Management in strengthening social- emotional competence during health emergencies

Gestão no fortalecimento da competência socioemocional durante emergências de saúde

La gestión directiva en el fortalecimiento de la competencia socioemocional durante la emergencia sanitaria

Aracelli del Carmen Gonzales Sánchez¹ aracelligs@hotmail.com

Universidad César Vallejo, Perú

Nancy Rita Trujillo Mariño²

Universidad César Vallejo, Perú

Ivonne Luz Ruiz Pelayo³

Universidad César Vallejo, Perú

Yolvi Ocaña-Fernández⁴

Universidad Privada San Juan Bautista, Perú

Esta obra está bajo una Licencia Creative Commons Atribución 4.0 Internacional.

The pandemic caused by the appearance of the COVID-19 has made us, from the schools, realize how little we were working on the social-emotional competence; it was only developed in the area of tutoring and in some sessions in the Personal Development and Citizenship course, when issues of bullying, harassment, coexistence, etc. were discussed. From 2020 onwards, the National Educational Project (PEN), in force until 2036, is considered the fourth pillar of the personal and academic formation of students, putting it in value for its application in schools.

An important actor in this new scenario will be the director, who from the directive management must face the new academic context. The pandemic caught the school with multiple weaknesses, among them the little capacity to incorporate remote education, or the lack of decision to select the contents to be worked on or the management of emotions.

Teachers had to perform emotional containment in the face of the limitations of students and parents to adapt to distance education, in addition to facing the unfortunate news of thousands of people infected by COVID-19, in addition to the deaths and unemployment generated by the pandemic, which undoubtedly also affected the families of students. The Ministry of Education saw the need to implement intensive courses in social-emotional competencies for teachers through the PeruEduca platform, so that they could manage their emotions, attend to the students, resolve conflicts and find an emotional anchor to help regulate them. The private schools in some other way sought to strengthen the members of their educational community on the subject.

Distance education is not a novelty; there is evidence of its development in the 18th century, when a distance calligraphy course was announced in the city of Boston (Alfonso, 2003).

"The distance education has evolved with the emergence of new theories of learning, especially with the appearance of the constructivism that considers the learning as a process in which the person goes building the knowledge" (Heedy & Uribe, 2008, p. 9). In this form of teaching a specific place is no longer necessary; through the use of technology it can be synchronous or asynchronous. Gallego-Lema et al. (2020) point out that the physical space is not the only one that can generate learning in students; these also depend on the context in which they develop in a virtual education context, for example.

For De Armas et al. (2020), online courses should be interactive, involving students and teachers with each other, and it is also important that the content is visually appealing. In this line, Lissen & Bautista (2020) put as an example Croatia, which since 2015 implements this system, so that the leading role of the teacher to maintain connectivity with students is evident. Finally, Radovan & Kristl (2017, in Del Prete, 2018) report that before the pandemic there was acceptance among teachers to use and implement Virtual Learning Environments (VLA) technology, which shows that it is possible to carry out distance education in the context of the health emergency.

In Peru, the University Law, Law No. 30220, already allowed this system before the health emergency, so that several higher education institutions were already adapted to the system of working in virtual environments. Moya et al. (2020) argue that due to globalization and increased technology, universities have been able to make this type of distance learning provide quality education.

The Ministry of Education had to generate adjustments for this form of teaching in regular basic education (EBR). In the case of public schools, it promoted the Aprendo en Casa platform, while private schools could use their own strategies. In this way, a series of questions would arise: What would education be like in this context? What form would schools implement? Would teachers be prepared to make use of information and communication technologies (ICT)? Given this situation, principals face a challenging situation in terms of management, which must provide quality education, where their main problem is the level of incidence of management in strengthening social-emotional competence during the health emergency. Where can we obtain information on the subject when there is almost no research?

This study was conducted in private schools in Metropolitan Lima. It is necessary to provide the characteristics that private schools possess, since there are not many academic contributions to this type of education. Cuenca (2013) points out that "in the imagination it is mainly manifested in the idea that private is per se of better quality" (p. 77); therefore, parents look for a private school with the objective that their children have better academic options and access to better alternatives in their professional life. In addition, the mentioned author concludes that the progressive increase of private schools in the city of Lima during the following years is not only in elitist districts, but is present throughout the city and even in the periphery; consequently, Lima has the highest number of private schools of regular basic education (EBR).

