Medición de ROS generado por TFD

While the Australian Curriculum states the elements of Personal and social capability and provides examples of activities aimed at fostering its development in a continuum from early years to year ten, it does not explicitly set it out as a programme for teachers. It is not explicit but integrated into subjects; although, some schools are electing to develop the personal-social capabilities in pastoral-care sessions. If schools are electing to promote social–emotional learning during teacher led pastoral-care classes, teachers will need professional development in this area. There are many social and emotional

programmes available to schools, many of which are commercial packages, able to be purchased as school and teacher resources. Some schools have adapted or developed their own programmes in collaboration with parents, students and school staff to teach the skills that their students need to build social and emotional competence. Despite this, social competence remains for many teachers an elusive concept. The secondary-school teachers interviewed in this study are by their own admission, not experts in teaching social skills. They acknowledge that social competence is important, but how to teach it is an issue. Indeed, there seems to be little research into the nature of social competence, or the ways it can be assessed and enhanced within school settings (Hoglund & Leadbeater, 2004). Additionally, Wight and Chapparo (2008) report that ‗there is little information about the particular social skills that teachers identify as barriers to school performance‘ (p. 257) and Gresham et al. (2001) suggest that there is limited research regarding the social-learning problems of children with learning difficulties, many of whom are in mainstream classrooms.

Wight and Chapparo (2008) note that ‗teachers report that social competence at school is multidimensional and situational‘ (p. 258) but that ‗as partners in children‘s learning at school, teachers are able to provide … valuable assessment information about whether children‘s social skills match the social demands of the classroom‘ (p. 259). While teacher observations of social interactions are often sought, and there are tools available such as the Teacher Skillstreaming Checklist (McGinnis & Goldstein, 1997), this and other instruments are based on teacher perceptions or judgements about behaviour. Sherrin (2012) states:

107

The collection of evidence of each child‘s development in the area of social competence needs to become a part of the overall data to give a true picture of the holistic education of the child. (p. 11)

The following comments suggest that some teachers are very aware of the subjective nature of assessing social competence.

Interviewer: Should we report on students’ social competence?

Ms O: Oh, that’s a good question. It’s fraught I think, because it is so subjective. Ms C: Yeah, to an extent, but you want to be very careful because that’s going to be completely—it could be very varied in regards to who the teacher is, and what they’re seeing, and how the kid is going to be behaving specifically for that teacher.

Ms C: Ooh, that’s interesting isn’t it? Because it’s really hard to quantify isn’t it? Again, I don’t think it should, I think it would, I think it could certainly be perhaps a comment in the report, a personal handwritten comment. I think if you try and quantify it too much by any sort of scoring system or any sort of databank comments I think it would probably, I don’t know it would be very hard to do and might not fully portray what it should.

So I think it should perhaps be, again as when we were at school, it might just be a comment by, a heartfelt comment by the form teacher would probably mean more than an assessed number.

One teacher felt very strongly about reporting on social competence, reflecting again on its multidimensional and situational aspects and how teaching staff are not always in the ‗loop‘ about students‘ backgrounds and situations.

Interviewer: Should we report on students’ social competence?

Ms B: That’s a tough one. What, failing them because they’re not acting like a proper human being or something?

Interviewer: Well it’s competency based, so it would be if they have it or if they don’t have it, not a fail.

Ms B: Maybe for our own records, but I don’t think we need to confront with kids with that information, especially at a young age. It might be more damaging,

108

especially if the kid feels like they’re having a few problems. To see it on paper might be a bit devastating for them. I don’t know. I definitely think there should be some records that staff can access. We don’t get given any information about kids and sometimes there’s stuff you should know. We’re just not told.

If a kid is—hasn’t got parents or has come over as an unaccompanied minor, or doesn’t have a mum or something. You might find that out half way through the year, but if you’re not told these things up front—and sometimes it’s good to know. You might cut a kid a bit more slack if you knew what they were going through.

Since schools are places of socialisation for students, teachers are in an excellent position to identify students who do not have positive relationships with their peers or are

aggressive. For this reason, many programmes require students to be identified and targeted for intervention support to be provided by teachers. Research supports the idea that teacher perspective is very important in identifying students with social and

behavioural difficulties because it is likely that such difficulties impede teaching (Webster-Stratton, Reid & Hammond, 2004). However, psychologists, school counsellors, occupational therapists, and other school support staff are often the professional personnel that provide targeted intervention assistance for students with social-skills difficulties, rather than teachers. As reported previously in this research, only one teacher interviewed in this study spoke about teaching social skills explicitly in a proactive manner.

