Skills Teachers Need to Teach

Why do many of the faculty with the most tenure and the many letters after their name, resort to archaic teaching principles and have no interpersonal skills with their students? They trudge about their day with frowny faces and mounds of paper on their desk that does not get graded in a timely manner. They enter the classroom and immediately lecture in an unemotional voice that sounds like the teacher from Charlie Brown, and read from the text or directly off of their media slides. Two minutes in, students are bored, asleep or browsing their social media feeds. That is if they show up at all for the class. Granted, I am speaking to a few and hopefully not the many awesome faculty out there.

What surprises me the most is that many recognize the correlation between social and behavioral skills and academic success; yet, no studies have been attempted to document such. My pet peeve for years in education, is that it is not just the alphabet soup one has after their name, but the interpersonal and socio-emotional skills needed to reach the students. We all probably have that one teacher or professor that made a huge impact in our academic career, and some to the point, personal growth. I bet we do not attribute those characteristics to years of experience or academic scholarship.

Jennings and Diprete make two contributions to the slim existing literature.  Children with higher levels of social and behavioral skills actually learn more. Second, the way in which teachers have success in the classroom with the aforementioned characteristics depends on the instructor’s beliefs or values concerning the skills, and their importance to the big picture of education. Education is influenced by many outside resources such as family dynamics to include prior education of parents, neighborhoods, SES, peers, and the social and behavioral elements of the community. Prior experience has much to do with how students perceive education and the fruits of its success. However, education is not just the basic elements of reading, writing, and mathematics. Without the social skills and the behavioral skills of real-life and how to interact with the outside world, all of the education in the world will be fruitless due to the inability to utilize the information in real-world scenarios.

The questions up for debate are, how do we evaluate such skills, and are they related to experience and education? Does the teacher with 20 years’ experience and a Ph.D. have better behavioral and social skills than the graduate with a bachelor’s degree? How do educators implement these skills in the classroom, and how do we measure their effectiveness? Because social and behavioral skills are an important end of education in itself and also provide a pathway to academic development, these skills need to be integrated into research and policy agendas.

Rivkin, Steven G., Eric A. Hanushek, and John F. Kain. 2005. “Teachers, Schools, and Academic Achievement.” Econometrica 73:417-458.

Jennings, Jennifer L., and Thomas A. DiPrete. 2010. “Teacher Effects on Social and Behavioral Skills in Early Elementary School.” Sociology of Education 83:135-159.

Williams, Gregory J. and Leon Reisberg. 2003. “Successful Inclusion.” Intervention in School and Clinic 38(4):205–10.