Social-emotional competence

This construct has increasingly become the focus of educational research since Jennings and Greenberg (2009) emphasized the relevance of social-emotional competence for good teaching and personal well-being in their prosocial classroom model. Facets of social-emotional competence are assumed to provide the necessary knowledge and skills for successfully managing the social and emotional challenges of teachers' everyday working lives.

Teachers with high social-emotional competence…

• recognize the emotions of their students. They know what triggers positive and negative emotions and what role their own behavior plays in the emotional experience of their students. For example, they can encourage anxious students or are able to adapt their teaching methods when boredom arises.
• can perceive and regulate their own emotions. For example, instead of openly showing or suppressing their anger at a student's lack of motivation, they change their perspective or actively look for solutions to avoid similar situations in the future.
• have a variety of strategies for shaping interpersonal relationships. For example, they know how to support others in difficult situations, how to resolve conflicts and how to achieve their own goals while maintaining good relationships with students.

Our current research focuses on the following questions:

How important is social-emotional competence in terms of professional practice?

The prosocial classroom model (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009) focuses on the importance of teachers' social-emotional competence. The ability to recognize students' emotions can strengthen relationships with students and help teachers to better adapt their teaching to individual needs (Pianta, 1999). The ability to regulate one's own emotions is in turn particularly relevant, as emotions shape teachers' thoughts and actions (Frenzel et al., 2021). Our research has shown that students report less math anxiety when their teachers are attentive to their emotional and academic problems (Aldrup et al., 2020). We also found initial evidence in reviews that teachers' empathy and emotion regulation are associated with their professional performance, although the evidence was inconsistent and requires further research (Aldrup et al., 2022, 2024).

Can social-emotional competence be measured?

The use of reliable and valid measurement instruments is crucial to gain meaningful insights into the importance of social-emotional competence in teachers. (Prospective) teachers and people working in initial teacher training and professional development contexts can also use these measurement methods to identify individual strengths and areas for personal development.

Initial studies indicate that objective test procedures may be better suited to predicting behavior in interpersonal situations than self-assessments of competence. Furthermore, a profession-specific assessment appears to make sense due to the particular demands of interaction with students.

Using these considerations as a basis, we developed the profession-specific TRUST test procedure, which measures knowledge about the regulation of one's own emotions on the one hand and knowledge about strategies for building positive pedagogical relationships on the other (Aldrup, Carstensen et al., 2020). Typical situations from the teaching profession and four options for action are presented in the TRUST, which differ in terms of how effective they are with regard to the regulation of one's own emotions and the relationship between teachers and their students. Teachers who complete this test must decide how effective they consider each action option to be in each situation.

Initial studies have successfully used the TRUST. Our findings show that teachers who know more about regulating their own emotions and about strategies for building positive pedagogical relationships report that they are more supportive of their students. However, they do not perform better in classroom management (Aldrup, Carstensen et al., 2020).

Can social-emotional competence be taught?

In theory, teachers' social-emotional competence is thought to be a key factor in their professional practice (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009). However, novice teachers often feel that their teacher training does not adequately prepare them for teaching and dealing with students (Klusmann et al., 2012; Schmidt et al., 2016; Tynjälä & Heikkinnen, 2011). With this in mind, we wanted to find out to what extent social-emotional competence develops during teacher training. We also wanted to design a training program for student teachers that specifically addresses fostering social-emotional competence as a combination of theoretical knowledge and practical skills.

We repeatedly surveyed student teachers on their social-emotional competence over a period of two years and found little development on average, which indicates that the content of the teacher training program does not contribute to the fostering of social-emotional competence (Carstensen & Klusmann, 2020). However, the results of the evaluation study on a training program we developed showed that support is certainly possible. Participation in the training had a positive effect on the development of social-emotional skills in student teachers. In addition, the training is highly accepted by the students, who consider the content to be very relevant for their future careers (Carstensen et al., 2019).