Building foundational skills for learning and for life.
The Aperture System, home of the DESSA, is the #1 solution for strengthening social and emotional skills.
Aperture Education empowers schools, educators, and students to measure, strengthen, and support social emotional competence and life skills. We believe in the power of data, the ability to transform by leading with strengths, and the necessity for educators to create safe, supportive, and positive learning environments.
Discover Strengths. Empower Growth.
Scale Your Impact.
Foster Resilient School Communities.
Resilient school communities thrive on positive relationships between students, teachers, and caregivers. Aperture Education provides the tools and support to create opportunities for meaningful interactions, preparing students for a lifetime of success and well-being.
Elevating student voice gives students agency in learning and in life. We help drive student engagement through self-reporting and goal setting to establish a growth mindset. Our system captures data from student perspectives for equitable insights so they can put their strengths into practice.
What Makes Aperture Different
Personalized Learning
In the ever-changing education landscape, MTSS, PBIS, and effective student support systems have emerged as essential tools for academic achievement, social-emotional growth, and overall well-being.
Mental Well-being
In the past few years, students have experienced a dramatic increase in mental health concerns including anxiety, depression, and behavior disorders. School-based programs focused on building social and emotional skills can proactively support students' mental health.
College & Career Readiness
Navigating the complexities of college life and the professional realm demands not only technical skills but also a strong foundation of emotional intelligence, self-awareness, effective communication, and interpersonal skills.
School Climate and Culture
Creating safe, positive, growth-oriented learning environments is crucial to building healthy school cultures. Strengthening social and emotional skills is the first step in cultivating a positive school climate and culture. It draws students back into the classroom, helps educators bridge the gap in learning, and fuses academic achievements with skills needed for lifelong success.
The DESSA In Action
Kannapolis: Setting Students Up For Success Through SEL
Products
The Aperture System, including the DESSA, is a suite of actionable, strength-based, and data-driven tools that prepare students with the social emotional skills for success in school and beyond. With Aperture Education, you can be confident that you are leading with strengths, fostering your students’ holistic development, and making a meaningful impact on your students’ lives.
DESSA Aperture System
The DESSA is the top solution for proactively addressing student needs, improving academic outcomes, and cultivating a positive school climate.
DESSA Student Self-Report
The DESSA Student Self-Report captures student choice and promotes student agency, significantly impacting student engagement, outcomes, motivation, and achievement.
Strategies and Interventions
The Strategies and Interventions Package leverages research-based insights generated by the DESSA to create easy and effective skill-building plans for educators in the classroom.
Aperture Academy
Aperture understands that educators are the center of learning. Supporting the social and emotional knowledge, skills, and well-being of your educators and staff is vital for them and for their students.
"Teaching doesn’t happen until love and respect happen in the classroom. And I’m grateful for this program and all of these different strategies that help develop that and give us the data to back it up. Over the course of 2 years, our SEL pilot schools reported that referrals had been cut in half and out-of-school suspension assignments had been reduced by 76%."
- Humble ISD Humble, Texas