Guidelines for Systems Development
The organizational and systems challenges in education are considerable. To guarantee benefits of CRE, educators must be strategic about what it takes to build programs in systems with poor resources, crowded curriculum, expectations of inclusive school community, and economic upheaval (Bird & Sultmann, 2010).
CASEL has provided suggestions for best practices to implement programs at the classroom, school, and district levels (Zins, Bloodworth, Weissberg, & Walberg, 2007). Among their guidelines for developing SEL initiatives are direct teaching and modeling of skills, developmentally and culturally appropriate instruction, integration into extracurricular activities, school-family-community partnerships, quality staff development and support, outcomes evaluation, and dissemination factors (Zins & Elias, 2007; Zins, Weissberg, Wang, & Walberg, 2004).Linking with the larger community is important but difficult. Looking at peace and reconciliation work in Northern Ireland, Cairns (1996) and Smith, Daunic, Miller, and Robinson (2002) both confirm that schoolbased initiatives require community links and support to succeed. While school-based programs may be able to develop individual skills, without involvement of community members in the program, the skills wane and the impacts to intergroup and social peace building are less likely to happen (Williams, 2004).