Begin teaching emotional competence to infants from their earliest days.
Use current emotional situations as an opportunity to teach and learn more appropriate emotion regulation strategies.
As key socializers of children’s behavior, emotions, and learning, teachers’ own intensive training and ongoing professional advancement are critical. Our program offers both asynchronous and synchronous professional development, feedback, and support.
In order to ensure successful understanding and implementation, it is vital that educators have the help and guidance they need at every step. The training program offers a strong system of reflective practice and support through mentoring and coaching.
Before educators and caregivers can help children successfully deal with their emotions, they must first be able to understand and manage their own emotions, stress, and anxiety.
Begin to ECSEL is designed to be woven into any existing programming or curriculum throughout the day, every day.
Proprietary begin to ECSEL® developmentally appropriate tools and characters provide children with the skills to identify and label their emotions, understand cause and effect relationships between emotions and behavior, and resolve interpersonal conflicts.
Our research has shown children who experience the begin to ECSEL program significantly outperform their peers nationally in key measures of emotional competence, self-regulation, empathy, and executive functions.
The begin to ECSEL strategies extend to the home, guiding parents in the critical understanding of their own emotional responses, underscoring the importance of modeling appropriate behavior, and enhancing their relationships.
While begin to ECSEL aligns with CASEL, NAEYC, Head Start, and State Standards, offering PDPs and CEUs to educators who complete the training, our approach goes above and beyond traditional SEL standards with our ECSEL standards.
Our evidence-based program is centered on innovative synchronous and asynchronous educator and mentor training that informs and guides teachers in the cornerstones of the begin to ECSEL program, with the guidance of trusted mentors. Our comprehensive training provides teachers with heat-of-the-moment strategies and tools for identifying emotions, managing feelings, and negotiating peaceful problem resolution.
A key component to the successful implementation of the begin to ECSEL program is the use of our proprietary developmentally appropriate tools to be used in the classroom. The program’s formative assessment supports and guides students’ recognition, understanding, and management of their emotions and those of others throughout the day.
At Housman Institute, we know that the success of any new initiative requires support and guidance, which is why the mentoring relationship is a key component of begin to ECSEL. We train select staff as mentors to ensure that the whole school community is supported in the program, able to learn, thrive, and grow together.
Begin to ECSEL not only transforms a school environment but enhances the curriculum. The program can be seamlessly woven throughout existing or new curriculum and programming to ensure emotional intelligence is incorporated continually throughout the day. Begin to ECSEL is aligned with CASEL, NAYCE, Head Start, and State Standards.
Children do not learn and grow only at school. Parents and families are their first teachers. We have developed tools to support family engagement and understanding of the begin to ECSEL program with important newsletters, webinars, and at-home tips and activities to ensure the experience continues beyond the school day. We know that parents, siblings, and extended family can also benefit from the important skills we teach. In this important way, the welfare of the school’s larger community thrives from being a part of the begin to ECSEL process.