Our History

In 2009, the Center for Reaching & Teaching the Whole Child (CRTWC) was founded by Dr. Nancy Markowitz in her role as Professor of Teacher Education at San José State University (SJSU). At the time of CRTWC’s founding, relatively little attention was being paid to the role of adult or educator SEL, or the need to bring SEL into teacher preparation. Additionally, the connection between SEL and issues of equity in our schools was not being made. Indeed, it was not until recently that a focus on equity and adult SEL have even been emphasized and prioritized (Jagers et al., 2019; Schonert-Reichl, 2017).

Dr. Markowitz and her colleagues recognized that teachers would need to develop their own SEL skills and competencies to better support students’ social and emotional development and to teach the whole child. To most effectively develop these skills and competencies and set teachers up to thrive in teaching, it was determined that this work needed to start during the teacher preparation period. Intervening during teacher preparation, when teachers’ skills, mindsets, and beliefs are most malleable, is an important window of opportunity.

In 2010, CRTWC, with the support from the Dean of the College of Education and faculty from the Department of Education at SJSU, was granted status as an Organizational Research Unit in the College of Education.

Inspired by Dr. Markowitz’s vision, a small group of interested faculty at SJSU and a group of cooperating teachers and administrators in Sunnyvale School District coalesced to develop a framework and approach for bringing this work into teacher preparation. The group homed in on the fundamental practices that teachers need to build students’ social and emotional skills and identified a set of core social and emotional competencies that teachers would need for their own development and practice. The group then created a framework to guide the integration of SEL into teacher preparation – the Social-Emotional Dimensions of Teaching and Learning framework.

In 2016, CRTWC moved from SJSU to become an independent project of Community Initiatives- a non-profit fiscal sponsor - a move that allowed for greater independence, innovation, flexibility, and growth as the organization continued to develop. Also at this time, WestEd began conducting a three-year external evaluation study of CRTWC’s efforts.

Shortly after the move to Community Initiatives, Dr. Markowitz and the CRTWC team worked with leaders in the field of culturally responsive and sustaining teaching, the CRTWC Advisory Board, and Sunnyvale District partners, to include cultural competencies into the development of a new and improved framework. This work led to the current framework - the Social, Emotional, and Cultural Anchor Competencies Framework (see below).

Since the development of the Anchor Competencies Framework, CRTWC has collaborated with universities, state commissions, and school districts to support the development of both educators’ and students’ social, emotional, and cultural competencies (SEC).