Promoting social competence development to reduce children's social aggression

Abstract

The roles of schools are more and more diverse, schools is no longer just an institution with instructive objectives, but an essential environment for socialization and acculturation. Of course, the instructive function of school is still important, but, at the same time, the school has the role to regulate the social behaviours, by educating the emotional responses and developing students’ social abilities.There are a wide range of theories who try to explain the recrudescence of aggressive behaviours in children. The underlying theory of this paper is that childhood aggression could be correlated with deficient information processing skills and social-emotional maladjustment. In many cases, disruptive behaviours are not just deviations from socials norms, but the expression of wrong behavioural models, hence a result of imitating and interiorizing undesirable behaviours through social learning.The role of the adults who represent significant, reference figures for the child (parents, teachers, specialists, etc.) have to be more then just passively observe, label the children behaviours as misconduct and apply the punishment; they have to be pro-actively involved in child's nurturing and education, promoting a supportive and formative environment, filled with opportunities of learning pro-social behaviours. There are plenty proactive programmes designed to create opportunities for harmonious development of children's personality, to enhance their pro-social behaviours repertoire.In this paper, we present the innovative process of adaptation and implementation of the program Making Choices into a Romanian school, as part of the national project CNMP 91-063/2007 Project, Social diagnosis of academic performances through Social School Success Scale (SSSS) and the design of research-validated intervention methods, project coordinated by Professor PhD. Maria Roth, from Babes-Bolyai University from Cluj Napoca, financed by Romanian Ministry of Education and Innovation.Making Choices is a curriculum containing a series of cognitive problem-solving lessons intended to broaden children's social knowledge and skills for successfully interacting with peers and adults.We conduct this research in a school in Romania, at secondary level. The conclusions will sustain the necessity to allocate resources in this type of pro-active, preventive, school-based program in order to promote social competence and to reduce both overt and social aggression of children.