What’s New with Second Step® Programs: Advancing Through Continuous Improvement

Like the best educators, Second Step® programs are continuously evolving to meet the needs of students and help them thrive in a rapidly changing world. We’re constantly seeking meaningful feedback from our educator partners, like you, to understand how we can make our programs even more effective in empowering children to thrive in the classroom and beyond.

This process of real-time utilization of usage data and user feedback is a major part of our commitment to the education community. In fact, we collected over 26,000 in-lesson surveys from educators in the last year to help inform our improvements.

Our commitments to quality and integrity in continuous improvement also include active oversight from our highly credentialed in-house research scientists, partnership with external grant-funded research on our programs, adherence to key education frameworks, co-creation with standing advisory groups, and a practice of regular annual updates to improve our digital programs.

When it comes to fulfilling these commitments, we’re proud to say that the past year has been a major success.

Over the last year, we’ve unveiled a new program, updated and improved existing programs based on extensive field research and feedback, and advanced the national conversation around what it means to empower children with the skills they need to be successful in school and life—skills like resilience, problem-solving, emotion regulation, and more. Time and time again, we’ve put practical, research-based resources in the hands of educators to make a real difference in the lives of students.

In 2025, the Second Step family of programs remains the critical solution to support the well-being of children and impact school communities for the better.

Here, we’re excited to highlight some of the biggest advancements in the Second Step offering, along with several other changes to come in 2025 and beyond.

We know schools need to do more with less, so we’re adding new features that make the Second Step family of programs an all-in-one solution to support and strengthen students’ essential skills. This isn’t just an upgrade—it’s a transformation.

Highlights from the past year

Evolving to “human skills”

Committee for Children, the creator of Second Step programs, has embarked on an exciting evolution to advance our mission. Rooted in our commitment to research, effective implementation, and engaging content, we have a new way to describe the essential skills students need to thrive: human skills. We believe this new term, “human skills,” better encompasses our mission and the impact Second Step programs make, empowering students to strengthen the skills they need to thrive in a changing world. As we embark on this change, we remain diligent in supporting students and in living up to the trust you’ve placed in our organization and our programs.

We’re expanding our focus to include skills for deepened success both in school and beyond graduation. We can better support the whole learner by developing the vital human skills needed in the world of today and tomorrow. As our partners, we know you may have questions, and we’ve provided some answers below. To learn more about human skills, you can visit our FAQ page.

Second Step® High School launches

After years of development, tests, and consultations with educators and students, we launched Second Step High School, an innovative digital curriculum designed to empower every student with the skills to succeed in high school and beyond.

Our goal was to fill a critical gap with a research-backed program that’s engaging and seamlessly aligned across all high school grade levels. Through extensive research and collaboration with high school educators and students, we aimed to differentiate our program from others by focusing on what truly works with adolescents.

What do Second Step® High School users think of the program so far?

We’ve been hearing the needs of schools and educators across the country who have been using the program.

As we talked to high school educators about the success they’re having with the new program, we heard that many were eager to implement additional student activities alongside the educator practices. We value your feedback, so we got to work expanding our student activities. Now, there are 25 new extension activities available to make Second Step High School implementation even stronger. We’ve also added in new alternate schoolwide and educator practices for Pathway 1, making implementation even more flexible.

A revamped Second Step® Middle School

To ensure Second Step Middle School continues to provide the tools and support educators and students need to excel in this pivotal phase, we revamped Unit 2 with a new focus on developing a positive sense of self. We also updated this unit’s design with more age-appropriate visuals and scenarios to enhance engagement. This approach allows us to better connect with students at this critical stage while maintaining the core effectiveness of the program. This work was a part of a multi-year Gates Foundation grant to research student engagement strategies. These findings have been and continue to be built into the program.

We also improved program flexibility by making the unit Recognizing Bullying & Harassment optional. This empowers leaders to tailor their implementation to fit their district or school goals.

Helping to ensure outcomes with new K–12 reporting features

Finally, we took our innovative Leader Dashboard to the next level. This includes a new K–12 Leader Checklist to provide leaders with an at-a-glance checklist of key implementation tasks that support success. For districts with muti-site access, we added a new, comprehensive multi-site reporting view, improving the oversight and overall experience for leaders. We also made improvements to our K–12 export files to give you more data at your fingertips. Our research shows that lesson completion was almost 20 percentage points higher among schools using data to monitor progress, so we’ll continue to build out the tools you need to be effective.

New evidence of impact: Second Step® Out-of-School Time

Listening to educator feedback, we knew many were achieving their desired outcomes. A recent study has also confirmed that Second Step Out-of-School Time can lead to a reduction in problem behaviors, including conduct behaviors, difficulty engaging with others, and impulsive behavior. The data also shows an increase in human skills like self-regulation, empathy, and perspective-taking and illustrates the impact of this unique after-school program—which we’re proud to share is now evidence-based!

What’s coming for Second Step® K–12 digital programs in 2025–2026?

As proud as we are of these advancements, they’re just the beginning. We’re thrilled to tell you about a few major upgrades to the digital platform that can radically enhance how schools meet the needs of students. Plus, keep an eye out for more updates as we continue to share our plans for our upcoming back-to-school update release on June 27, 2025.