Balarín et al. (2018) point out that the changes and transformations in private education began during the Fujimori government with the attempt to modernize it; in that sense, the Private Schools Law (Law No. 26549) of 1995 and Legislative Decree No. 882 (1996) were enacted, allowing flexibility in the installation, implementation and operation. This favored the emergence of a large number of private schools which, over the years, has been increasing. Murillo et al. (2017) present figures of the increase in private education in Latin America between 2006 and 2010, where Peru is the second country, after Chile, with the greatest increase in private schools.

The educational offer is varied and it depends on the families the choice of a public or private school. Cuenca et al. (2019, p. 3) argue that "the private educational market is very heterogeneous and highly deregulated, in the high educational segregation that exists in the country". Therefore, the State should have more regulation in private institutions, which are not equal to us, we can divide them by the cost of pensions, access according to social classes or, otherwise, in small schools, consortiums, parochial, bilingual, Catholic or international baccalaureate.

The variables of this study will be management and social-emotional competence, for which it is necessary to put ourselves in context and provide the definition and dimensions that have been used. With respect to the first variable, its background is found in Fayol's theoretical contributions: management consists of paying attention to the structure and functions that an organization should have in order to achieve efficiency (Ortiz & Barrera, 2018).

For Azeska et al. (2017), the term management was originally given as management, of English origin, which when translated means 'direction' or 'management'. Campos et al. (2018), according to Casassus (2002, p. 4) "educational management is a relatively new discipline with a low level of specificity and structure, which seeks to apply the general principles of management to the specific field of education".

Management will be dimensioned according to the recommendations of the Manual of Management for Directors of Educational Institutions (UNESCO, 2011). In the first place, institutional, pedagogical, administrative, and community management will be considered. The first falls directly on the director, since he is the legal representative and must respond to both the Ministry of Education (Minedu) and the educational community. In addition, institutional management will require the trust provided by the director (Colina et al., 2018), so that it will be the fundamental basis for interpersonal relations in the institution.

The second dimension in pedagogical management is the work of the director, which is evidenced in the commitment of management 4, accompaniment and monitoring of teaching practice, so that the educational service is positive. This can be verified when standardized evaluations are applied, with the academic performance of the students being favorable. According to Acevedo et al. (2017), school results are important in demonstrating to teachers and parents how favorable good pedagogical management is.

The administrative management will be based on the good management of the resources of the school, in such a way that it can be developed fulfilling the minimum requirements in the management of resources and infrastructure that the institution has. In our opinion, there could be differences in this aspect with respect to economic resources, since the State manages an assigned budget for which a commission is formed in which the different actors that make up the school have an active participation, while in private institutions the issue of administration is more limited, because the economic part is seen by the promoter.

In fourth place, the relationship with the community will be taken into account. In this aspect, the management has a leading role as the director is capable of generating a welcome with respect to the attention of the parents, because their support is important to strengthen the learning of their children, Simon et al. (2016), in addition to making alliances with the different agents of the community such as the police station, health networks, municipality, etc.

In this context of health emergency, despite the regulations issued, the problem among managers and parents became more acute because they demanded the reduction of pensions, arguing that this new form of distance education service was not of quality and also because the school infrastructure was not being used. The Executive issued Legislative Decree No. 1476, exclusively for private schools, in which they were to make the costs and investment in the provision of educational services transparent in the context of the COVID-19 health emergency, and inform parents; if they did not comply, they would be subject to sanctions.

Nowadays, management entails a set of actions to be carried out by the director as a pedagogical leader. Báez et al. (2018) determine that management is a set of planned actions. In our opinion, the main objective is to provide a good educational service to the students, which should involve the management of adequate infrastructure, teachers who develop good pedagogical practice and an educational community willing to commit to the students. According to Freire & Miranda (2014), Peruvian educational management should be understood as the work of leading and maintaining the institution; from the administrative and pedagogical perspective, promoting equality, equity and efficiency that allow the personal development of students.

At the beginning of the state of health emergency, the management of private schools faced multiple problems, due to extraordinary regulations such as the Vice-Ministerial Resolution No. 079-2020 of the Ministry of Education (Minedu), the technical regulation called "Guidelines for the development of the 2020 school year in educational institutions and educational programs of basic education", which was repealed with the Vice-Ministerial Resolution No. 093-2020 (Minedu, 2020), "Pedagogical guidelines for the basic education educational service during the year 2020 in the context of the health emergency caused by the coronavirus COVID-19". They had to present to their respective local management unit (UGEL) a plan for the adaptation and recovery of the educational service in the context of the health emergency and disseminate it in their educational community.

