PROJECT ONWARD: WOO
Social-Emotional Growth Through Organized Support
Students with emotional, behavioral, and mental health challenges often need explicit instruction in social-emotional skills to thrive in educational settings. In this strand, we explore strategies that help students develop self-regulation, build positive relationships, and manage emotions effectively. By creating supportive environments, teaching mindfulness practices, establishing calming corners, and explicitly modeling social skills, educators empower students to navigate challenges and engage meaningfully with their learning. When students can recognize and manage their emotions, they develop the foundation needed for academic success and positive social interactions.
This strand explores practical approaches for supporting students' social-emotional development in specialized settings. Topics include implementing calming corners as tools for self-regulation, teaching explicit social skills through structured frameworks like "I Do - We Do - You Do," fostering collaborative environments where all staff reinforce positive behaviors, and creating consistent PBIS theme months. It provides actionable tools for helping students develop self-awareness, manage feelings, and form positive relationships through mindfulness practices, individualized skill analyses, and peer mediation. The strand emphasizes the importance of collaborative teaming to ensure social skills are reinforced consistently throughout the day, creating a cohesive approach that helps students build the emotional and social competencies needed to succeed both in school and in life.
PROJECT ONWARD
What's in the Woo strand?
Monthly Themes for Behavioral and Emotional Growth
Mindful Pathways
Mindful Pathways integrates monthly PBIS themes such as empathy, self-control, and integrity with mindfulness practices to help students develop emotional regulation, focus, and self-awareness in challenging behavioral environments. Teachers implement these concepts through visual reinforcements, classroom discussions, recognition systems, and mindfulness exercises like balloon breathing, body scans, and mindful eating, while consistently modeling desired behaviors themselves. The instructional approach creates a supportive environment where students learn to manage stress, develop empathy, make thoughtful decisions, and build resilience through present-moment awareness, helping them respond rather than react to emotional triggers and fostering long-term emotional health.
Explicit Teaching for Social Skills Mastery
Making the Invisible Visible
Making the Invisible Visible focuses on two complementary approaches for supporting students with emotional, behavioral, and mental health challenges: creating effective calming corners for emotional regulation and providing explicit social skills instruction. Calming corners serve as dedicated classroom spaces where students can self-regulate using strategies like deep breathing, mindfulness activities, and journaling, while explicit social skills instruction follows the "I Do, We Do, You Do" framework to teach skills that neurotypical students might learn incidentally. Both approaches are essential because they make invisible skills visible through intentional modeling, structured practice, and supportive feedback, ultimately helping students develop the self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making competencies needed for success in school and life.
Reducing Problems While Building Skills
Dual-Focus Strategies
Effective behavioral support requires simultaneously reducing challenging behaviors while teaching functional replacement skills through structured frameworks like Skillstreaming, which breaks complex behaviors into developmentally-appropriate, teachable steps. Success depends on explicit documentation in Behavior Intervention Plans (BIPs), alignment with IEP goals, and consistent implementation across all service providers and settings to ensure students receive unified support. This comprehensive approach transforms replacement behaviors from abstract concepts into practical skills, creating a balanced intervention that promotes student independence while providing measurable data to guide instructional decisions and adjustments.
Creating a School-Wide Culture of Social Competence
Modeling What Matters
Modeling What Matters emphasizes that social skills instruction is most effective when integrated throughout the school day by all staff members rather than taught in isolation, as students with emotional, behavioral, and mental health challenges need consistent practice across settings to develop and generalize these skills. The content highlights collaborative teaming strategies where every adult models, prompts, and reinforces the same social expectations during natural opportunities like group work, transitions, and peer conflicts, creating a unified approach that builds student confidence and supports lasting skill development. Additionally, the module introduces peer mediation as a structured framework where trained student mediators guide peers through conflict resolution using a five-step process (introduction, storytelling, problem-solving, agreement, and closure) that empowers students to resolve disagreements through communication and mutual respect while adults provide appropriate support and oversight.