From Perspectives to Practice: What We’re Learning About Positive School Supports in MNPS

This blog post was adapted from an interview with Dr. Marisa Cannata of the Positive School Climate Working Group.

Supporting students’ personal competency development and fostering positive school climates have long been priorities for Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS). Through NashvillePeer, district leaders and Vanderbilt researchers are building on that commitment together — studying how these efforts are showing up across the district and using what they learn to strengthen practice even further.

Led by Vanderbilt’s Marisa Cannata and MNPS’s Krista Davis, the Positive School Climate Working Group brings together researchers and district staff around a shared research agenda focused on students’ personal competency skills and school culture. Rather than pursuing a single study, the group is building a connected body of research that moves from understanding current practice across the district, to studying school-level implementation, to ultimately examining how student development in this area relates to longer-term outcomes.

Understanding the Current Landscape

Funded through a NashvillePeer small grant, the working group’s first study sought to better understand the current context around social-emotional learning (SEL) in the district. Specifically, they examined how MNPS Support Hub staff define SEL, how the district supports students’ development of social-emotional competencies, and how district leaders describe school-level implementation.

The research found strong agreement about the importance of supporting students’ social-emotional development, along with clear evidence of the district’s substantial investment in this work. At the same time, interviews pointed to opportunities to strengthen consistency across schools. Several themes stood out:

• SEL is valued, but often reactive. Staff affirmed its importance for all students, yet practices tended to emerge in high-need moments rather than as everyday instruction.
• Broad familiarity, less depth. Many staff could name the CASEL competencies (MNPS’ SEL framework), but fewer could describe what building them looks like in a classroom.
• Events, not routines. SEL support often showed up as isolated activities — like assemblies — rather than being embedded into daily instruction.
• SEL is frequently conflated with behavior management or counseling, which can crowd out more proactive, skill-building approaches.
• Success often rests on individual champions rather than systems built to sustain and scale across schools.

The findings also underscore the importance of connecting SEL to the everyday work of teaching and learning. As lead researcher Marisa Cannata explained,

“It’s very important to [the district] that SEL is not seen as a nice-to-have add-on to the core work of schools.”

Together, these findings offer a clearer picture of how SEL is currently supported across the district — and point to concrete opportunities to strengthen implementation, common language, and alignment.

Turning Research into Improvement

In December 2025, findings from the initial study were shared with MNPS executive leadership to help inform future research priorities and ongoing improvement efforts. That work is already shaping conversations about creating more consistent language around student supports, strengthening alignment across Student Support Services teams, and clarifying which programs and practices contribute most to student outcomes.

The findings have also helped sharpen the questions the working group hopes to answer next. A stronger understanding of how SEL is implemented across schools lays the groundwork for studying which approaches best support students’ development of personal competencies.

Looking Ahead

The Positive School Climate Working Group’s research agenda builds on this initial work through two complementary paths. The first will dig deeper into implementation — studying how schools integrate personal competency skills into daily practice, the conditions that support high-quality implementation, and how implementation varies across school contexts.

The second will explore how students’ development of personal competencies relates to longer-term outcomes. Drawing on existing longitudinal MNPS student survey data and linking those data with later education and workforce records, the working group will examine how growth in the five CASEL competencies is associated with outcomes such as postsecondary attainment, economic stability, and involvement with the justice system. The study will also examine how school climate, academic achievement, disciplinary experiences, and postsecondary enrollment may help explain these relationships.

Together, these studies will build on one another to answer increasingly complex questions about student personal competency skills in MNPS schools. By first understanding how SEL is defined and supported across the district, the working group is creating a foundation for future research on implementation and student outcomes.