Safe and Supportive Learning Environments

Safe and supportive learning environments are linked to increased student engagement, attendance, achievement, and success.

WestEd supports your school, district, or state to develop the knowledge and build the capacity needed to foster equitable learning conditions during everyday instruction and throughout school communities.

Our Safe and Supportive Learning Environments (SSLE) professional learning and technical assistance services focus on many topics that may be familiar, such as trauma-informed, restorative, and culturally responsive practices, social and emotional learning (SEL), school climate, and related whole-person topics, with attention to equity throughout.

What You Will Learn:

With the facilitation, coaching, and consulting from our multidisciplinary and highly skilled staff, we will help you learn how to:

• Reflect on and adapt practices to shift values, attitudes, mindsets, biases and beliefs on personal/individual, interpersonal/collective, and structural/systemic levels.
• Understand sustainable systems and structures to promote effective implementation, scale-up, and ongoing improvement.
• Lead improvement efforts that meaningfully engage staff, students, and families as equal partners to co-create equitable conditions for learning.
• Tailor your implementation of SSLE initiatives so your efforts are working together to achieve desired goals.

Who Will Benefit:

• Teachers
• School and district administrators
• District directors of student services
• District school improvement leaders
• State education leaders
• State assistant or deputy superintendents

Safe and Supportive Learning Environments Essentials

Our flagship professional learning offering is the SSLE Essentials, a 10-part professional learning series for both K–12 staff and administrators.

The SSLE Essentials consists of practical and manageable modules that bring together the most important or “essential” pieces of the research, frameworks, practices, and lenses that help create and sustain safe and supportive learning environments.

The SSLE Essentials series contains 8 Essentials for school/district staff and an additional 2 Essentials for administrators and other school leaders, for a total of 10 Essentials for administrators.

The series can be delivered on-site or virtually, which includes synchronous learning and peer collaboration as well as asynchronous experiential practice and reflection.

View the Info Brief for more information.

What Makes Our Services Unique

Rather than adding another framework or program to pre-existing SSLE-related efforts, our offerings are designed to help you synthesize and apply a broad cluster of research-based content and culturally responsive practices. We emphasize collaboration and local contexts and prioritize educator-friendly language that removes stigma and simplifies similar or overlapping concepts.

As new research and evidence-based frameworks emerge dynamically in the field, our Resilient & Healthy Schools and Communities team developed our approach iteratively with districts and state education agencies across the country, subject matter experts and field professionals, including a state education agency’s community of practice supporting school and district administrators.

Cost: Costs vary based on the needs of each client and the services selected.

To schedule sessions or learn more about our Safe and Supportive Learning Environments offerings, please contact us at SSLE@wested.org.