Practitioners can use CORE benchmarking data to target resources and supports needed most within their schools and districts. Benchmark data can be used to illuminate strengths within and across schools or grade-levels in order to help identify and scale promising practices; it can help leaders and administrators identify disparities in SE development in order to inform resource allocation; and, it can be used to prioritize student SE development goals and set priorities for the year.  We recommend that you use following set of questions to help guide your use of the CORE benchmark data to unpack your own students’ social-emotional survey data.

Revisit your goals for supporting students’ social-emotional development

  • What are our current goals for student social-emotional development in our school or district?
  • What are 3 questions we hope to answer by looking at this data?

Identify and scale promising practices

  • For which competencies do our students report scores above the benchmark mean scores?
  • Are there any specific student subgroups or grade levels that report higher scores, relative to the benchmark data?
    • Why do we think students are reporting this way?
    • What do we know about their experiences?
    • How can we learn more about what our students have to say?
  • What are some school or classroom factors or practices that might be supporting students’ development of these competencies?
    • Are there relevant school-wide policies or practices that we can explore more closely?
    • Are there helpful practices that specific teachers or teaching teams are implementing in their classrooms?
    • What ideas and goals help guide their decisions and actions about facilitating their students’ social-emotional learning?

Identify subgroup disparities for resource allocation

  • Which competencies have greater disparities among different student subgroups?
    • How can we learn more about the sources of those disparities?
    • What do we know about the experiences and needs of these different groups of students? How can we learn more about students’ perspectives directly?

Prioritize specific goals toward student SE development

  • Given our current goals for our students’ social-emotional development in our schools, how do our students report on these areas of focus, relative to the CORE benchmark data? Are we meeting our goals? Where are there potential challenges for us to explore and address?
    • Are there any differences between grade levels or subgroups on these areas of focus?
  • How do we want to develop, refine, or change our existing goals based on what we learn from this process?
    • How can we engage the voice of teachers, students, and families to help us further define our SE goals?
    • To what can we commit to take action?
    • What resources do we need for teachers and students to support our new goals?
Note: At TransformEd, we no longer use the term MESH to represent SEL or whole child development
By Published On: May 20th, 20190 Comments