Abstract:

Life’s hectic pace in the modern world is obvious, people are very busy, they do many thing in a rush. Even communication is in a hurry by asking short questions and looking forward to short answers without going deeper into feelings. There is an increasing number of families who do not care of development of children’s social and emotional skills, therefore, the school becomes the place where children’s social and emotional literacy is raised in different ways. However, there is a lack of balance between the subject knowledge and social and emotional education noted at school as well, the greatest focus is on academic achievements of children.

Despite of the increasing number of scientific researches in this field, the lack of studies on this topic is still observed. That shows the need of looking into the issue of methodology of children’s social and emotional competence education with parallel exploration what role of pedagogue is in this education process necessary for successful implementation of social and emotional development of education institutions.

This article reveals the experiences of primary teachers in education of social and emotional literacy of students. Experience is a tool of research that helps to form a context, to reveal potential, to embody immanent reciprocal processes between man and the world. In addition, the experience is accumulated throughout life and is updated and enriched each time to reflect the experience already gained. Each teacher’s experience is valuable in helping to understand the pedagogical conditions required to develop students ’social and emotional literacy.

The empirical study of primary teacher experiences revealed that the teachers recognised the importance of social and emotional literacy education, they were fully aware the education of social and emotional competences strengthened self-regulation of students’ conduct, reduced the risk of development of emotional and behavioural difficulties, reinforced already acquired social and emotional competences and improved academic achievements. The qualitative study, however, showed sluggish integration of social and emotional education elements by teachers in their lesson planning and delivery, they were limited to participation in prevention programmes enforced at school and individual conversations.

Keywords:

Teacher experiences, social and emotional literacy, education.