Tamara Fyke 
Tamara Fyke wrote in 2019 about four next steps for whole child education, including culturally relevant practice and evaluating social-emotional learning over time. A new section after the column defines the approach and reviews what two large research summaries show about SEL and what they leave unanswered.
As I look at the landscape of education, particularly social-emotional learning, I agree with my colleagues David Griffith and Sean Slade from ASCD. We have made good progress with whole child education. As Roger Weissberg of CASEL said, “In our country right now in education, we need to do a lot more ‘lumping’ and looking for the synergies.” So what’s next?
In my conversations with educators, researchers, and thought leaders, I see four emerging themes that will help us continue in improving our commitment to whole child education.
A Culturally Relevant Approach
1. Culturally Relevant Approach – Being culturally relevant is more than having a multiracial group of students on the cover of our brochure. It means that we integrate the stories and experiences of different cultures within our instructional approach. This requires us to be open to conversations with students, families, and teachers about their needs and perspectives. Gone are the days when we can push an agenda without considering the input of everyone involved. Social media has torn down the fourth wall. Even major brands engage and value consumer voice. Why would it be any different in education?
A culturally relevant approach also means more than race and nationality. We must consider the major influences in our culture, media and technology, and how they can be harnessed for good. It is time for us to lay down our weaponry against phone usage and social media and find meaningful ways to engage students with these tools. How do we inspire and challenge our students to use their knowledge and devices to create solutions?
Evaluating SEL Over Time
2. Evaluation & Data – We have now reached the point where administrators are crying out for the data to prove impact. Having been in the field of SEL for over 20 years and participated in research with the U.S. Department of Education, I can tell you firsthand that change must be measured over time. To think that we can look at attendance and behavior referrals and get the whole picture of what is happening in a school or in the life of a child and then use that data punitively against the school or the child is naïve at best. Change takes time. The seeds of SEL that are planted now may not yield much result until a decade or two later. Longitudinal studies, such as the one conducted by James Heckman, show us what is possible. Again, change takes time.
Instead, we need to look at culture and climate data, such as a student’s sense of belonging, student-peer relationships, and student-teacher relationships. What does this data tell us about the additional resources in personnel and programs that need to be allocated for a particular population? This is the approach that Caroline Chase and her colleagues are taking at Austin ISD. SEL evaluation is formative, not summative.
Building Teacher Capacity
3. Teacher Capacity – In a conversation with a district in the northeast last week, a leader shared, “We are at the very beginning of our journey. We are not sure what to do from here.” I appreciated their transparency and vulnerability. They recognized that embracing an SEL mindset and integrating that into practice will take time. My response was that it doesn’t need to be an either/or approach. Other districts with whom I’ve worked have said that they are not willing to do anything for their students until they build capacity within their teachers. While I agree that teachers need to be educated about brain research, adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), trauma-informed practice, and SEL integration, this mindset shift takes time. One of the most powerful ways to learn is through experience. Therefore, I strongly advocate for a both/and approach. Provide the training and tools teachers need while also giving them opportunities for explicit instruction and integration within their classrooms along with supportive coaching. The truth is that whether you are implementing particular strategies or specific curriculum or not, SEL is already happening. By corralling the energy and efforts, you can create a common vocabulary and greater sense of community.
Additionally, educators who embrace SEL need to be given permission to be human. In order to teach kids to identify what is going on in their heads and in their hearts, we must be willing to go there ourselves. This work is simple but not easy. It requires us to take time to listen to ourselves…to acknowledge our strengths and weakness, to face our inner demons, to get the help we need. Providing journals, offering Tap-In/Tap-Out, encouraging exercise and healthy eating, and inviting conversation are ways to support teachers on their personal journeys.
Engaging Families Without Judgment
4. Family Engagement – In my experience as both an educator and a parent, what I have found is, too often, family members do not have a seat at the table. Too many times, educators look at the family as the problem or as the wallet for funding needs. Perhaps it’s because dad is locked up in jail or by his job and mom is preoccupied with other kids or with personal concerns. Maybe the student is being raised by an auntie, uncle, or grandparents. In some cases, kids are shuffled from one home to another because of divorce. Whatever the case, our job is to accept, embrace, and empower families – whatever they look like – without judgment. Let’s motivate them to be a part of the school community in whatever way they can, rather than shaming them for not contributing to the annual PTO funding drive.
