Social – Emotional Competencies and Self Care for Teachers

A few words about the course:

Schools play a vital role in the development of key social-emotional competencies such as tolerance, respect and understanding. Children learn social and emotional skills by observing and interacting with adults. Teachers are primary exemplars in the school context, fostering the development of prosocial behaviors. They achieve that by modelling social and emotional competencies in their interactions with their students, their students’ parents and other adults.

Nevertheless, stress causes a negative impact on the teachers’ social and emotional competence. When teachers lack the ability to manage their negative emotional reactions in response to troublesome student behaviors, their performance can be impaired. Teachers’ failure to respond to the above situations often results in further student disruption and teacher burnout syndrome.

This course aims to help participants understand that educators with high SEL competencies of their own contribute to the development of SEL among their students and create a positive classroom climate and higher academic achievements.

Through practical and experiential activities, the course members will deepen their content knowledge of the SEL theories and concepts. They will develop their own social-emotional skills (self-awareness, empathy, conflict management, social awareness, etc.), so as to effectively teach their students these very same social and emotional competencies through direct instruction and cultivation activities. In addition they will be introduced to mindfulness techniques to manage their stress, promote their resilience and reduce the probability of burnout syndrome.

By the end of the course, participants will have both deepened their knowledge on the necessary skills to effectively model student SEL and will have acquired the competencies needed in order to manage stress and create a safe and supportive classroom environment.