Architecture of Grace · Crosswalk
CASEL Five Competencies Crosswalk
CASEL's five core competencies, mapped to Architecture of Grace's four pillars — Identity, Self-Compassion, Forgiveness, Grace — and its five practiced moves. Then the part a one-page crosswalk usually leaves out: how each competency develops across the grade bands, and how the framework reaches all four of CASEL's settings rather than only the classroom.
The five competencies
| CASEL competency | Grace move / pillar | What it looks like | What carries it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Self-Awareness | The Coach Voice · Identity | Naming feelings; separating a mistake from one's worth. | Book unit on identity; the Identity Audit (w1); the Perfectionism Spectrum (w5); the anchor chart that stays up. |
| Self-Management | The Pause · Release / Boundary | Regulating before reacting; letting go of what isn't theirs; holding a kind, firm boundary. | The Pause routine; Quiet Space and its pathways; the somatic floor materials; the Daily Check-In as a daily rehearsal, not a measurement. |
| Social Awareness | The Charitable Read | Extending the benefit of the doubt; reading others' feelings and perspectives. | Scenario card decks; the novels' cohort followed across five Rooms; the autism-adapted chart sets, which teach difference as design. |
| Relationship Skills | The Repair Move · Grace | Owning impact; moving toward repair; turning rupture into reconnection. | The five-step Repair Protocol; Talk It Out, the whole-class board; Rewriting the Script (w6); the Mistake Wall. |
| Responsible Decision-Making | Release / Boundary · Difficult-vs-Unsafe | Choosing a next step; telling "difficult" from "unsafe"; acting with care for self and others. | Values Under Pressure (w2); the Choice & Agency Map (w3); the difficult-versus-unsafe distinction taught explicitly as a skill. |
The four settings · where the competency is practised
CASEL's framework is a set of concentric rings, and a curriculum that only reaches the innermost one is half a framework. Architecture of Grace has something in each.
| Setting | What the framework puts there | Evidence it happened |
|---|---|---|
| Classroom | Six books K through adult; anchor charts as printable sets and as eleven live boards built with the class on the projector; scenario decks; worksheet packs; Talk It Out; Quiet Space; thirty interactive practice pages. | Daily Log; class trends; exit slips; probe records. |
| School | The MTSS report and its triangle; the adult team check-in, so a colleague who has the student for one period can answer honestly; the practitioner arc and the role Quick-Starts, including one written for MTSS coordinators. | Tier movement over time; school-wide and class-level reports; a colleague's observation, attributed. |
| Family | Matching Home Editions of every book; the Home Check-In across morning, afternoon and evening; home observations in the family's own words; the Family & adults tab; the parent-facing goal link. | Home observations beside classroom ones — the same skill, two environments, never averaged together. |
| Community | The mentoring band; Book 6, The Dwelling, which follows the same cohort into adult life; the Practitioner Edition pathway for adults doing the work themselves. | The adult record, kept on the same instrument in the same language. |
How each competency develops · the grade-band arc
| Competency | K–2 · Foundation | 3–5 · Framework | 6–8 · Interior | 9–10 · Facade | 11–12 & adult |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Self-Awareness | Name the feeling out loud. | Notice the feeling before it moves you. | Tell the feeling from the story you told about it. | Notice the face you put on for other people. | Author the account of yourself. |
| Self-Management | A body that can be calmed, and one way to do it. | A Pause you choose, not one you are given. | Regulate under peer pressure. | Hold a boundary that costs you something. | Sustain it without an adult nearby. |
| Social Awareness | Other people feel things too. | The benefit of the doubt, offered on purpose. | Read a room you are not the centre of. | See the pressure other people are under. | Extend it to people who did not extend it to you. |
| Relationship Skills | Say sorry and mean it. | Repair, in five steps, rehearsed. | Repair when it is genuinely your fault. | Repair across a real rupture. | Repair as a professional practice. |
| Responsible Decision-Making | Safe and not safe. | Difficult and unsafe are different. | Choose the next step, not the whole road. | Decide when nobody is checking. | Decide for people who depend on you. |
One thing this framework does not claim
Disclosed here and everywhereCASEL's competencies are a map of what to teach. They are not a measurement scale, and the framework's three domains — Emotional Regulation & Well-Being, Self-Compassion & Growth Mindset, Social Competency & Repair — are not the five competencies renamed. They overlap; they are not the same object; and the instrument that measures the three has not been independently validated against the five, or against anything else.
On the site today
Where each thing named above lives now.
- Room 12 · Room 18 · Room 36 · Room 104 · Room 207 — the five SEL rooms, each with its lessons, workbook, anchor charts and Grace in Practice.
- Quiet Space and the calm & regulation tools; Talk It Out.
- The Educator Dashboard — the daily check-in, exit slips, the adult team check-in, the MTSS report, and Brick by Brick growth.
- Family Mode — the home check-in and the family's own observations.
- Academic standards — every course, unit by unit.