Social Emotional Competence in Early Childhood Education

This first part of the course introduces and unpacks the concept of social and emotional competence into its various components, while considering how they are interlinked and the part they play in children’s wider learning across the lifespan.

Explores how a positive climate contributes to children’s sense of wellbeing, and provides the confidence, safety, and security children need in order to grow further social and emotional competencies, as well as strategies for evaluating and enhancing your setting’s climate.

Details the emotion knowledge children need to learn in order to be emotionally competent and pedagogies for teaching about emotions, including information on how to support children who experience intense emotions.

Explores how direct and intentional teaching can scaffold children’s social skills as well as examining peer conflicts and considering how these might be used as a context for learning social skills.

Describes the different components of executive function and their relation to social and emotional competence as well as a range of simple strategies and games for enhancing children’s executive function, some of which are illustrated by teachers in case study early childhood settings.

Explores neurodivergent children’s particular strengths and needs in regard to developing social and emotional knowledge and skills and considers specific strategies that may support neurodivergent children’s social and emotional competence.

Focuses on so-called challenging behaviours and offers a set of supports and actions that can be put together to provide individualised and tailored support for the children having most difficulty developing social and emotional competence.

The last part of the course integrates learning from different parts of the course to develop a comprehensive programme for children’s social and emotional learning and to plan some next steps following your participation in this course.