain the conditions that support whole-person learning and development, every student will have experiences that support personal purpose, healthy relationships, a sense of place in community, success in school and the workplace, and engaged citizenship.
This guide aims to support state and regional leaders to identify districts or schools with notably positive outcomes in the areas of SEL and school climate, learn about those exemplars’ strategies and experiences, and share their learnings in order to scale up whole-person efforts and outcomes.
The report is divided into three sections:
Part 1: Quantitative Analyses to Identify Potential Exemplars
Part 2: Qualitative Analysis to Verify and Finalize Exemplars
Next Steps: Communicate and Scale the Exemplars’ Success
This comprehensive, adaptable, research-informed, and field-tested guide is also the basis of a related WestEd service. Discover how our technical assistance team can lead you through a structured yet flexible process to improve the alignment and coherence of whole-person efforts.
Instructional Practices That Integrate Equity-Centered Social, Emotional, and Academic Learning: Updated Research-to-Practice Brief
To elevate ways in which SEL is embedded in regular instruction, educators need culturally and linguistically sustaining scaffolds to integrate SEL into existing instructional practices and educator professional learning systems.
Integration of SEL allows educators and students to move away from the traditional compartmentalized “SEL time” to an understanding that SEL is a core ingredient to teaching and learning in identity-affirming spaces.
Produced by Harmony SEL at National University, Transforming Education, the Center for Social and Emotional Learning and School Safety, and the American Institutes of Research, this brief refines pioneering work on the integration of SEL with academics and specifically addresses 10 educator practices that promote social, emotional, and academic development.
The authors have updated the 10 practices to be more inclusive of the multiple spaces in which students learn and develop and to reflect recent learnings on culturally responsive practices, trauma-informed instruction, and the science of learning and development.
Rooting Social and Emotional Well-Being Efforts in Equity: A Reflection Guide
This tip sheet for educators offers several high-level principles that educators can consider, followed by nine self-reflection questions. These allow individuals or teams to evaluate their practices along a continuum: A high rating may indicate that social and emotional well-being practices are already anchored in equity, whereas a low score may indicate that well-intended practices are actually working at cross-purposes with equity.
The Toolkit Before the Toolkit: Centering Adaptive and Relational Elements of Restorative Practices for Implementation Success
Restorative practices are characterized by proactive relationships, connection, and community transformation. When implemented correctly, restorative practices are not more to do, but a different way to be.
This guide highlights the mindsets, values, social capital, and structural supports that bind and hold together restorative practices.
Educators, school leaders, and district administrators can use this practical guide to successfully implement restorative practices and transform their schools into strong communities with meaningful relationships, a sense of authentic belonging, and equitable whole-person outcomes.
Reimagining School Safety: A Guide for Schools and Communities
While school safety ideas and practices have evolved over the last several decades, the variety of school safety tools, policies, and degrees of success highlights a need for more conversation about the very concept of safety: what it is (and isn’t), who gets to define it, how it’s achieved, and at what cost.
In shifting how safety is defined so that it is not the absence of violence but the existence of systems and structures that support mutual care, belonging, and interconnection, schools’ policies, practices, and values shift towards creating strong communities and places of collaborative learning.
The purpose of this guide is to support education professionals reimagine and redefine school safety such that safety is not the absence of a negative but rather the existence of positive elements like interconnection, belonging, voice, and agency. Further, working from this paradigm of safety and centering the lived experiences of students and families—especially those who have been kept furthest from institutional power—can be a key component of designing systems that are more equitable and sustainable.
This interactive guide pulls from different frameworks and concepts, including complex adaptive systems, restorative justice, co-designing, and design thinking, to provide educators, school leaders, and district administrators with mindsets, strategies, and grounded examples of what is possible by reimagining school safety.
