Supporting Social Emotional Learning Growth with Student SEL Reports

Panorama’s New Student Social-Emotional Learning Reports Give Students Tools to Chart Their Own Growth

Last year, Panorama introduced Panorama for Social-Emotional Learning, an online platform for social-emotional learning (SEL) student surveys and data analytics. Since then, thousands of schools have used Panorama to measure and improve their students’ social-emotional learning at the school and district level. Now, Panorama is launching student social-emotional learning reports, providing easy-to-read, actionable information about individual students’ social emotional development. Students and their teachers and families are using student SEL reports to identify and communicate about students’ individual strengths and opportunities for growth.

Educators are using student SEL reports to see how each of their students is developing key social-emotional learning skills. Classroom reports help teachers and counselors identify students who need additional support and pair them up with peers based on similar or complementary strengths. Individual reports give students and the adults who support them a tool to understand and grow their social-emotional learning in targeted areas.

As districts turn to better data to personalize academic instruction, Panorama’s student SEL reports enable principals, teachers, and counselors to ensure each student is getting appropriate, personalized support around social-emotional learning skills, such as grit, growth mindset, social awareness, and self-management. Panorama’s reports are developed to be used online or in print, so that they can be easily shared by student support teams and with students and families for conversations and collaboration around supporting individual students’ social emotional development.

Download our guide to measuring social emotional learning to read SEL case studies from districts nationwide.

Students Chart Their Own Social Emotional Development 

By sharing social-emotional reports with students in one-on-one or whole class conversations, counselors and teachers empower students to chart their own course for social emotional development in areas like grit, self-management, learning strategies, and classroom effort. Social-emotional learning data is different than academic data. SEL data is a snapshot of a student’s perceptions of his or her SEL skills and can be used to spark conversations and provide a sense of personal ownership around behavioral evidence and goals for growth.

Over the past year, Panorama’s design and educator engagement teams interviewed students, teachers, and principals on how they would use Panorama’s personalized social-emotional learning reports. We heard from students that they value the opportunity to better understand their own social-emotional learning, and that they wanted the reports to be clearly meant for them.

In response to these interviews, we added clear, behavior-oriented explanations of each SEL topic. For example, a student report including self-management explains, “Students with strong self-management are calm and focused on their work.”

The Impact of Student SEL Data in Schools

Focusing adults on students’ social-emotional learning data can have profound impacts on student achievement. During our recent social-emotional learning webinar, educators from Long Beach Unified School District shared their approach to using SEL data for student growth. After the first year the school measured students’ social-emotional learning, staff at MacArthur Elementary School decided to focus on helping students develop growth mindset. In 2014-2015, only 53% of students responded favorably to questions about their growth mindset.

On the webinar, Principal Scott Fleming shared that he and others asked the critical question, “What are the implications of students’ low perceptions of ability and the effect on their academic achievement?” In 2015-2016, 81% of students at MacArthur Elementary responded favorably to questions about their growth mindset. Over the same time, test scores in ELA and math increased for every subgroup of students at MacArthur.

Focusing students on their own social-emotional learning skills can have a tremendous effects on students and schools. Counselors, teachers, and school leaders at Carolina Voyager School in Charleston, South Carolina are directly engaging with young students about social-emotional learning and using student reports to identify students who need support in specific areas. You can hear fourth graders from the school talk about what grit means to them and their enthusiasm for looking for and cultivating grit in their lives.

At Panorama, we’re excited to partner with more districts and school systems that are focusing on supporting students' social emotional development using personalized data. Please get in touch if you'd like to talk about bringing Panorama for Social-Emotional Learning to your district.