Caring School Community: Principles and Structures to Develop Social Skills
Create a culture of kindness and respect, where students are treated warmly in a safe and supportive environment. Our evidence-based social and emotional learning and discipline program, Caring School Community, promotes positive behavior through direct teaching of responsibility, empathy, and cooperation, creating a setting where students feel heard, known, and cared for.
With Caring School Community, we imagined an approach to build the whole school community, while simultaneously developing students’ SEL skills and competencies. This comprehensive program for grades K–8 is in use in 24,000 classrooms, impacting 380,000 students in 326 school districts nationwide.
Caring School Community is an effective, proven SEL program that succeeds by focusing on relationships. Relationships underpin teaching, learning, and prosocial development. Building relationships and fostering students’ sense of community are our hallmarks. A large body of research confirms that building a safe and caring school community and attending to social and emotional learning (SEL) are essential to students’ overall success.
In addition, Caring School Community features the following:
- For the Whole School Community: Community includes everyone – not just the leaders & teachers, but support staff including custodians, cafeteria staff, yard duty, school secretaries, students, and parents.
- Comprehensive Leadership Guidance: Everything a leader needs for a successful implementation, including step-by-step guidance and resources to help plan for, launch, and support program implementation.
- Reimagined Discipline: No more gold stars, no focus on compliance. Our program builds community before discipline is needed, building self-discipline in students, and enacted in the context of relationships.
- Comprehensive, Teacher-Friendly and easy-to-implement instruction across all grades: A full thirty weeks of daily, grade-specific lessons across K–8 which only need 30 minutes a day; comprehensive scope & sequence to build relationships, social skills, and competencies intentionally over time.
- Caring for Middle School: New for our latest edition, Caring School Community includes a comprehensive middle school program, including advisory lessons and guidance for integrating SEL across all subject areas.
