New Aperture Education Feature Incorporates SEL Assessment Data with Harmony SEL Curriculum -- THE Journal

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New Aperture Education Feature Incorporates SEL Assessment Data with Harmony SEL Curriculum

By Kristal Kuykendall
06/21/22

Aperture Education has launched a new tool to help districts incorporate SEL assessment data in their classroom usage of Aperture’s Harmony SEL curriculum, the company said today.

The new solution, called Harmony SEL Crosswalk, “identifies areas in which Aperture’s DESSA SEL assessment aligns with Harmony’s curriculum to help schools understand how to differentiate support in Harmony lessons to have the most impact on students,” according to a news release. Crosswalk is free to download and use, a company spokesperson said.

Harmony SEL offers social-emotional curriculum for PreK–6 students through lesson units such as “Empathy & Critical Thinking,” “Problem Solving,” and “Communication.”

The company’s DESSA solution assesses students’ competence in eight areas of SEL: self-awareness, self-management, social-awareness, relationship skills, goal-directed behavior, personal responsibility, decision-making, and optimistic thinking, according to Aperture’s website.

“There are a lot of tools out there to support social and emotional learning, and sometimes it can be difficult to see where they fit together,” said Aperture Education CEO Jessica Adamson. “More than 45,000 schools use the Harmony SEL curriculum and many of them also use the DESSA. We created Crosswalk to make it easier to understand how the DESSA data and the Harmony SEL lessons can be used together to support students, and to measure the effectiveness of the curriculum.”

When a school uses both DESSA and Harmony SEL, the new Harmony SEL Crosswalk solution provides actionable insights for teachers on how to use the DESSA data, Aperture said. “For example, if DESSA data indicates that several students in a class need support in the area of decision-making, the teacher can use Crosswalk to identify which Harmony SEL lessons teach those skills so they can provide more support when implementing those lessons in class,” according to the news release.

Harmony SEL Crosswalk can also alert teachers using a Multi-Tiered Systems of Support approach when supplemental instruction is called for in Tier 2 and Tier 3, and it allows districts to more easily measure the impact of Harmony SEL curriculum using the DESSA assessment data, the company said.

Learn more at Aperture’s web page for Harmony SEL.

About the Author

Kristal Kuykendall is editor, 1105 Media Education Group. She can be reached at [email protected].

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