From leadership research to district action: Educational Leader Reports of Statewide Change in Conditions for SEL Implementation over 1 Year of CalHOPE Student Support

AI-assisted editorial implementation guide. Proposed district actions are separate from the original authors’ findings and recommendations. Independent peer review of this guide is not asserted.

Read source Search paper agent CC BY 4.0

Evidence and transfer

Education-related source: verify which participants, institutions and outcomes were actually studied before district adoption. Source publication type: research-article. License and identity checks do not establish study quality or causality.

Original authors’ abstract, reproduced under the source license:

Abstract This study examines changes in the conditions for social and emotional learning (SEL) implementation in California over the 2023–2024 school year, following approximately 3.5 years of CalHOPE Student Support. Grounded in the SHIFT-SEL model, CalHOPE aims to build statewide SEL infrastructure through a nested implementation support system, with County Offices of Education (COEs) positioned as key intermediaries. Educational leaders (507 in Fall 2023 and 386 in Spring 2024) reported on their well-being, workplace climate, and SEL implementation conditions. This study builds on prior work by including county, district, and school site SEL leaders in the analysis, enabling a broader examination of change across multiple levels of the education system. Cross-sectional comparisons showed that COE leaders reported more favorable conditions than district and school leaders, particularly in the extent of the supports they provided. Longitudinal analyses revealed small but significant improvements among district/school leaders in well-being, implementation supports, leadership capacities, and SEL structures and routines, while conditions at the COE level remained favorable. These findings suggest progress in infrastructure for SEL implementation support statewide and illustrate the potential of regional intermediaries for scaling prevention practice. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11121-025-01866-z. Keywords: Social and emotional learning (SEL), Implementation support, Statewide prevention infrastructure, Capacity building

Study methods

Data were collected in Fall 2023 and Spring 2024, approximately 40 and 45 months after the CalHOPE kick-off event, respectively. Prospective participants were sourced from a CalHOPE “Contact Directory”—a list of COE leaders contributing to CalHOPE, which was initiated and maintained by the State Planning Team. This directory also included COE leaders (e.g., division heads, county office superintendents) who were not involved in the day-to-day work of CalHOPE, but asked to be copied on communications by nature of their role overseeing employees advancing SEL. The second source of prospective county-level participants was prior survey respondents. This dual strategy created a broad, inclusive roster of prospective county-level participants.

Limitations

The current study was based on a sample of educational leaders working within a single statewide educational system and indicating at least some involvement in the provision of SEL support. Thus, the study’s results may not generalize to other statewide K-12 systems or to educational leaders not working as part of CalHOPE. Nevertheless, the sample—which spans nearly every county in California—represents a diverse array of educational settings that are embedded within diverse social and cultural systems. Because the BASEL-LV asks general questions about SEL conditions rather than specific questions about implementation supports within the state of California or within the CalHOPE system, the findings here are likely to be transportable to other K-12 systems and even ripe for cross-state comparisons.

A 90-day district inquiry

Days 1–15 · Appraise. Read the source methods, recruitment, comparator, outcomes and limitations. Record how the study setting differs from your district and which claim the design can support.
Days 16–30 · Design. Choose one school improvement question with teachers. Protect a short shared planning cycle, agree an instructional change and use a common rubric for examining student work. Agree participation, privacy protections, baseline and stopping rules before starting.
Days 31–60 · Observe. Collect the pre-agreed measures, keep a log of implementation changes and invite confidential voluntary feedback. Preserve existing support for staff and learners.
Days 61–90 · Decide. Review implementation fidelity, teacher time and independently scored student work against a recorded baseline. Examine access differences and competing explanations before attributing changes to leadership. Make a dated decision to stop, revise or extend the inquiry.

Board decision brief

Present the local problem, source setting, evidence limits, intervention, responsible owner, total cost, measured changes and uncertainty. Separate staff perceptions, implementation measures and student learning outcomes.

Attribution and reuse

Ashley N Metzger; Justin D Caouette; Patrick M Robinson-Link; Jax Braun; CalHOPE Research Committee; Valerie B Shapiro. Educational Leader Reports of Statewide Change in Conditions for SEL Implementation over 1 Year of CalHOPE Student Support. Prevention Science (2025-12-01). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-025-01866-z

Prepared 2026-11-07. Source authorship and DOI are preserved. The abstract and source passages are attributed extracts; this editorial guide is offered under the same CC BY 4.0 license.