Promoting Social Emotional Learning through Shared Book Reading: Examining Teacher’s Strategies and Children’s Responses in Kindergarten Classrooms

ABSTRACT

Research Findings: Early childhood educators play an important role in promoting children’s social emotional learning (SEL). This study proposes a comprehensive coding scheme to explore teachers’ strategies and children’s responses in shared book reading (SBR), which create opportunities to share pictures and storylines to examine social circumstances and emotional situations. Drawing on videotaped observations of nineteen classrooms from a larger study in Singapore, SEL-related interactions consisted of illustrations or discussions with indicators from the five SEL areas outlined in the national curriculum. Results revealed that teachers’ support for SEL occurred more frequently when facilitating interpersonal learning over intrapersonal learning, while children’s responses accorded with the types of teachers’ input. In response to teachers’ strategies within the intrapersonal dimension, children provided responses to teachers’ prompts for identifying self-abilities and preferences most frequently. Within the interpersonal dimension, children provided responses to teachers’ prompts for labelling others’ emotions most frequently. Practice or Policy: Our findings demonstrate that SBR can be useful in promoting SEL even without books that explicitly convey skills and messages relating to SEL. The results imply that teachers should increase their input on facilitating intrapersonal learning topromote children’s balanced development in the understanding of themselves and others.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the participating children, teachers, and schools.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Abstract of the book: “All of the little birds have learned to fly all except one. Little Owl can’t do it! But others explain to him that it’s easy: all he has to do is say ‘abracadabra’ and try, and try again, until he succeeds!” (American Psychological Association, 2019).

2. Abstract of the book: “a little mouse looks for a friend – and happily finds one just in time to save himself from a predator who has been hiding there all the time – unseen, but in plain sight! A simple story on the universal theme of friendship.” (Eric-Carle, 1971).

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the Singapore’s Ministry of Education, Education Research Funding Programme, National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Project No. OER 09/14 RB and Project No. OER 02/16 SH. The views expressed in this paper are the authors’ and do not necessarily represent the views of NIE.