Teacher social emotional competence has been connected to literacy development as well as broader academic outcomes through the domains of Emotional Support and Classroom Organization of the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS). Despite these findings, teacher development has yet to place an emphasis on social emotional skill development in line with such research. Drawing on diffusion of innovations literature, the authors offer a conceptual model that ties teacher social emotional skill development directly to the instructional support domain of the CLASS, thereby increasing the compatibility of social emotional learning to teaching and learning outcomes, including literacy. The analysis identified perspective-taking and social cue recognition as key opportunities for instructionally-aligned teacher social emotional skill development. The authors make recommendations for methods to increase these skills for teachers.
TopTeaching Through Interactions - The Class Framework And Literacy Development
Although there is not a consistent standard for defining “effective teacher behaviors” and the educational field lacks the precision and structure of a formal classification system, evidence does converge on common elements that appear in the mostly widely used measures of effective teaching. These common clusters include aspects of teachers’ social and emotional behaviors toward students, their practices related to classroom management, and their delivery of instruction (Danielson, 2007; Hamre et al., 2013; Kane & Staiger, 2012; Marzano, 2014).
The CLASS is one observational measure of teacher-student interactions that has been widely researched (Li et al., 2020) and is used at broad scale in practice as a part of state and federal policy initiatives in the early childhood field as well as in large school districts across the country. It assesses three domains of interactions: Emotional Supports, Classroom Organization, and Instructional Supports (Li et al., 2020). These domains are subdivided into 11 dimensions that are further described by specific indicators and behavioral markers (Pianta et al., 2010). In numerous studies, the three domains of teacher-student interactions have each been linked to students’ social, emotional, regulatory, and cognitive development (Calzada et al., 2015, Vernon-Feagans et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2020).
With regard to literacy in particular, students require not just exposure to high-quality curriculum but also to interactions with teachers, peers, and classroom materials that model new language, invite verbal expression through questions and conversation, engage students in interesting and meaningful lessons, and encourage persistence and attention when learning new concepts. Each of the domains of teacher-student interactions measured by CLASS have demonstrated links to students’ literacy development.