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The need for social and emotional learning (SEL) has never been so clear. The growing understanding of its benefits has been made more evident by the stronger focus of state, district, and school leaders, educators, and families to leverage SEL as a strategy to promote emotional well-being, to combat systemic and interpersonal inequities, and to engage students in positive learning environments. With this urgency to use SEL practices, now is the time to ensure a focus on creating environments and experiences that promote social and emotional development and deepening understanding of the motivational factors that promote student and adult success. Motivation researchers have been studying the motivational elements – and associated interventions – that better equip youth and adults to engage in their learning environments, suggesting the importance that the two fields learn with and from each other. The introductory chapter of the volume, Motivating the SEL Field Forward Through Equity, explores the intersections and accelerators of the two fields to create optimal learning environments and experiences for all youth. Specifically, we provide a high-level overview of the two fields, including ways each field takes into account personal development in relation to context and culture. We further explore ways in which the two fields intersect, elevating the importance of understanding the role of equity and excellence in research and practice. We then focus on one approach that we believe elevates equity of voice in research – research–practice partnerships. Finally, we highlight how this volume is organized.

Social and emotional learning (SEL) programs have traditionally evaded or been silent on issues of (in)equity and, thus, critiqued for their lack of attention to how social injustices create different outcomes for different groups (The Education Trust, 2020). Furthermore, these efforts have been criticized for placing the burden on individual youth to navigate challenges to SEL without recognizing the influence of systems. Transformative SEL offers an alternative approach that centers the integration of an explicit equity and social justice lens into the conceptualization and implementation of SEL (Jagers, Rivas-Drake, & Williams, 2019). Notwithstanding its usefulness as a conceptual framework, mechanisms for “how” a transformative SEL approach may occur have not been well-specified. We recognize that historically, the curricular materials available to SEL educators often take a conformist approach focused on skill-building, coping, and even resilience absent attention to broader social injustices (Jagers, 2016), further burdening teachers with having to redesign curricula to incorporate their commitments into a culturally responsive, justice-oriented pedagogy. We offer stretching as a conceptual category that aims to capture the ways in which educators adapt SEL frameworks and school policies, student–educator relationships, curricula, and instructional practices in order to critically consider and responsibly address their students' experiences of injustice. We argue that stretching of SEL practice is a critical mechanism for conceptualizing how teachers go beyond traditionally equity–evasive notions of SEL to more proactively engage equity issues in their SEL implementation. We will use examples of teaching practice to illustrate and define what constitutes stretching in SEL instruction.

Across the United States, school leaders are realizing the potential for social and emotional learning (SEL) to be used as a critical lever for students' equitable access to full participation in social and civic life. Researchers and practitioners seek to understand how teachers can elevate student voice, increase students' sense of agency, and promote civic engagement through SEL instruction. The School and Community Pathways for Engagement (SCoPE) Project brought together teams from a large, urban school district in the Midwestern United States, the University of Michigan, and the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) in a research-practice partnership (RPP) to examine these pertinent challenges. This chapter demonstrates how the purposeful establishing of and fostering collaborative relationships between researchers and practitioners in the SCoPE Project motivated deeper investment and equity of voice for all stakeholders involved. This chapter specifically discusses the motivational affordances of the RPP approach during participant recruitment, data collection, and data sharing for the SCoPE Project.

Many youth-serving organizations refer to social and emotional learning (SEL) as a process through which adults and young people develop the critical knowledge and skills one needs to be successful in school, work, and personal life (e.g., Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning – CASEL, 2020). SEL is a learning process and – as evidence from the science of learning and development would suggest – one that happens everywhere, both in and out of school. The science also suggests that young people and adults learn best in safe and supportive environments that are identity-safe and filled with developmentally rich relationships (Science of Learning and Development Alliance, n.d.). These finds highlight the importance of meaningful, intentional, and inclusive SEL practice that is grounded in equity and cultural competence. This has historically been the approach out-of-school time (OST) educators have taken to expanding learning opportunities for young people and these practices continue to evolve as the OST field moves toward more intentional SEL practice. OST practitioners are looking to the evidence, many of whom are doing so by partnering with researchers to reexamine and bolster their SEL practices. In this chapter, we explore why and how researcher–practitioner partnerships can foster equitable SEL in OST.

