Meeting a global socio-emotional learning program with Think Equal

Community of Practice on Socio-Emotional Learning

Following our meaningful fifth gathering with Transcend, where we explored how consistent routines can build belonging, regulation and readiness to learn, we are excited to continue this journey with our sixth session, led by Think Equal.

This gathering welcomes Leslee Udwin, founder of Think Equal, a global socio-emotional learning programme currently reaching over 900,000 children across 41 countries, NY city to Zimbabwe (materials being recorded in 15 languages), Pakistan to UK, Palestine to Mexico, and others.

What makes the programme distinctive is the design itself. Rather than a pre-service training-then-deploy model, teachers are trained while they teach through 45 hours of in-classroom practice over 30 weeks, plus in-person and online layers. Over two years, teachers become fully grounded in the SEL evidence base – Freud, Vygotsky, the pedagogies, the theory, and the practical “how”.

In this 90-minute session, Leslee will:

Walk us through the Think Equal’s journey, model and emerging evidence of impact, including parent and teacher voices now surfacing across contexts, from a mother in Somalia whose five-year-old is mediating disputes in the street, to classrooms in Botswana, Uttarakhand and Uganda.

Engage with four questions our community has been sitting with across every session so far:

• How do we navigate the limited funding currently available for SEL?
• How do we measure impact meaningfully, given how thin current measurement often is?
• How do we support teachers who themselves are often carrying trauma?
• How do we integrate SEL into other subjects, rather than treat it as a standalone period?

We welcome your participation to move from design principles to practical implementation, and to contribute your own experience to a growing community repository of what is actually working on the ground.

More about the Community of Practice

The Global Schools Forum in collaboration with Labhya launched a Community of Practice dedicated to Socio-Emotional Learning (SEL). This practitioner-led community will move from foundational design to advanced implementation through three action-oriented sprints. We will build a shared repository of effective frameworks and tools, address the critical human element of teacher enablement, and tackle the challenge of measuring impact while scaling with quality.

We welcome your participation to move from design principles to practical implementation, and contribute to our growing repository of effective SEL strategies.