My name is Dr. Heidi Stevenson and I’ll never forget sitting at my desk and the initial excitement I felt when learning that SEL and student well-being were becoming valued in education. I stood up to share it with my colleagues, but sat back down as reality set in. 

 

I found myself head in hand, grappling with questions like, "How can I possibly learn a new curriculum and integrate it into my packed teaching schedule?" and "How do I even begin to navigate the maze of SEL frameworks and CASEL competencies?" I literally felt like my head was spinning so I set it aside.

 

What made me pick it back up and commit to SEL? 

 

I later learned that teaching with SEL competencies can raise test scores by an impressive 11 percentile points and significantly increase prosocial behavior in students (Durlak et. al, 2011). That was all the incentive I needed. I dove deep into an intensive SEL training and started integrating these transformative strategies into my own classroom.

 

I was so inspired by the difference I saw in students’ mental health and well-being, as well as the time it saved, that I committed to teaching other educators about SEL through non-profit work, designing a conference,  publishing articles, co-editing a journal, helping create California's SEL benchmarks and serving as an SEL consulting partner.

 

Throughout this journey I consistently heard from educators about four main areas of frustration: managing a classroom, being culturally responsive, raising test scores and handling the increasing mental health issues they were facing in their classrooms every day. Many of them felt like I did early on, that integrating SEL seemed like a good idea but it felt out of reach. I knew something had to be done.

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That’s why I founded Transformative Outcomes Consulting (TOC) to provide a direct answer to these four challenges; the CALM Professional Learning (PL) training in SEL. It's