Our Mission
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 guiding framework, the Anchor Competencies Framework serves as a roadmap for helping teacher educators, education leaders, and teachers to develop a holistic approach to teaching and learning – an approach that focuses on developing whole educators to ensure they are equipped to reach and teach the whole student. The Framework emphasizes the need for supporting educators’ own social and emotional competencies with an attention to their context. In so doing, educators are prepared to create safe, supportive, and engaging classroom environments where all students can grow, thrive, and learn.
The Framework also provides a common language and set of approaches for educators, schools, and institutions to integrate a focus on students’ social and emotional competency development with an attention to the context that they bring to the learning environment. It defines seven social and emotional competencies, together with suggested teacher moves and specific teaching strategies – all underscored by the notion that is critical to attend to the context within which the person lives, in order to teach the whole person (both child and adult) (Markowitz & Bouffard, 2020).
With over 15 years of experience working at the state, district, county office, and university teacher preparation level, the Center for Reaching & Teaching the Whole Child (CRTWC) has been transforming the way we prepare and support educators across the United States – providing a more holistic model of teaching and learning that centers the educator’s own social and emotional development and well-being. For instance, CRTWC has provided year-long professional learning institutes for faculty from teacher education programs across the country designed to deepen their understanding of the Framework and support their integration of it into their programs. CRTWC’s Framework has also been used to inform the creation of new state standards for Educator Preparation Programs in Oregon and novel Grow-Your-Own teacher licensure pathways. Additionally, CRTWC works closely with districts, county offices, and teacher education programs across the Bay Area and California to integrate a focus on whole child development into their teacher preparation and development efforts.
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 – © 2025. All Rights Reserved
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