Fundación Sientoxciento

This proposal is based on our program called “Aprendizaje al Sientoxciento” aiming to share tools and strategies designed to provide adults and the children in their lives with strong and long-lasting socioemotional skills. Additionally, this program strengthens family and/or school ties, promotes respectful and compassionate relationships, teaches ways to identify, express, and regulate emotions, fosters safe environments for children, and enables the upbringing of self-directed human beings able to make responsible decisions.

Our goal is to ensure that every participant:

• Understands the importance and impact of socioemotional development.
• Realizes the need for behavioral change and is willing to make changes to improve their own skills and those of the children in their lives.
• Understands what their strengths and weaknesses are, and what is their room for improvement.
• Make changes in their behavior and in their personal interactions.

This program is based on a combination of a multimedia approach, where participants receive solid teaching resources -audios, videos, and readings- to be reviewed at their own pace, as well as eight hours of workshop attendance and five hours of coaching. The main topics addressed in this program are: a. socioemotional development: its importance and its impact on individual and collective wellbeing; b. Mutual respect; c. Connection before correction; d. Self-care and self-regulation; e. Firm and kind interactions; f. Rewards and punishments: their long-term effects; g. Bad behavior: its root causes; h. Intrinsic motivation; i. Chores for children according to their age; j. Solution-driven approach; k. Assertive communication; l. The power of routines; m. Family/classroom meetings.

This program targets adults from families, schools, early childhood development centers, and other organizations where children and youth are served.

The coaching component of our program is pivotal for success. Attending a workshop is useful for understanding the importance and impact of socioemotional development and somehow useful to realize that some changes are needed. However, permanent training and individualized coaching are the most proper means of making real and sustainable changes. 

Aprendizaje al Sientoxciento is based on decades of research conducted by scholars like Charles Nelson and Jack Shonkoff from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, Jane Nelsen, founder of the Positive Discipline Association-, and the teams from CASEL and Turnaround from children, who have understood the main struggles of families, communities, and organizations serving children.

Throughout our first year of operations, working with families and educators serving children from different socioeconomic backgrounds, we have gathered, through surveys, interviews, and conversations, some lessons that have allowed us to improve our workshops´ topics and materials as well as better time management and adjust technical issues affecting our online training. The message from these parents and educators has been consistent: they are willing to help their children get the life skills they need to succeed in life. Thus, their feedback has reinforced our goal of giving them the proper knowledge and tools required for their socioemotional development. 

We believe that prosperous, inclusive, and sustainable societies are only achievable when they are built by upright, autonomous, and empathetic human beings who have developed socioemotional skills. These are skills that a person can learn and develop to behave in ways that benefit themselves and others, to achieve positive outcomes in their health, personal relationships (family, friends, neighbors, peers, etc.), and academic and professional endeavors, and to contribute in a significant way to society. With these skills, people can identify, express, and regulate their emotions and behaviors; empathize and cooperate with others; establish healthy and rewarding relationships with others; and make responsible decisions, among others.

 Robust research has thought us that children develop their social and emotional skills according to what they live and learn every single day and from every person who interacts with them and becomes a role model. We have also learned that every single person should be held accountable for child and youth development: from parents and teachers who interact daily with their children, to famous public figures who model behavior for others. Every single person counts, including parents, family, neighbors and community members, education, health and protection systems, governments at various levels, politicians, public figures, mass, and social media as well as people from private and social development sectors. Based on this evidence, we designed an approach comprised of 5 components:

•  Ensure nurturing interactions: relationships are the most vital factor to achieve effective socio-emotional development.  Although knowledge about and development of social and emotional skills are essential, interactions are the driver.
• Teach socioemotional skills: social and emotional skills are acquirable and malleable. They can be learned and practiced in all settings and by all people.
• Model socioemotional skills: children need parents and other adults in their lives who teach them and model social and emotional skills. Adults require training and intensive practice as well as a transformation of their own relations with others since adult modeling is key for building skills.
• Offer opportunities for children and youth to practice their socioemotional skills: to appropriately learn socioemotional skills, practice in everyday situations greatly matters.
• Improve environments: safe, caring, and supportive environments are pivotal to ensuring proper socio-emotional development. In such environments where children feel physically and emotionally safe, they can learn, practice, and acquire socioemotional skills and ensure healthy development.

 All these components are handled in Aprendizaje al Sientoxciento and are supplemented by our other two strategies: Knowledge and Transformation. Through Knowledge, we seek to share the impact and importance of socioemotional development with people in general since they will help us spread the message and thus, to strengthen children and youth's socioemotional skills. We share our message through our podcast, our participation in various networks and events, and through the resources we share on our website and social media.

Regarding Transformation, we currently lead the Advocacy committee at AFSEC – an alliance devoted to promoting socioemotional learning- where we wrote a document with context and recommendations for the President of Colombia elected for 2022-2026. Through Transformation, we also plan to support schools, early childhood centers, communities, and other types of organizations to carry out the systemic changes required to successfully ensure children and youth socioemotional development. 

Regarding Nesta´s Standards of Evidence, our current level is 1, with some data taking us towards level 2. 

Sientoxciento was built on rigorous research-based foundations. Two of its founders created, after many hours of research, a document that has been a beacon for the design of our three strategies. Furthermore, we are constantly reading new research and attending key webinars to keep up with socioemotional science state-of-the-art resources. As it was previously mentioned, we also adapt according to the lessons learned from the interactions with our users. 

Currently, we are only using surveys and interviews to receive feedback from the families we have served. That’s why, we urgently need rigorous technical support to design the most accurate methodology to track progress. We envision a tool where we can establish a specific baseline for each of our users and a report once the intervention has finished. Such a tool will help us track real progress, establish next steps for users, identify required changes or improvements, and tailor our coaching sessions to their specific needs. 

Aprendizaje al Sientoxciento: enabling prosperous, inclusive and sustainable societies for everyone, by changing one interaction at a time

Aprendizaje al Sientoxciento is a combination of permanent training, sound learning resources, and coaching sessions aimed to help parents and teachers make the sustainable changes required to improve their children´s socioemotional skills. It was designed that way following the recommendations made by Professor Shonkoff from Harvard University as well as many other scholars and researchers. At this stage, Sientoxciento wants to enhance this program by introducing a solid and comprehensive methodology of monitoring and evaluation that will help us track its impact and clearly identify opportunities to improve and scale in the middle term. Therefore, we seek to answer the following question:

What is the most accurate methodology to track the progress made by our users? 

and to develop the following outputs due to the support of the LEAP sprint team: 

• A Monitoring and Evaluation Plan to improve the program, track impact, and successfully scale it.
• A methodology where we can establish a specific baseline for each of our users and a report once the intervention has finished.