The directors of private schools that practice social-emotional skills had an important role with the different actors of the educational community. First, it was necessary to sensitize teachers to adapt and train them to the new way of teaching, to motivate students to adapt to this new way of generating learning experiences and with parents, with whom the tensions were more complicated, as mentioned above.

Due to the payment of pensions, in the face of insistent complaints, the Minedu opened vacancies in public schools to receive students who could not afford to stay in the private system. This measure affected smaller schools, mainly pre-schools, more severely, as they were forced to close.

Fragoso (2015) maintains that there are competencies for life, such as emotional competencies. According to his study, the first to give strength to this term were Saarni and Bisquerra. For Sánchez et al. (2018), there are differences between the concepts of these two authors. For Saarni, emotional competence would be the product of social interactions, while Bisquerra proposes social competences as a capacity that individuals have to have good relationships with other people. In this line, López et al. (2018, according to Alzina & Escoda, 2007, p. 59) affirm that "emotional competence is understood as the capacity to adequately mobilize a set of knowledge, abilities, skills and attitudes necessary to carry out diverse activities with a certain level of quality and effectiveness".

In this sense, Alzina & Andrés (2019) point out the validity of the dimensions of socio-emotional competence, proposed by Bisqerra (2003). Emotional awareness will contemplate how we analyze ourselves and are able to be assertive with others; emotional regulation is the way to channel our emotions by demonstrating empathy, emotional autonomy, and this will have to do with the inspiration that the person radiates, in addition to self-esteem (Montoro et al., 2020). It can be concluded that emotional competence is the way we interact with other individuals, and how important is the management of soft skills. In addition, one must take into account competencies for life and well-being, which have to do with how people are able to make decisions and face challenging situations with optimism.

Therefore, social-emotional competence will contribute to managers' ability to solve conflict situations with other members of their educational community that were generated by the pandemic. It also contributes to the optimization of emotions and their regulation (Bisquerra & López-Cassá, 2020). In view of the above, it is necessary to investigate the impact of management on the strengthening of social-emotional competence during a health emergency.

The population chosen for this study was that of private school principals of RBS located in Metropolitan Lima. A sample of 84 principals was used. The study variables used are management and social-emotional competence; in this study a Likert-type perception scale questionnaire was used to measure social-emotional competence, which was measured in aspects such as emotional awareness, emotional regulation, emotional autonomy, social competence and competencies for life and well-being (Alzina & Andrés, 2019).

The instrument is of ordinal and polytomic scale. It considered: always (5), almost always (4), sometimes (3), almost never (2) and never (1); for the levels and ranks it has been considered as a reference the evaluation of the managers applied by the Viceministerial Resolution n.º 027-2020 MINEDU: outstanding, expected, acceptable and low. Due to the situation of the health emergency, a form was created on Google Drive which was distributed to the emails and WhatsApp applications of the respondents.

The explanatory description of the socio-emotional competence, according to the information processing, gave the following results.

Figure 1
Comparison of the percentages of the dimensions of social-emotional competence

The graph shows the high percentage achieved in two dimensions at a prominent level, about the directors' perception of how they consider they have handled their emotions. According to the descriptive explanatory model, the statistical explanation will be as follows.

Source: The authors (2020).

Table 1
Comparison of the percentages of the dimensions of socio-emotional competence

Note: Table 1 shows the percentages according to the ranges used to take into account the social-emotional competence of the surveyed managers in relation to the situation that meant the health emergency. With respect to the first dimension, emotional awareness, the highest number 52.4% is at an expected level, while the regulation of emotions shows an outstanding level of 58.3%; the highest achievement is in emotional autonomy with 65.5%: social competence, relationship with the others 54.8%, and finally the competence for life and well-being have 73.8%.

Table 2
Results of ordinal logistic regression of the management and social-emotional competence variable

Note: The results of table 2, in the first location, show the coefficients of the expression of the ordinal linear regression of institutional management. Socio-emotional competence is at an acceptable level among managers; Wald's coefficient, 8.211, is greater than 4, which implies that the incidence of managerial management on socio-emotional competence cannot be verified. With respect to educational management, from the first institutional dimension with the social-emotional competence, the incidence between pedagogical management and social-emotional competence is evident; Wald's coefficient is 13.589; it also has significant value, with an estimate of -2.383, which shows that the work of the directors has the expected level with respect to the relationship with the teachers.

