Students with emotional and behavioural difficulties (EBD) have overall fewer educational opportunities and are more at risk of developing impairments in health and functioning than their peers (Durlak et al., 2011). For students with EBD it is difficult to meet school requirements and teachers’ expectations for social and learning behaviour in class (Bethell et al., 2012). They report a lower social integration in class, less acceptance by their teachers and less well-being than their peers (Blumenthal & Blumenthal, 2021). Furthermore, children and adolescents with special educational needs in this area are perceived as more aggressive and are more likely to be rejected by their peers (Gest et al., 2014; Hendrickx et al., 2016). In addition, teachers find these students’ disruptive behaviour in class challenging (Øen & Johan Krumsvik, 2021). Difficulties in meeting requirements and expectations in class are associated with EBD students’ shortcomings in social emotional skills (Durlak et al., 2011). 

Social emotional learning can be seen as the process of acquiring competences to recognise and manage one’s own and other’s emotions, to establish positive relationships or to manage conflicts, in sum, to gain social emotional skills (Durlak et al., 2015). Indeed, promoting social emotional learning needs to be a prominent aspect in teaching students with EBD (e.g. Demol et al., 2020). There are several schoolwide programs and planned interventions for promoting social emotional learning (Durlak et al., 2011; Reicher & Matischeck-Jauk, 2012). Meta-analyses show that these programs are effective in enhancing students’ self-perception or reducing aggression both at post-test (Durlak et al., 2011) and at follow up (Taylor et al., 2017). These programs mostly implement strategies to enhance students’ skills through systematic instructions for teaching, modelling, practicing and applying social emotional skills in different situations, sometimes complemented by the development of safe and caring environments  (Durlak et al., 2011; Taylor et al., 2017). These programs have shown to be more effective if delivered by the teacher and not a person from outside the classroom (Durlak et al., 2011). This points to the important role of the teacher and the teacher-student relation for social emotional learning (Farmer et al., 2011). It also raises the question of teachers’ competences and the approaches that they take for promoting students’ social emotional learning in everyday class. For example, teachers might support social emotional learning by scaffolding peer interactions or functioning as a role model in how to shape relationships (Gest et al., 2014; Hendrickx et al., 2016). Yet regular teachers feel especially challenged by EBD students‘ behaviour and report on a lack of approaches to promote social emotional learning (Øen & Johan Krumsvik, 2021).

The aim of this study was to investigate which approaches teachers employ in shaping student-teacher and student-student relationships, thereby supporting EBD students’ social emotional learning. 13 guided interviews were conducted with experienced teachers (11 women; 28-59 years old, M=41.85; 2-27 years of professional experience, M=12.96). The transcribed interviews were submitted to a qualitative content analysis with deductive-inductive categories (Kuckartz, 2018). The main categories could be deduced from the interview guideline that focused on how teachers promoted social interaction – a more colloquial term and easier to comprehend for the interview partners than promoting social emotional learning. Questions aimed at what “good” relations meant to the teachers, which social learning goals they set for their students and the means they implemented to reach these goals. Consequently, the resulting main categories were “concept of relation”, “social learning goals” and “teaching strategies”. These main categories were derived in a deductive way and for two main categories inductive subcategories emerged from the interview material. For the main category “concept of relation” meaning units were coded in which teachers referred to aims for social interaction such as respect or trust. “Social learning goals” involved meaning units mentioning desired or undesired social behaviour both individually and class wide. “Teaching strategies” were coded when a reference to a specific pedagogical strategy aiming at social emotional learning was made. For the two main categories “social learning goals” and “teaching strategies” subcategories could be inferred from the material. For the main category “social learning goals” subcategories were among others “self-awareness”, “emotion regulation” and “self-regulation”. These subcategories describe social emotional skills as can be found in frameworks of social emotional learning (e.g. Durlak, 2015). For the main category “teaching strategies” subcategories included for example “learning through consequences” (operant conditioning), “model learning” (the teacher or a peer serving as a model) and “breaking of cognitive schemas” (stimulating students to rethink their interpretation of social interactions for instance through the reduction of attributional biases according to social information processing). These subcategories could be aligned to learning theories in educational sciences.

Our results show that teachers use evidence-based approaches for promoting social emotional learning and implement these in everyday learning. Teachers reported how they break down learning goals into smaller and achievable steps for their students, how they match social situations for single students (for example dyadic or group work) or how they tailor the strategies they use to individuals (teachers report that a certain strategy works for an individual but not in the current situation, so they adapt the strategy or implement a different one). For this individualised support, teachers constantly observe, interpret, and draw consequences from students’ behaviour for their pedagogical actions. With reference to the interview material, the competences teachers used could be described as a formative diagnostic resulting in individualised support for social emotional learning. In addition, preliminary analyses revealed that the social learning goals and teaching strategies were related to teachers’ concept of relation. For example, one teacher reports on the importance, that the students can rely on each other („concept of relation“), that they do not resign to verbal or physical aggression when bothered by others‘ actions („social learning goals“) and that she scaffolds her students in reaching a shared solution for their conflict („teaching strategies“). These results suggest that teachers’ notions on social learning goals and teaching strategies are not independent but are related to each other and to the concept of relation as well.

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