What I Do, Think, and Know about Social-Emotional Learning: Pre-Service Teachers’ Relationship Skills, Attitudes, and Perceived Knowledge

Abstract

When implemented effectively by teachers, social-emotional learning (SEL) teaches students the skills needed to recognize and regulate their emotions and behaviour, manage relationships, and make decisions that promote success. Researchers have found that teachers’ relationship skills, attitudes about SEL, and perceived knowledge about SEL are related to the quality and practices with which they implement SEL. Understanding these variables and the relationships amongst them in pre-service can help teacher training programs improve the limited SEL training that pre-service teachers receive. Using a concurrent correlational design and self-report measures completed by 197 Canadian pre-service teachers, the current study aimed to describe Canadian pre-service teachers’ relationship skills, attitudes about SEL, and perceived knowledge about SEL, and to examine whether their attitudes and perceived knowledge significantly predict variance in their relationship skills. Descriptive, independent t-test, correlation, and multiple regression analyses were conducted. Results indicate that the pre-service teachers report having moderately high to high levels of relationship skills, having positive attitudes about SEL, and being unknowledgeable to moderately knowledgeable about SEL. Pre-service teachers’ attitudes and perceived knowledge about SEL together predict a small amount of variance in the their self-reported competency in three relationship skills: initiating new relationships, disclosing personal information, and providing emotional support. As well, their attitudes about SEL uniquely predict a small amount of variance in the latter two relationship skills. The findings from this study can be used to inform Canadian teacher education programs’ SEL training, theoretical models of SEL, and future research on pre-service teachers and SEL.