Facilitating Socio-Emotional Skills Development (SESD) Resource Hub

The resources in this hub go alongside a dedicated training programme, Social and Emotional Learning Training of Facilitators (SELTOF), which has been developed by the David P. Weikart Center for Youth Program Quality, part of the Forum for Youth Investment in the US. We recommend this training for anyone who wants to really focus on developing their skills to intentionally support young people’s socio-emotional development. 

If you’re just getting started, we’d recommend doing our introductory SESD training first. Check out our website or get in touch to see when we are next running this two-part training programme. 

The David P. Weikart Center for Youth Program Quality is a leader in empowering education and human services to adapt, implement and scale best-in-class, research-validated quality improvement systems to advance child and youth development. The Center is a critical part of the Forum for Youth Investment’s overall effort to build leadership capacity to advance readiness and equity. 

Our YMCA George Williams College’s Framework of Outcomes 2.1 and focus on supporting and measuring socio-emotional skills development draws heavily on the work of partners such as the Weikart Center [1]. We refer to the key staff practices and key experiences for young people that are detailed in the SEL Challenge: Preparing Youth to Thrive [2] [3]. These practices and experiences are explored in more detail in each section of this hub and can be found embedded throughout our measurement tools and guidance for practitioners. 

The SEL Challenge study also forms part of the legacy work for our research partners, Q-Turn, with whom we are working to develop dedicated SES measures for the UK Youth Sector. As such, the content in this SELTOF Resource Hub is very well aligned with our wider work on socio-emotional skills development. 

Work on socio-emotional skills is more advanced and mainstream in the US than in the UK, which is why these materials are sourced from there. Part of the work of this resource hub is to translate them into a UK context.  

All materials included in this resource hub are © 2020 the Forum for Youth Investment. We have brought them together for ease of access during training and to support UK practitioners in their journey to facilitating socio-emotional skills. 

The US context also refers to Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) whereas we use the term ‘socio-emotional skills’ (SES), as in the UK SEL is associated only with formal education and SES is multi-disciplinary. We have left the word 'SEL' in the materials for fidelity and adherence to the Weikart materials. 

[1] For more information, watch our SES Models Webinar [add link once created]. 

[2] Preparing youth to thrive: Promising practices in social and emotional learning (Charles Smith et al., Preparing Youth to Thrive: Promising Practices for Social and Emotional Learning (Washington, DC: Forum for Youth Investment, 2016) 

This guidebook describes SEL standards and organizational and curriculum features for a set of eight exemplary SEL programs. DOWNLOAD 

[3] Preparing youth to thrive: Methodology and findings from the social and emotional learning challenge (Smith, C., McGovern, G., Peck., S.C., Larson, R., Hillaker, B., Roy, L. (2016). Preparing Youth to Thrive: Methodology and Findings from the Social and Emotional Learning Challenge. Forum for Youth Investment, Washington, D.C.) 

This technical report describes methodology and findings for (1) best-practice SEL standards, (2) validation of a suite of SEL performance measures for use in QIS, and (3) performance benchmarks for out-of-school time programs focused on building SEL skills with vulnerable children/youth. DOWNLOAD