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• A large majority of teachers expressed confidence that they could improve students' social and emotional competencies. At the same time, many teachers believed that factors beyond their control had a greater influence on students' SEL than they did themselves, and that pressure to improve student academic achievement made it difficult to focus on SEL.
• Three-quarters of teachers received some professional development (PD) that addressed SEL during the 2018–2019 school year. The topics that PD was least likely to cover were adapting SEL practices to different cultures or linguistic backgrounds and using student SEL data.
• Teachers' sense of well-being was positively associated with their reported emphasis on SEL practices. Teachers in lower-poverty schools reported higher levels of well-being compared with their counterparts in higher-poverty schools.
• Elementary teachers reported higher levels of school supports for SEL than secondary teachers did.
• Half of teachers did not know whether their states or districts had adopted SEL standards. Teachers who perceived that their state or district had adopted SEL standards indicated greater use of SEL practices than other teachers; whether the state had actually adopted standards was not a predictor of teachers' reported use of SEL practices.
• The use of SEL curricula or programs was more common among elementary teachers, whereas secondary teachers reported greater reliance on community engagement, teacher/student check-ins, and student involvement in school decisions.
• Teachers in lower-poverty schools reported using peer mentoring, project-based learning, and guided inquiry to a greater extent than those in higher-poverty schools.

RAND researchers present results from a spring 2019 survey of a nationally representative sample of kindergarten through grade 12 (K–12) public school teachers about their approaches to supporting students' social and emotional learning (SEL) and the factors that might influence those approaches. The authors explore teachers' SEL practices, including both classroom- and school-level approaches. The authors also examine teachers' beliefs about SEL, their emotional well-being, professional development related to SEL, school-level supports for SEL, and district and state SEL standards. All of these conditions can contribute to the likelihood that educators will adopt high-quality SEL practices. The findings shed light on how SEL practices and supports can depend on the population of students that a school serves and explore how multiple aspects of teacher well-being are related to SEL practices. Although these data were gathered before schools closed because of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in spring 2020, the findings will continue to be relevant as educators work to enact SEL practices in both in-person and remote instructional contexts in future school years.

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