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• Noncognitive skills are important: Incorporate them throughout teaching and learning.
• There is a strong connection between noncognitive attributes and life achievement.
• Mastery of noncognitive skills and dispositions is essential for at-risk learners.
• There is both rationale and strategy for assessing noncognitive skills and attributes.

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Emerging research shows that cognitive competencies are built on foundations of social, emotional, and personal attributes. According to the Institute of Education, “Non-cognitive skills including self-control and engagement in learning are [Page 114]correlated with high academic outcomes” (Gutman & Schoon, 2013, p. 2). In these schools, educators and students embrace, scale up, and utilize these building blocks.

Call them what you like, metacognitive, noncognitive, social-emotional, or something else, they are the keystones that ...