Theories Of Social Competence

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Social competence is a complex concept consisting of social, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral skills. A child’s social competence refers to a child’s ability to affectively interact and communicate with other children and adults. Children learn social competence from how their parents treat them and how their parents treat others; it is learned through observation and participation. As children learn behavior, they are bound to have conflicts with others and this is often seen as misbehavior. However, the theory of Steven Harlow is that the behavior of children is mistaken behavior rather than misbehavior. Three examples of how this theory is related to what the research is telling us today are identified as experimentation, socially …show more content…

When discipline is used, for example time-out, it relies on blame and shame to bring a child’s behavior “back in line”. Friedrich Frobel said, “Through punishment adults make a child bad”. However, when a teacher uses guidance rather than discipline, the children learn what they can do to fit into, and participate as a member of the class, it is used to create an encouraging classroom environment. Guidance actively teaches children to express and meet needs acceptably. As the children go through their day, part of learning social competency is conflict. Children who experience conflicts with one another, with adults, or conflicts that affect the whole class, need to be taught positive alternative behavior. The teacher guides all the children involved in the conflict through mediation, which makes all parties equal contributors to a peaceful settlement. The teacher might try guidance talks, which is when the teacher has a private conversation with the child to avoid embarrassment. Teacher and child discuss what happened and reach an understanding about why the behavior was mistaken. When a social conflict affects the whole class, the teacher could have a class meeting(s) to discuss the situation. During such time, one child speaks at a time, every gets a turn to talk, and everyone listens and respects others’ views while the teacher leads until the conflict is resolved. For supportive classroom environments, children need to be guided rather than disciplined to feel valued as a member of the classroom. When children are guided through conflicts, they are more apt to learn positive alternative behavior. Whereas discipline just shames and embarrasses the child and they learn nothing, so the mistaken behavior is likely to

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