Session: Teachers' Social-Emotional Competence: A Key to Teacher Well-Being and Practice of Integrated and Equity-Enhancing Social-Emotional Learning (Society for Social Work and Research 29th Annual Conference)

Based on decades of interdisciplinary research, school-based social-emotional learning (SEL) has been globally advocated as an evidence-based approach for youth well-being (e.g., World Health Organization, 2015; 2020). In social work, SEL has been suggested as a promising intervention to "unleash the power of prevention" to "ensure healthy development for youth" (Hawkins et al., 2015). The wide dissemination of SEL has provided role-expansion opportunities for school social workers (Johnson & McKay-Jackson, 2017), through which they can become central contributors to the Grand Challenges for Social Work (Shapiro et al., 2018).

To date, SEL research and practice have primarily focused on individual students' social-emotional competence (SEC). Yet, there is a growing consensus that adults in school, especially teachers, should first possess SEC to better support students. In this context, school social workers encounter increasing opportunities to support and collaborate with teachers.

Teacher SEC (T-SEC) has been conceptualized to facilitate (1) stress-coping and mental well-being for teachers themselves, (2) caring and supportive learning environments for students, and (3) successful SEL implementation, including teachers' integration of SEL into daily interactions and routines. Altogether, T-SEC is recognized as an essential ingredient for SEL and well-being in schools.

T-SEC has become even more crucial with the field's recent movement toward "transformative SEL" which centers equity and inclusion in SEL practice. To realize the anti-racist and anti-oppressive potential of SEL, teachers require appropriate SEC to create and maintain equitable and inclusive school conditions, where every student can grow and thrive.

However, empirical research on T-SEC has been limited, in part due to the lack of good-quality measures. Also, the current literature on T-SEC is predominantly grounded in the U.S., leaving this issue largely unexplored elsewhere. This symposium aims to address these gaps by sharing findings from three studies conducted through international collaborations.

Paper (1) introduces a new measure of T-SEC, designed to be a practical tool for assessing multidimensional T-SEC, based on the CASEL-5 framework while incorporating an equity lens. Using data collected from China and Korea, this study provides robust psychometric evidence of this scale.

Paper (2) examines whether and how T-SEC contributes to teachers' own mental well-being, using this new T-SEC scale. This study found that T-SEC was a key promotive factor for mental well-being among Chinese teachers, while acting as a protective factor for those experiencing burnout.

Paper (3) examines how T-SEC contributes to teachers' integrated and equity-enhancing SEL practices. With a sample of Californian teachers, the new T-SEC scale worked similarly well as previously found with East Asian teacher samples. Also, T-SEC significantly predicted both integrated and equity-oriented SEL practices, while it was more influential for preK-5 teachers (vs. middle/high school teachers) to practice equity-oriented practices.

Based on these findings, this symposium will discuss the next steps for research, practices, and policies to advance school-based SEL that is beneficial for both teachers and students, sustainable in routine settings, and equity-enhancing within and across diverse cultural contexts, with a specific focus on the shifting roles of school social workers in these collaborative efforts.