Social-Emotional Learning and “The Westfield Effect”
A 25th Year Retrospective

The Westfield Day School began by helping struggling students overcome obstacles that led to school dysfunction and failure. We believed that students with underlying learning, social-emotional, or neuro-processing difficulties could benefit from spending time in a small, nurturing school environment that offered academic and emotional support.  When improved and ready to move on, they could then find suitable school placement. It was, and still is, a simple idea, utilizing the well-established psychotherapeutic principle of “the healing relationship” within a school; hence, our motto, “Linking Education and Emotional Support”.

The formal therapeutic aspect of the school is provided by school therapists and group therapy. Additionally, there is an extensive informal aspect. For example, role-modelling by caring teachers and staff encourages a positive student peer culture.The emphasis on supportive relationships, while not formalized, is the “beating heart” of the school. The process of socializing all students to the importance of mutual support begins even before admission as the core principles of the school are explained to prospective students and parents.These features constitute some of the important aspects of the school’s social learning model refined over the past 25 years.

A similar model that has received gradual, widespread introduction in contemporary education is called Social-Emotional Learning (SEL). This began out of a collaboration among educators, researchers and child advocates in New Haven, CT in the mid-1990’s known by the acronym “CASEL”. They developed a school-based program to improve social and emotional competence in children. They defined SEL as helping students “learn the skills and knowledge…to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships…” [https://casel.org/about-us/]  According to research by CASEL, the founding organization of SEL programs, “by the 2023–2024 school year, 83 percent of school principals reported that their schools used a SEL curriculum”.[see: https://casel.org/links/social-and-emotional-learning-in-u-s-schools/ September 2024]

Despite major conceptual similarities, Westfield’s social learning model differs from SEL in many important ways.  One important difference is that SEL is instructionally based and graded just like any other academic subject with measurable learning standards. There is no such didactic element at Westfield. Social learning takes place in “real time” throughout the entire school day. Students are encouraged to interact in mutually supportive ways through their interactions with more socially positive peers or teachers and staff.

In 2000 when we started Westfield–prior to the acceptance and implementation of SEL in schools–our relationship-based social learning model lacked research or evidence to demonstrate its effectiveness, and it was met with considerable skepticism by school districts. However, over time the outcomes both surprised us and convinced the skeptics. While we believed Westfield was a compassionate, supportive alternative for students facing ongoing school dysfunction and failure, we didn’t expect that relationship-building through mutual acceptance could also result in “treating” many of the underlying mental health conditions that led students to us in the first place. Yet, that is what our work with hundreds of students over 25 years has shown.

Students who come to us with a variety of needs and mental health conditions improve in an “across-the-board” way.  Not just in academics or emotionally, but they improve across many domains of personal, social, behavioral, intellectual, and cognitive functioning.  This realization has led us to refer to such global improvement as “The Westfield Effect”.

Now,  the reasons for the robustness of positive outcomes are yet to be determined and the theory validated by research, but the fact of our success and “The Westfield Effect” cannot be denied.

Perhaps sometime in the next 25 years the value of relationship-building for its positive effect on learning for all students—whether they have special needs or not–may become, like SEL has, a validated and accepted aspect of education everywhere.