Our Approach
“When your child or grandchild walks through the doors of school on the first day, she is entering an unacknowledged lottery. That lottery may place her in a classroom with a teacher who fosters growth mindset and encourages her self-regulation skills, or in one where she will disengage after being shamed for not mastering content quickly, or left behind because the teacher believes students should sink or swim. That child’s odds are further complicated by race, class, and culture, by the implicit and often unacknowledged biases all of us hold about one another, and the impact that differences in cultural background can play in how students and teachers interpret behavior and social cues…
The work of CRTWC is about changing those odds. The CRTWC Anchor Competencies Framework and our professional development initiatives lay out a comprehensive approach and provide a set of resources for making the social, emotional, and cultural dimensions of teaching and learning a fundamental priority that can be woven into all schools and teaching preparation programs in meaningful ways, regardless of a school’s resources, curricular programs, or population.” (Markowitz and Bouffard, 2020)
Our Mission
The Center for Reaching & Teaching the Whole Child believes that educational change starts with educators. Our goals are to build educators’ capacity to provide a safe, brave and supportive learning environment; promote equity in teaching and learning; build resilience and sense of optimism; enable academic success; and inspire responsibility for the greater good.
We envision a world in which educators are supported to continually develop their own social, emotional, and cultural competencies. Educators, in turn, consistently support the development of their students’ social, emotional, and cultural competencies so that children are resilient and able to reach their full potential.
We are a community of educators committed to teacher and student well-being. All of our actions, decisions, and goals are driven by the belief that every child deserves a quality education and, in order to achieve this, we must adopt a lens that integrates social, emotional and cultural teaching practices in all aspects of the curriculum and learning environment.
What the education community is saying about us
“I always leave our [professional development sessions] more inspired and motivated to try new ideas. I am learning to live [the lens] out in my own life and creating space for it in my classroom. It's been an unexpected gift that keeps on giving."
Rachel Bacosa
Social-Emotional Learning Instructional Coach, Sunnyvale School District
"Teaching with a Social, Emotional, and Cultural Lens is a call to action…Starting out with a clear framework that describes these practices, and moving to illustrative examples from real classrooms in real schools, [creates] a compelling blueprint to help practitioners, schools of higher education, and districts to integrate a social, emotional, and cultural lens into everything they do.”
David Adams
Chief Executive Officer, Urban Assembly, New York
“Teaching with a Social, Emotional, and Cultural Lens is ...a critical resource for any educator who seeks to supercharge and harness their craft to achieve the absolute best possible outcomes for themselves and the children they serve.”
Meria Joel Carstarphen
Formerly superintendent, Atlanta Public Schools, Georgia
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