Regardless of circumstances, more often than not, families love their kids and want to give them the world. Some adults were not given the tools they need to succeed, so they are doing the best they can. What would happen if we came around these families with support and encouragement – GED programs, food pantries, entrepreneur centers, childcare? What changes would happen in the culture and climate of the school if parents were engaged in these meaningful ways?
The school has become the epicenter of the community. Therefore, we must do all we can to promote a healthy lifestyle for students, educators, and families.
- EdSurge – Teenage Brains Are Elastic. That’s a Big Opportunity for Social-Emotional Learning
- edCircuit – Tamara Fyke Columns
- SmartBrief – How leaders create, sustain SEL
Whole child education in 2026: what the approach means and what research on SEL shows
Tamara Fyke wrote in 2019 about four next steps for whole child education: a culturally relevant approach, evaluating social-emotional learning (SEL) over time, building teacher capacity, and engaging families without judgment. Whole child education is the idea that schools serve students’ health, safety, engagement, support and academic challenge together, and the question of evidence runs through all four of Fyke’s steps. This section defines the approach as ASCD describes it, then reviews two large research summaries on SEL, which is one part of whole child education, and relates their findings to Fyke’s recommendations. Educators should read the effect sizes as modest and uneven, and the open questions as real.
What the approach means
David Griffith and Sean Slade of ASCD, the organization Fyke cites at the start of the column, described the approach in an October 2018 article in Educational Leadership. They present whole child as an umbrella that includes social-emotional learning and other holistic models, and as a shift from narrow academic measures toward the long-term development and life success of all children. A whole child education is one in which students are healthy, safe, engaged, supported and challenged. ASCD offers a school needs-assessment tool built on five tenets and 50 related indicators. The authors recommend defining the school’s mission, sharing it with staff, students and families, and building shared language across related terms such as social-emotional learning, school climate and character education. They give few classroom strategies, so the framework is a way to organize decisions and not a program in itself.
What a large follow-up study of SEL found
Fyke argues that change takes time and that evaluation must follow students over years. A 2017 meta-analysis in the journal Child Development, summarized by CASEL, examined 82 school-based SEL interventions involving more than 97,000 students from kindergarten to high school, measured from six months to 18 years after the programs ended. Students who had taken part showed lasting gains in social and emotional skills and prosocial behavior and lasting decreases in conduct problems, emotional distress and drug use. For academics, the average gain was 13 percentile points at an average follow-up of 3.5 years, but that estimate rests on only eight studies, a limit the summary itself points out.
What a review of 12 meta-analyses adds
A review by Joseph Durlak, Joseph Mahoney and Alaina Boyle, published in Psychological Bulletin in November 2022 (volume 148, pages 765-782), with the accepted manuscript posted by CASEL, combined 12 meta-analyses covering more than 500 unique reports and an estimated one million students from early childhood through high school. It rated the meta-analyses as high quality. Average effects were consistently positive on SEL skills, attitudes, prosocial behavior and academic achievement, and consistently negative on conduct problems and emotional distress. The effects were smaller at follow-up, with effect sizes from 0.07 to 0.33, compared with 0.09 to 0.70 right after programs ended (figures as given in the accepted manuscript).
The review also reports little consistency in which conditions made programs work better. The reviewers write that research has yet to clarify which individual, contextual, methodological and programmatic factors help or hinder different SEL skills for different students. For a leader this means that SEL programs have a solid evidence base on average, and that a particular school cannot assume a particular program will work the same way in its setting.
What this means for Fyke’s four steps
- Culturally relevant approach. The review found no consistent pattern for the moderators it examined, so a school should check a program’s fit with its own students and families and not assume that effects carry over.
- Evaluating SEL over time. The fact that follow-up effects are smaller than immediate effects supports Fyke’s caution against judging a program on one year of attendance and discipline data. A school can add measures such as students’ sense of belonging and relationships with teachers, as Fyke suggests, and review them across years.
- Teacher capacity. Fyke argues for a both-and approach in which training and classroom practice happen together. The research summaries here do not test a training sequence, so that recommendation rests on Fyke’s experience and not on these studies.
- Families. The sources above do not test family engagement, and Fyke’s recommendation to support families without judgment stands as Fyke’s professional view.
A principal who wants to act can begin with a needs assessment, choose one or two measures of belonging and climate, collect them each year, and ask any program vendor for studies of schools like their own.
For more, see edCircuit’s Social-Emotional Learning Guide.
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