Second Step® K–8 programs

Tier 2 targeted interventions

It’s more important than ever to provide comprehensive support for students at every level of behavioral need. We’re proud to announce that Second Step® Elementary and Second Step Middle School digital programs will expand beyond our Tier 1 foundation to include Tier 2 supports in August 2025, providing targeted interventions for students who need additional support. By adding Tier 2 supports, we ensure that schools can meet a wider range of student needs with Second Step programs instead of needing additional costly, external intervention tools.

Our new tiered intervention resources will include:

• Targeted Tier 2 small-group lessons
• Teacher-friendly pre-screeners
• Implementation guidance to help educators identify and support students who need additional intervention

These ready-to-use lessons focus on key skills like emotion regulation, self-efficacy, decision-making, and stress management, giving counselors and student support teams the tools they need to drive real progress.

With reporting and progress monitoring launching later in the year, educators will soon be able to track student growth and intervention effectiveness—without paying extra for it.

Integrated assessments for Tier 2 interventions

The ability to understand students’ individual behavioral needs and respond with effective support is a top priority for school communities.

In August 2025, Second Step Tier 2 support for Kindergarten through Grade 8 will include a third-party, universally evidence-based screener and assessment to help educators identify students in need of Tier 2 interventions.

Improving content for student engagement

Second Step® Elementary:

We’ve redesigned the Grade 5, Unit 1 lessons with fresh visuals, engaging media that includes five new videos, and an exciting story featuring two new characters, Earl and Kana. Additionally, we’re enhancing the Grade 4, Unit 1 lessons with clearer, more relevant content to support improved student engagement.

Second Step® Middle School:

We’ve created new introductory lessons for each grade that help lay the groundwork for meaningful learning by helping educators build classroom culture and connection from the start of the year. We’re also adding new Unit 1 lessons for Grades 7 and 8 with a focus on reinforcing leadership, agency, and critical thinking and giving educators more tools to connect human skills to students’ lived experiences. In addition, we’re adding 11 new videos that explore real-life scenarios and student voices to promote deeper engagement. You’ll also see 33 new lesson plans to provide educators with clearer structure and support for instruction.

Our collaboration with educators from various schools has also led to improvements in our middle school lesson plans, helping to reduce prep time and increase implementation fidelity and allowing educators to focus more energy on student engagement and facilitation.

Second Step® High School

Empowering success based on your needs

After the exciting launch of Second Step High School in 2024, we’ll continue to build on the strong program foundation to empower student outcomes. This year, we’ll add more alternate practices. These provide additional content to allow educators and leaders to further tailor experiences. They also offer time-agnostic practices for schools starting the program later in the year. We’ll add new Pathway 2 alternatives, and we’ll make it easier to track and monitor progress of alternate practices.

We’re also developing new posters to support reinforcement and engagement. We’ll be adding in 54 new introduction videos to make it easier for educators to get started, and we’ll be redesigning key features based on user feedback to make the program easier to use, to align the program schoolwide, and to seamlessly embed human skills into daily instruction. We’re listening to you and continue to tailor and adapt our program improvements to the needs and feedback of our program users.

Second Step® K–12 programs

New high-quality professional development offering

By popular demand, we’re thrilled to launch Elevating Second Step Programs: Virtual Workshops, a new series of learner-focused workshops designed to inspire and empower educators and leaders with the skills and confidence to successfully implement Second Step programs in your schools.

Improving tools for leaders at every level

We continue to focus on providing leaders with crucial progress data and refining our implementation tools and supports to simplify planning. This year, we’ll be significantly improving the experience for leaders as they plan, launch, and monitor their implementations.

We know that program adoption is a key indicator for leaders to understand whether their staff are ready to teach the program. Later this summer, we’ll further empower leaders with this insight by adding the ability to track training completion across K–12 digital programs.

In June, site leaders will be able to input key information directly into the program to increase ease for leaders and buy-in for educators. Leaders will be able to add goals for usage as well as broader school, district, or initiative goals directly into the program. You can also detail your vision for Second Step programs in your school.

Lastly, we’ll improve the detailed export report that leaders can use to understand usage by updating the historic format to match the new Excel version. This will help leaders better monitor their ongoing implementation, access historic data, and understand how to leverage our new tiered supports.

All of these improvements will be available on the Leader Dashboard of your Second Step program.

Looking ahead to deepen impact

Research-based, student-centered continuous improvement has been at our core since we began developing programs over 40 years ago. As we share out these exciting updates for the 2025–2026 school year, we’re also developing and refining our vision for the future. This vision includes our organization commitments, impact measures, and roadmaps for program improvements.

Our vision and program roadmaps have been meticulously developed around core commitments to quality and integrity in continuous improvement—with positive student impact at the center. Holding ourselves accountable for this vision is measured not in profits made but in the tangible impact we have on students. We’ll continue to share this vision and work to co-create it with you.

If you have questions about driving positive change in your school community with Second Step programs, please reach out to speak with our team.