Dropping grades in favor of high-quality feedback on assessments helped her students focus on learning instead of ranking.

I fell in love with working in a school setting and applied to begin my graduate degree is special education.

The irony here is that I had spent so much of my early years as a student resisting the idea of school altogether.

With dyslexia and attention deficit disorder, it’s an understatement to say that school was never my happy place.

The results revealed that students who participated in universal SEL programs showed a statistically significant improvement—a 4.2 percentile-point increase—in overall academic achievement compared to a control group. In programs that lasted for more than a semester, the gap between the two groups widened to 8.4 percentile points. 

These results are important because they provide research-backed evidence that SEL programs can improve academic achievement in literacy and math.