The present paper focuses on social and emotional learning, and highlights empirical findings on its importance for teachers, students and schools.The importance of social and emotional learning in school settings has been a central focus of research for the last 30 years.The development of teachers' social and emotional competencies has been an essential factor for improving social and emotional learning of students.Only when teachers are able to create a school climate in which students feel included and welcome, students can develop and enhance their social and emotional competencies.In this paper, we outline the main conceptual frameworks on social and emotional learning, emphasizing the CASEL framework, relevant for both young people and adults.We proceed by focusing on teachers' social and emotional competencies, as teachers are one of the key figures for fostering and developing social and emotional competencies in school settings.Afterwards, we address the issue of development of teachers' social and emotional competencies in various settings.The last part of the paper links teachers' and students' social and emotional competencies.We stress the importance of teachers' social and emotional competencies for healthy teacher-student relationships, and students' well-being and academic achievement.As teachers also need support for the development of these competencies, we advocate for comprehensive school-wide approach, in order to ensure the successful implementation of social and emotional learning in classrooms.
Teaching and learning about men’s violence against women, domestic violence, interpersonal and sexual violence present a challenge to all higher education systems. Social responsibility, national and international legal frameworks on prevention and treatment of gender-based violence, as well as the demands of different professions that deal with victims, point to the complexity and necessity of delivering learning outcomes on gender-based violence, particularly those related to social skills and attitudes. Additionally, the global, national and institutional context, such as the often- confronted public actors and heated public forums on human rights violations and gender equality issues, influence higher education efforts to deliver human rights and gender equality learning outcomes with students in ways that still need to be uncovered. The study presented in this article is based on a survey done with Croatian and Swedish health, social work and criminal justice study programmes, with particular focus on the prevalence and features of learning outcomes on gender-based violence. The analysis aims to investigate the influence of the socio-political and institutional context, attitudes and opinions of Croatian academic stakeholders on content and methods of teaching and assessment of students’ knowledge, soft skills and attitudes about human rights and gender- based violence, compare them to Swedish results and frame them in a broader national and international discussion on the quality and responsibility of higher education.
In the last 25 years, Slovenia has undergone some major changes in the society, economy and higher education.However, the application and selection procedure for enrollment in higher education which is presented in our work remained unchanged, especially in terms of its characteristics and weaknesses.With the establishment of the national records and analytical information system of higher education in Slovenia, a large amount of data on Slovenian higher education was collected, which enables longitudinal monitoring of students since 2006.Data on the employability of graduates will be added to those on study performance in the next two years.The authors believe that together with existing data on the performance of secondary education and transition to higher education the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data Analytics (BDA) can be used to manage higher education institutions (HEIs) in terms of curriculum design and that a new approach can also be used in the selection of candidates for studies with an emphasis on optimizing the individuals preferences, taking into account their characteristics -abilities and the range of study programs available.
