Transformative Social-Emotional Professional Development Program
Creating equity-centered social-emotional learning development
The transformative social-emotional learning (T-SEL) professional development program offers workshops, coaching, and an online course full of interactive, reflective exercises and resources, including sample activities and lesson plans.
Culturally-Relevant Support
Given the ongoing challenges students face, including the ongoing impact of COVID-19, racial trauma, school shootings, as well as housing and food insecurity, the need for culturally-relevant social-emotional supports has never been higher. Observing a need for additional social-emotional learning (SEL) training for teachers in the cities we serve, City Teaching Alliance secured US Department of Education funding to create equity-centered SEL content to enhance the professional development opportunities for educators. We’ve aligned the modules to the Collaborative for Academic (CASEL) Social and Emotional Learning Framework, intentionally emphasizing the transformative SEL (T-SEL) equity elaborations described in the chart below.
Description & Details
Made possible by a 2020-2023 federal SEED grant, City Teaching Alliance (then Urban Teachers) collaborated with multiple experts in SEL, culturally responsive pedagogy, and special education to design, test, and refine a field-leading Transformative Social-Emotional Learning PD series for teachers. These self-paced online modules include essential grounding in the five core T-SEL competencies, tangible tools and models of practice, and a resource library for further learning and application. Any educator within or beyond our program network is welcome to access them, free of charge. Whether you are new to the profession or a veteran educator looking to build a more nurturing, productive, and culturally responsive learning environment for your students, we encourage you to sign up and explore.
Have questions or feedback? We’d love to hear from you.
Please contact us at cpl@cityteachingalliance.org
Components of T-SEL based instruction include:
- Partnerships between students and adults that focus on authenticity, power sharing, and joint decision making.
- Integrating issues of race, culture, and class into academic content.
- Honoring students’ individual cultures and lived experiences.
- Opportunities to reflect on personal and social identities, examine prejudices and biases, disrupting and resisting inequities, and co-constructing equitable and just solutions.
- Emphasizing students’ ability to work toward more just schools and communities.
- Creating belonging and engagement for all.
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.
Our Modules
SEL Framework
- Self-Awareness
- Self-Management
- Social Awareness
- Relationship Skills
- Responsible Decision-Making
T-SEL Equity Elaboration
- Identity
- Agency
- Belonging
- Collaborative Problem-Solving
- Curiosity
More About T-SEL
Social-emotional learning has been shown to have myriad positive impacts on students’ lives and academic performance. 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 City Teaching Alliance’s mission to prepare culturally responsive educators 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, City Teaching Alliance deliberately committed to T-SEL as the focus of its professional development program.
Join the Alliance
Apply Now