Abstract:

Socio-emotional learning focuses on the development of socio-emotional skills consistently and directly contributes to the personal growth, development and well-being of students, as well as the prevention of behavioural and mental health problems.

The framework within which socio-emotional learning is implemented includes at least three dimensions: socio-emotional competences of students, socio-emotional competences of teachers and learning context. For creating an adequate and supportive learning context in which socio-emotional learning will take place, adults like parents and teachers, but also policy makers and principals are crucial.

Croatian educational policy through its laws, documents, strategies and curricula, provides a legal and administrative foothold for socio-emotional learning; however, the implementation of the socio-emotional learning programmes remains poor, occasional, and more spontaneous than organized and comprehensive.

The authors of this paper wanted to give an effort in clarifying this challenge of Croatian educational practice by focusing on socio-emotional competences of school professionals (teachers on different levels of education, school counsellors, principals) as one of the three basic dimensions of the socio-emotional learning.

So, this study aims to examine the socio-emotional competences of different school professionals. The sample of 744 school professionals (M=41.58; SD=10.53) from different parts of Croatia self-assessed themselves using Personal Assessment and Reflection- SEL Competencies for School Leaders, Staff and Adults (CASEL).

The results indicated that all of the school professionals, no matter of their profession or position (either elementary school teachers, high school teachers, school counsellors or even principals) self-assessed their socio-emotional competences very high, with the highest variation on the Social skills subscale. No correlations were found between different professions in the sample. One-way ANOVA showed that the principals had significantly higher scores on the Responsible decision-making subscale. Regression analysis indicated age as a significant predictor on the Responsible decision-making subscale explaining 2% of the variance. Factor analysis fits the 5-factor model as it is suggested in the original questionnaire.

Respecting the fact that the studies of social-emotional competences in Croatian school professionals are scarce, those important results are discussed in the light of actual challenges of Croatian high education, educational practices and recent EU directions in the field of socio-emotional education.

Keywords:

Croatian high education, educational practices, school professionals, self-assessment, socio-emotional competencies.