Updt Title – Working with Children: Behaviour and Guidance

Course Information

While cognitive skills are important for a student in academics, young people benefit from social emotional learning skills for greater success. In today’s stressful climate, the ability to cope are skills necessary for children and young adults to develop positive character traits that will equip them for life.

We live in a stressful world, and our nation’s children and young adults are coping with new and prevalent emotional realities we can’t ignore. Research indicates that when educators work to teach learners how to alleviate and manage stress, students become more likely to learn deeply, avoid negative behaviors and achieve successful outcomes with long-term effects. Social-emotional learning (SEL) practices are the focus of copious research studies – and it’s a good thing they are because SEL is needed more than ever.

There’s been a shift in how educators and child development experts think about the skills students need to be successful in school and in life. Some researchers now suggest that a child’s success or failure isn’t only determined by cognitive skills, as once thought; Social Emotional Learning (SEL) skills, or those most related to character, including grit, optimism and self-awareness, are other important contributors to student success.

SEL skills are categorized into seven categories by the Devereux Student Strengths Assessment (DESSA), the national assessment City Year uses to track student progress in SEL skills.

1. Self-Awareness: A child’s realistic understanding of his/her strengths and limitations and consistent desire for self-improvement.
2. Self-Management: A child’s success in controlling his or her emotions and behaviors, to complete a task or succeed in a new or challenging situation.
3. Social Awareness: A child’s capacity to interact with others in a way that shows respect for their ideas and behaviors, recognizes her/his impact on them, and uses cooperation and tolerance in social situations.
4. Relationship Skills: A child’s consistent performance of socially acceptable actions that promote and maintain positive connections with others.
5. Goal-Directed Behavior: A child’s initiation of, and persistence in completing, tasks of varying difficulty.
6. Personal Responsibility: A child’s tendency to be careful and reliable in his/her actions and in contributing to group efforts.
7. Decision Making: A child’s approach to problem solving that involves learning from others and from her/his own previous experiences, using her/his values to guide her/his action, and accepting responsibility for her/his decisions.
8. Optimistic Thinking: A child’s attitude of confidence, hopefulness, and positive thinking regarding herself/himself and her/his life situations in the past, present and future.

Learning Outcomes

Make a positive contribution with the skills necessary to enhance the overall social emotional learning development of children in the classroom. You will Learn how to use evidence-based practices to identify and develop suitable programmes to meet your students’ social emotional learning needs. This course is especially designed for educators working in student care centres.

This course is supported by e2i.
Subsidy is available for participants who are current employees of centres that offer before and/or after-school care (e.g. Student Care Centres).