The teachers interviewed in this research were sometimes unsure of the nature of their current reporting of the social competence of the students they taught. Some reported that social competence is communicated to parents only when there are problems.

Interviewer: Should we report on students’ social competence?

Ms O: We report on it anyway, when we get parents involved when there’s ongoing issues of concern with kids.

The difficulty for some teachers lies in the limitations of the report-writing framework or the focus on looking for deficits in social competence.

109

Ms D: Yes. I think we should. We usually have on some reports—and we’ve got also as well programmes where we can comment about the whole social skills and whatever else. But I think it needs to be taken a bit more seriously. It’s not just the negative skills, I think we should also be praising the positive social skills as well that quite a lot of students do have. But you’re not—we need to get more as a community and look at what people are doing. Instead of looking at the negatives, what are the good things we’re doing?

Interviewer: So assuming that these reports on social skills don’t have specific … Ms D: Yeah well, we can only report on the framework. We do have the behaviour in the classroom. We do comment on social skills and we do comment on whether it’s outstanding or whatever. But really it’s not very informative to parents.

The previous comment suggests that teachers are looking for more in the curriculum to support the development of social competence in the students that they teach: the ‗how to‘.

Interviewer: How do we achieve socially competent students?

Mr T: I think that’s really complex. You’ve really got to deal with their psychology, their maturity levels, their intellectual—their capacities in terms of emotional intelligence, their growth, all that sort of stuff. I think we teach that sort of curriculum in things like health and human development. We don’t do enough of that here. I think every school in this—I think it’s an area of curriculum that we need to focus more on and become, well maybe if we focus more on it we’ll become more explicit about it. There are kids here who need a lot of that sort of value adding if you want to call it that. I call it soft curriculum. I think that’s not a bad word for it. Because we have the hard curriculum of gathering data … VCE [Victorian Certificate of Education] is hard data. NAPLAN is hard data.

I think there’s soft data and there’s a social data and there’s a soft curriculum, a social curriculum that we really—I’m not sure, we haven’t really started to explore that fully yet.

Social competence is a key attribute in young people that fosters wellbeing and interpersonal relationships (Prior et al., 2000). However, Korinek and Popp (1997)

110

suggest that mainstream teachers are reluctant to take time from the academic curriculum to teach social skills. In the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) (2003) report

What works in developing children’s emotional and social competence and wellbeing?,

the authors suggest that teachers find the idea of taking responsibility for emotional and social competence difficult because they already feel under stress. They also suggest that ‗many teachers have personal barriers to working in this area due to their own lack of comfort with emotional matters‘ (DfES, 2003, p. 74).

Interviewer: Should we report on students’ social competence? Mr O: Like to parents?

Interviewer: Yeah in reports and things.

Mr O: I don’t think—because I think it’s really a touchy thing to be reporting to parents because it really does reflect on them. If you report that a student has really poor social competence, what does it say about the way that they’ve been brought up and what does it say about the parents’ social competence?

Interviewer: Do you think it reflects on them? Mr O: I think it would.

Ms C: I have a very, very different view to a lot of our families here about what social competence is about and what I expect, and also an even bigger difference to what I was brought up with.

Lewis (2001) suggests that primary-school teachers believe that it is their job to teach social skills, but as described in Chapter Eleven, ‗I like her—she‘s nice!, the secondary- school teachers interviewed for this research engage in teaching social skills in a non- systematic and largely reactive manner, responding to perceived deficits in the students they teach, rather than teaching social skills explicitly and proactively. In an article on the marginalisation of Australian youth, te Riele (2006b) suggests that rather than using ‗deficit logic‘ and targeting individuals for intervention, the whole-school system should be examined. However, traditionally, screening and assessment of social competence have been the foundation for intervention in social–behavioural problems of children and adolescents, students deemed ‗at risk‘, and who subsequently attend alternative school settings. The concept of at risk also focuses on the notion of targeted intervention rather

111

than a whole-school approach. Te Riele states that to ‗serve marginalized youth, policy needs to change its focus from ―fixing students‖ to providing high quality education‘ (te Riele, 2006b, p. 141). Inclusive schooling practices aim to achieve good educational outcomes for all students.

Opinions varied between teachers on whether social competence should be assessed. This question could be linked to how we achieve socially competent students because if teachers are struggling with the ‗how to‘, is it fair to ask them to assess students? Forster (2004) warns of the following possibility:

We need to be cautious about the kinds of understandings we infer that students have, and the relationship between those understandings and behaviour. Understanding social interactions, and the capacity to articulate these interactions, is not necessarily an indication of likely behaviours. Nor is it necessarily an indication of self-insight. (p. 83)