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Building educators' capacity to promote resilience, equity, and excellence in education
The Center for Reaching & Teaching the Whole Child believes that educational change starts with educators. Our goals are to build educators’ capacity to provide a safe, brave and supportive learning environment; promote equity in teaching and learning; build resilience and sense of optimism; enable academic success; and inspire responsibility for the greater good.
We envision a world in which educators are supported to continually develop their own social, emotional, and cultural competencies. Educators, in turn, consistently support the development of their students’ social, emotional, and cultural competencies so that children are resilient and able to reach their full potential.
We are a community of educators committed to teacher and student well-being. All of our actions, decisions, and goals are driven by the belief that every child deserves a quality education and, in order to achieve this, we must adopt a lens that integrates social, emotional and cultural teaching practices in all aspects of the curriculum and learning environment.
Our Framework
Our Social, Emotional, and Cultural Anchor Competencies Framework goes beyond a one-off learning program — it addresses the assumptions and beliefs both students and educators bring to the classroom and how these multiple contexts impact daily teaching and learning processes. By weaving together social-emotional skills and culturally responsive teaching practices, we have identified seven anchor competencies that are foundational to an equitable education that enables all students to achieve and educators to flourish.
Rather than being another add-on to the educator’s plate of responsibilities, our framework IS the plate — integrating social, emotional, and cultural skills into your everyday practices.
Based on over a decade of pioneering work
Our work is based on founder Nancy Lourié Markowitz’s book, Teaching with a Social, Emotional, and Cultural Lens.
Teaching with a Social, Emotional, and Cultural Lens goes beyond existing social emotional learning programs to introduce our framework for integrating the development of key skills needed for academic success into daily classroom practice.
The text serves as a critical roadmap for educators, whether they are university faculty searching for how to bring a social, emotional, and cultural lens into their methods or foundations course and field work experiences, or classroom teachers hoping to infuse critical skill building into the everyday academic learning that is the traditional focus of schools.
What the education community is saying about us
“I always leave our [professional development sessions] more inspired and motivated to try new ideas. I am learning to live [the lens] out in my own life and creating space for it in my classroom. It's been an unexpected gift that keeps on giving."
Rachel Bacosa
Social-Emotional Learning Instructional Coach, Sunnyvale School District
"Teaching with a Social, Emotional, and Cultural Lens is a call to action…Starting out with a clear framework that describes these practices, and moving to illustrative examples from real classrooms in real schools, [creates] a compelling blueprint to help practitioners, schools of higher education, and districts to integrate a social, emotional, and cultural lens into everything they do.”
David Adams
Chief Executive Officer, Urban Assembly, New York
“Teaching with a Social, Emotional, and Cultural Lens is ...a critical resource for any educator who seeks to supercharge and harness their craft to achieve the absolute best possible outcomes for themselves and the children they serve.”
Meria Joel Carstarphen
Formerly superintendent, Atlanta Public Schools, Georgia
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Center for Reaching & Teaching the Whole Child fiscally sponsored by Community Initiatives – © 2023. All Rights Reserved