Social and emotional learning (SEL) is critical for students' social and academic success. Students' SEL is often contingent on their teachers' social and emotional competencies and capacities (SECC; Jennings & Greenberg, 2009; Chapter 5) and teacher preparation to facilitate SEL in classrooms (Schonert-Reichl, Kitil, & Hanson-Peterson, 2017). Concerningly, teacher training to facilitate SEL is frequently predicated on a color-evasive perspective that ignores the ways structural racism impacts the schooling experiences of racially minoritized students and associated academic and SEL outcomes (Jagers, Rivas-Drake, & Borowski, 2018; Jagers, Rivas-Drake, & Williams, 2019). In order to support SEL for students from racially minoritized communities, we assert that teachers' social and emotional competencies and capacities must incorporate a culturally responsive pedagogical approach that explicitly acknowledges and addresses issues of race and justice (Jagers et al., 2019; Ladson-Billings, 2014; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). In this chapter we (1) provide an overview of culturally relevant pedagogy in relation to teacher social and emotional competencies and capacities; (2) outline existing models that support a culturally relevant approach to teacher social and emotional competencies and capacities; and (3) discuss future directions for education research, practice, and policy.

Drawing on Coburn and Turner's framework for research on data use, this study looks at how contextual factors support interactions around data. In so doing, the authors contribute to the emerging body of literature on administrators supporting high school students' social-emotional learning (SEL).

This two-site case study “follows the data” that were shared with administrators at two high schools based on a longitudinal study of students' SEL. One author of this study has been leading a research project of high school students' SEL in two high schools from two different districts in a Midwest university town since 2017. This study follows what happened in both high schools after the author shared students' SEL data with district personnel.

Findings showed that participants were invested in increasing SEL programming. However, SEL data moved in different ways through the two schools, and all individuals had different ideas about which data were important. Each district dealt with a specific set of organizational norms, existing inequities, and beliefs systems that influenced which SEL data were noticed and how, if at all, data spurred action.

Specific aspects of organizational contexts support and constrain SEL data use. Both cases suggest researchers can guide data use practices that can advance students' SEL. However, each district dealt with a specific set of educational inequities, which influenced which data were noticed and how, if at all, data spurred action. Importantly, data-driven decision-making must be conducted from an equity lens, lest the process replicate existing inequities.

As high school and college graduates enter today's highly competitive and diverse, globalized economies, cultural competence and social and emotional learning (SEL) competencies continue being essential skills for college, career, and life success. These capabilities are more than valuable assets, they are employability requirements in a modern workforce dependent on navigating relationships and interactions between people from different backgrounds. In education, educators are increasingly expected to cultivate these skills within equitable learning environments for all students, international and domestic. Recent research demonstrates greater need to support international students in the United States who often experience unique academic barriers, stressors, and lack of support services for managing international relocation and integration into unfamiliar academic and cultural systems. To better understand how culturally responsive SEL education can serve as a lever for increasing equitable conditions for international students and to contribute research-based practices on how distance learning can strengthen culturally responsive SEL skills, the following chapter introduces how one online academic and cultural studies course influenced high school and undergraduate international students. Through qualitative and quantitative sources (e.g., written homework reflections; cultural orientation indicator (COI) report; paper: My Action Plan; course evaluation survey), themes emerged from the data that identified how explicit online SEL education, using a culturally responsive lens, contributed to gains in cultural competence, educational equity, academic and professional development, and self-efficacy.

Social and emotional learning (SEL) is an important driver of student well-being, academic achievement, and future success. Despite decades of work on motivation theory and frameworks to promote student motivation and achievement outcomes, connections between motivation and recent frameworks and measures of SEL could be stronger. The purpose of our chapter is to help address this shortcoming. First, we begin by reviewing which theories of motivation currently appear in major SEL frameworks. Second, we introduce how a more comprehensive theory of motivation (based on an expectancy–value–cost framework) could be incorporated into SEL frameworks to advance their overall impact. Third, using examples from our ongoing research in STEM classrooms, we show how a broader knowledge of motivation can inform practitioners on how to promote key SEL competencies and subsequent achievement and engagement for students, especially to address inequities for historically marginalized and minoritized students. Finally, we close with recommendations for future directions for research and practice.

This chapter describes a new leadership model called shared equity leadership (SEL). The goal of SEL is to create culture change that embeds shared values of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) into the core of an organization. SEL emerged from a qualitative multiple-case study of leaders who were committed to establishing an equitable organization at eight colleges and universities that had seen success in their equity efforts. We reviewed over 1,000 pages of documents and interviewed 126 leaders, including cabinet-level executives, mid-level leaders, and group-level leaders. While we identified this model on college campuses, it has relevance for any organizational context. SEL entails three elements: (1) a personal journey toward critical consciousness in which leaders solidify their commitment to equity, (2) a set of values that center equity and guide the work, and (3) a set of practices that leaders enact collectively to change inequitable structures. Distinct from traditional leadership models, SEL encompasses both personal and organizational processes of leadership and emphasizes collaborative, relational, personal, and emotional aspects of leadership. This change starts with transforming awareness and behaviors of individuals, who engage in personal journeys toward critical consciousness and develop an urgent sense of responsibility for creating change. Organizations can facilitate their personal journeys and begin structuring SEL by forming a diverse team and socializing them into SEL expectations. With a concerted effort of leaders committed to SEL values and practices, an organization can be transformed so that equity is everyone’s work.