Enhancing Students’ Social-emotional Competencies Through Dialogic Feedback

by  Ms Shynn Lim, Juying Secondary School

     Ms Maybellina Lim, Juying Secondary School

 

During the recent Teacher’s Conference 2021, Professor Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, stressed on shifting students’ emotions from results to ideas. This reinforced the need to be even more intentional in lesson or curriculum design to include the social and emotional learning of students.

 

At Juying Secondary School, creating a positive school culture is a shared responsibility . This involves enhancing peer relations as well as teacher-student relationship. The Social-Emotional Competencies (SEC) Inventory Tool was selected and adopted by the school for Teacher-Student-Interaction (TSI) sessions this year to drive strong peer support culture. The TSI sessions drive affective, behavioural and cognitive engagement as form teachers and students converse. Complementing the TSI sessions are customised SEC lessons whereby all students are explicitly taught social skills, leadership skills and values.

 

Teachers leverage on the SEC tool to conduct meaningful talk with students. Students then work on personal dispositions that are non-academic yet critical for enhancing relationship and learning. Teachers perform dialogic feedback to students on how they can work on their social skills. During the process, students reflected that they felt good - discovering more about themselves, getting to hear their form teachers’ perspectives and even hearing from close friends at times. The positive affect encourages them to be more mindful of their behaviours and to be more intentional to work on the feedback given by the form teachers. In this process, feedback is both conversational and introspective. Students are involved and empowered to take greater ownership in self-improvement.

 

The link below shows shows an extract of a sharing conducted during the West Zone Centre of Excellence CCE Sharing on Building a Shared Positive School Culture. In this sharing, Miss Maybellina Lim reflects on her experience in the use of the SEC Inventory results to identify the individual needs of students. She also shares on how she conducted a dialogic feedback session with a secondary one student she was working with.  

 

Link to video: Sharing by Juying Secondary