The Chicago Equity-Centered Innovation Forum’s webinar on September 30, 2021, welcomed nearly 60 educators from Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and around the state. The session built on the ongoing work CPS is doing to support its competency-based education (CBE) schools to incorporate adaptive competencies into the curriculum and integrate social-emotional learning instruction. As one of its strategic priorities for its CBE schools, CPS is focusing its adaptive competency work, aligned with CASEL’s Transformative Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), to help students explicitly grapple with broader issues of social justice and promote their ability to analyze and oppose systems that inequitably favor some segments of the population.
The webinar addressed using performance-based assessment for CASEL’s Transformative SEL and featured author and international speaker Karin Hess, PhD and CASEL’s Practice Integration Specialist Tyrone Martinez-Black. It was an inspirational hour and a half in which the presenters walked through both concepts and how they work together to meet students where they are. The presenters reminded us that we ourselves, along with our students, are always engaged in problem-solving and always growing in our SEL. They even addressed how these principles are key to supporting and engaging diverse learners and English learners. Check out the recording and the presentation slides for practical examples of the principles in action along with links to additional resources.
About CEIF
CEIF promotes models of personalized instruction, competency-based approaches, performance assessments, project-based learning, and other emerging innovations that provide promising education frameworks. CEIF identifies, supports, and amplifies models for addressing systemic inequities that are unlikely to emerge from schools making more incremental changes. EdSystems collaborates with staff from the Chicago Public Schools Office of College and Career Success to organize and co-facilitate forums where implementers of innovative models in secondary education can share best practices and strategize toward solutions, receive support and guidance from national experts, and learn about implementation models from other Illinois districts and other states. Related resources are available in the CEIF Resource Hub.
