Taproot Learning Partners with Aperture Education to Add a Social Emotional Learning Assessment to its Online Curriculum

Aperture’s SEL screener, the DESSA-mini, will be integrated into Taproot Learning’s Camp Timber curriculum to measure students’ SEL skills.

 Charlotte N.C. (Dec. 17, 2018) — Online SEL curriculum provider Taproot Learning has partnered with Aperture Education to add Aperture’s social-emotional learning (SEL) screener to its Camp Timber curriculum suite.  The partnership allows teachers who are using Camp Timber to easily screen students for SEL competence using Aperture’s universal SEL screener, the DESSA-mini.

“Nurturing students’ social-emotional learning is becoming a global educational priority due to the strong links between academic and life success and a well-developed SEL skillset,” said Barker Davis, CEO and co-founder of Taproot Learning. “By partnering with Aperture Education, we are now able to offer our customers an extremely efficient and accurate way of screening students to determine their social and emotional competence. The data from the DESSA-mini will be a valued addition to our SEL educational suite.”

The DESSA-mini is a brief, yet powerful universal screener of social-emotional competence that allows educators to screen a student in less than a minute. As a strength-based and nationally standardized tool, the DESSA-mini offers a practical and reliable way to measure students’ social and emotional competence.

Camp Timber’s research-based curriculum provides schools with a wide range of engaging instructional multimedia (animated tutorials, eBooks, songs, student-modeling, and mindfulness exercises) foundationally sequenced in 10-minute chapters. The online K-5 SEL curriculum is entirely digitized, features built-in, activity-level PD tips for teachers and counselors and was designed for whole-class implementations. Taproot’s suite of age-scaled curricula addresses core SEL topics like Empathy, Respect, Self-Regulation, Conflict Resolution, Growth Mindset, Collaboration and Leadership and provides classroom, campus and district-level reports through its Camp Timber Dashboard.

“Social and emotional learning programs are most effective when they are augmented with reliable data,” said Jessica Adamson, CEO of Aperture Education. “Taproot Learning understands the importance of supporting the whole child and we are pleased to be able to support their customers by providing them with reliable data to support schools’ SEL work.”


About Aperture Education

Aperture Education specializes in social and emotional learning (SEL) solutions. Our flagship product, the DESSA Comprehensive SEL System, allows educators to measure, strengthen, and support social-emotional competence in youth in grades K-12. The DESSA System includes a suite of strength-based assessments, a universal screener that can be administered in less than a minute, and growth strategies and foundational practices to strengthen social and emotional competence. The DESSA System is lauded by researchers because it meets high standards for reliability and validity and is appreciated by educators for its ability to easily and quickly identify each student’s personal SEL strengths and provide practical supports that result in improved student outcomes. For more information, go to www.ApertureEd.com.

About Taproot Learning

Taproot Learning specializes in combining the necessity of SEL instruction with the scalability and enhanced engagement of digitization. Our online solutions are exhaustively engineered to highly entertain young learners while perfectly fitting the pedagogical, implementation and data requirements of educators. For more information on Taproot Learning or our Camp Timber SEL solution for young learners, go to www.Taprootlearning.com.

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