Well-Being and World-Class Relationships

Is Social Competence a Part of Your CPD?

Every year, the students in Denmark are tested on their wellbeing. Just think about that for a minute. In Finland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden, we are almost obsessed with minimizing the distance between the teacher and the students. Why? Because the educational research has overwhelmed us. It points to the fact that, if you build a relationship between the student and the teacher, they will learn more both academically – and as human beings. Therefore, we focus on methods to train the teachers’ Social Competence.

How do you work with your Social Competence as a teacher and school leader?

Let us introduce four key areas of training the teachers’ well-being and relationship building capabilities. They are all based on both research and everyday practice experience from schools all over The Nordic Countries: 

• How do you learn to sense and create moods in the class. In other words, how do you create a learning environment in which every student feels welcome. Is it possible to help the students to not being afraid of making mistakes?
• The class is a team. Above all, teambuilding is the key to learning. How do one build relationships with the whole class as a group?
• Do you know ways to build relationships with each student? For instance, how can you systematically map all your and teacher colleagues’ relationships to each student?
• A school class is a learning community. However, very few teachers have learned how to strengthen this community. And fewer know how they can work with the relationships between the students.

In other words, we go deep into the heart of the matter of working with students’ wellbeing. Similarly, we show you the specific tests that are being used in both primary and secondary schools in Denmark. We have translated them into English for your benefit.

Nordic Schools look forward to inspire you on how to perform even better when working with students’ well-being.