Mid Sweden University

The chapter describes Swedish legal texts that regulate parts of the country’s school system, initial teacher training and teacher in-service training to provide the back‐ ground for understanding the opportunities available to teachers to strengthen their personal social and emotional competencies and diversity awareness. Some relevant research is also presented, despite being limited in this area. Teachers’ opportunity for in service-training is further described as being strongly focused on learning other than teachers’ own personal competence development. It is concluded that no formal requirements exist for teachers to possess social and emotional competencies and di‐ versity awareness themselves, even though to some extent the teacher training includes content from this field. When in-service training for teachers is given, research shows the participants largely see it as deficient. We establish that Swedish teachers’ own well-being or career development is rarely the focus in policy documents, teacher in- service-training, or research. 

The chapter is based on summarised findings of both the HAND in HAND: Empowering Teachers Across Europe to Deal with Social, Emotional and Diversity-Related Career Challenges policy experiment (presented in volume 1) and analyses of current European Union and national policy frameworks (presented in this volume), and elaborates on the conditions needed to ensure the scalability, transferability and thus sustainability of the HAND in HAND: Empowering Teachers Across Europe to Deal with Social, Emotional and Diversity-Related Career Challenges project outcomes and the systematic policy and political support needed on the European Union and national levels. It sets out 39 guidelines organised in 5 areas: 1) Including social and emotional and diversity awareness content in teachers’ professional development; 2) Supporting the development and implementation of teachers’ social and emotional competencies and diversity awareness programmes; 3) Considering the role of working conditions in teachers’ well-being; 4) Enhancing teachers’ professional status in society; and 5) Improving policy frameworks for supporting teachers’ social and emotional competencies and diversity awareness on all levels of the European Union’s multi-level governance. While considering the differences in current national policy arrangements and challenges to teachers’ well-being and the development of their social and emotional competencies and diversity awareness in the HAND in HAND: Empowering Teachers Across Europe to Deal with Social, Emotional and Diversity-Related Career Challenges project field-trial countries (Austria, Croatia, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden), the chapter also introduces specific guidelines concerning ways to foster teachers’ SEDA development in their respective national contexts.

Digital textbooks are rapidly becoming a common feature in mathematics and science teaching. At the same time, there is limited research on teachers’ use of digital textbooks for teaching. Our study takes a comparative approach, contributing to the field’s understanding of the implementation of digital textbooks in mathematics and science education. Four lower secondary teachers’ use of digital textbooks was deductively analysed concerning various features in the textbooks, using data from classroom observations and interviews with teachers and students. Results revealed similarities between teachers regardless of subject, such as using functions to guide students in the digital textbook and recognising the advantages of using videos or animations. One conclusion is that these similarities could be regarded as generic for the use of digital textbooks and important regardless of the subject. A prominent difference concerned the use of digital textbooks as a means of content processing through writing. In the mathematics classrooms, paper and pencil were used, mostly due to the limited possibility of writing mathematics in digital textbooks. In the science classrooms paper and pencil were not used, as this subject is different and to a lesser extent based on being able to represent subject content through calculations, symbols, and figures. Another difference concerns teachers’ approach to planning and tracking students’ progress, where the science teachers focus on the group and the mathematics teachers on individuals. This implies the importance of including a focus on subject-specific aspects when designing and integrating digital resources in teaching.

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. 

I detta bidrag delar vi med oss av våra erfarenheter att genomföra fortbildningskurser i naturvetenskap och teknik för pedagoger i förskolan. Syftet med kurserna är att deltagarna ska förvärva kunskaper inom teknik och naturvetenskap och få möjlighet att stärka tilltron till sin förmåga att planera och leda pedagogisk verksamhet om naturvetenskap och teknik. I den här texten beskriver vi hur kursen har genomförts. För att bedöma hur genomförandet av kursen motsvarar fastställda mål har vi utgått ifrån pedagogernas utvärderingar i anslutning till kursavslut. Från utvärderingar och diskussioner med deltagarna kan vi se flera exempel på olika framgångsfaktorer i samband med fortbildning som exempelvis en glädje över att upptäcka naturvetenskapen i det man redan gör på förskolan. Deltagarna beskriver också hur de upplever att de sänkt kraven på sig själva om att alltid kunna leverera de korrekta svaren på barnens frågor. Istället vågar de oftare ställa produktiva frågor och utforska vidare tillsammans med barnen. 

I den här rapporten presenteras en fördjupad analys av svenska elevsvar på fyra olika kunskapsfrågor i naturvetenskap som samlats in inom ramen för TIMSS 2019.

Rapporten har skrivits av Nina Eliasson och Anna-Karin Westman, Mittuniversitetet, på uppdrag av Skolverket.

Syftet med analysen av elevsvaren är att fördjupa förståelsen för vilka kunskaper hos eleverna, innehållsliga såväl som kognitiva, som döljer sig i dessa svar.

Over the last few decades, there has been a significant rise in the number of programmes aimed at developing students’ social, emotional and intercultural competencies. This has coincided with growing recognition of the role that schools have to play in fostering not only the cognitive, but also the social and emotional development of their students. Despite targeting separate competencies, there seem to be many similarities in approaches to students’ social and emotional learning (SEL) as well as developing intercultural skills, presenting a rationale for their integration and conceptualisation on the social, emotional and intercultural (SEI) level. The myriad of different SEI programmes provides an arsenal of useful tools for school-based SEI learning. However, choosing which programme to use, considering how to implement it and determining whether it will be effective can be quite overwhelming. Existing approaches aimed at teaching SEI competencies vary greatly depending on the programme, as does the content of the programme and its design. In this paper, we seek to tackle the question of how SEI competencies are taught, with particular emphasis on the content and theoretical or conceptual background of existing interventions, together with their methodological and organisational aspects. We also explore whether and how the evaluation of existing programmes has been conducted, the most important results and the aspects of implementation which are key to fostering the development of SEI competencies in educational contexts. This paper presents an overview of relevant aspects worth acknowledging while developing and implementing SEI programmes, and which might prove especially useful when programmes are conceptualised within the overall SEI (instead of the more often used SEL) learning framework. Given the importance of SEI competencies for the overall well-being of students (and hence their parents and school staff), we encourage researchers and practitioners to build upon these insights while developing and implementing comprehensive SEI programmes.