Building teams for support

The SEL team is made up of the people who are responsible for actually implementing and making change happen. There may be an SEL team at every level of implementation (schools, LEAs, and COEs).

When you think of who will be included on these SEL teams:

• Consider equity and diversity and the roles people have.
  

• Ideally, you would want 3-8 people on an SEL team.

In terms of responsibilities, SEL teams:

• Plan and articulate the vision of where this work is going.
  

• Are responsible for clear communication with all of the people who might be impacted by, or are a part of, the changes you are making.
  

• They engage and partner with other key stakeholders who can make change happen, and also regularly collect and use data to reflect on progress and plan next steps.

Action: If you have not yet identified an SEL team, use this understanding of their responsibilities to reach out to and identify people who can be on the team. Consider equity, diversity, and inclusion.

When working to implement SEL, you will likely need to work with people from across the system (e.g., with different organizations, different schools, across different regions, etc.). Thinking about who you need to work with and how you’re going to work with them is a key part of implementation.

Start by identifying who your system partners are and why you need to partner with them. Then, define collaboration goals and what level or intensity of relationship you want to have with each of your system partners.

To help you think about the degree of intensity you want to have with each of your partners based on the kinds of goals you’ve developed, you can use a spectrum of collaboration:

• Coexistence: You know about your system partner, but you don’t necessarily need to interact.
  

• Communication: You know of each other’s existence and have some type of knowledge exchange mechanism in place to be able to communicate bidirectionally.
  

• Cooperation: You are doing things together, but not necessarily in integrated ways. For example, event planning or a time-limited activity.
  

• Coordination: You are shifting the things you do in your normal work to accommodate the other system partner and aiming to create alignment in your work.
  

• Collaboration: You have long-term interactions, trusting relationships, and joint protocols and procedures.
  

• Integration: You work with each other in ways where you completely depend on that other system partner to do what you need to do in order to move forward. The level of the relationship is such that you essentially function as one organization.
  

Note that you may be in competition with your system partners. This is helpful to note as it can impact how you work together.

Action: Rate your relationships with your system partners according to the spectrum of collaboration. Are all of your relationships at the level of intensity you want them to be? If not, identify where you want to go and reflect on what actions you can take to get there.