In the logistic regression of administrative management and social-emotional competence, Wald's coefficient is 6,070, which shows incidence; it is also significant, with an estimate of -1,391, so that there is an expected performance of the manager with the administrative staff. Finally, in the last column of the community dimension with social-emotional competence; Wald's coefficient is 12,666, according to p value < 0.05, there is incidence between community management and social-emotional competence, the sign of estimation is -2,886, so that the directors' work is at the level of expected with respect to their community.

Taking into consideration the results of the statistics that explain the five dimensions of the socio-emotional competence variable, competence for life and well-being has 73.8%. Miranda Beltrán (2016), in a study that addressed management in state institutions in Bogotá, reached a similar conclusion: that it is important to review management, not with external agents, but with the eyes of the actors themselves, who direct the educational system. Therefore, within the socio-emotional competence, they must reflect on their work. Alzina & Andrés (2019) describe an emotional leadership, where the leader uses the appropriate channels to sensitize his work group and thus reach the objectives, instead of ordering communication in an assertive way. Freire & Miranda (2014) studied the incidence of managerial leadership on student academic performance, taking the school census evaluation (SCE) test as a reference. This study showed that the principal's leadership is positive from the pedagogical point of view; in this same dimension, we have seen that the level is expected from the principals; despite the current complexity of distance education, there is a concern to continue with the development of quality learning experiences, contextualized in the pandemic.

Ramírez et al. (2019), taking into account the impact on the work environment and coexistence in Mexican educational institutions, concluded that the influence of the management and the management team has a positive effect on the construction of training spaces in the work teams, in such a way that goals can be achieved. In the same line the results obtained with respect to the administrative dimension, with the emotional competence, showed an expected range, therefore the work of the director in this dimension is also positive.

Madrid et al. (2019) studied the roles of the school and the family, among one of their conclusions they propose that the school should leave the traditional role to get closer to the families; these feel linked when they support the learning of their children, in this line is the community management as a dimension of the educational management, in which the director strengthens the social-emotional competence according to the results obtained (which is expected), therefore the director feels that his work is effective.

The results show that there is an incidence between the directive management in three of its dimensions and the social-emotional competence. The aim is, in this context of health emergency, to provide a quality education that evidences the effectiveness and efficiency of the educational service. "Quality requires an open spirit and a great willingness to learn from the feedback received. Therefore, it is subjective and depends on the needs and perceptions of each group or person to whom the service is directed" (Zaldivar, 2017, p. 88).

It is important to point out that, during the bibliographic research for this study, most of the researches really deal with the work environment; taking the emotional perspective, there is a lack of researches that deal with the social-emotional competence from the directive management; however, they exist to try to understand the students with respect to the coexistence in the school. Uribe (2015) gives light on how this competence can help in the school to resolve conflicts or in teacher performance, in which the strengthening of social-emotional competence will allow positive skills in the school (Cassullo & García, 2015). Alzina & Andrés (2019) maintain that the way in which it is taught is changing because, as the new straight years pass, it involves educational work, the importance of changing the educational paradigm of the cognitive aspect and valuing the development of emotions from the classrooms; this will contribute to forming better people.

It was concluded that distance education has existed for many years, so from the experiences of how it was executed it can serve as a reference for the school to continue the teaching process, providing quality learning experiences, so that the management is important to seek the approach with the educational community. Educational authorities should practice social-emotional competence. This is understood as the regulation of emotions, assertive listening and empathy, so that in moments as complicated as those representing the health emergency resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, the members of the educational community find support in their authorities.

This study was applied to directors of Metropolitan Lima; the results were encouraging because, although the institutional dimension provided the level of acceptability, it is necessary to make a self-reflection of the professional practice. The directors of private schools have shown themselves to be capable of facing this new scenario.

Therefore, we can conclude that the impact of management with respect to strengthening social-emotional competence during the health emergency is favorable.

Finally, given the new scenario resulting from the health emergency, which has allowed the value of social-emotional competence to be placed on it, there is a lack of studies on this subject by management.

How to cite: Sánchez, A. del C. G., Mariño, N. R. T., Pelayo, I. L. R., & Ocaña-Fernández, Y. (2021). Management in strengthening social-emotional competence during health. Revista Tempos e Espaços em Educação, 14(33), e15111. https://doi.org/10.20952/revtee.v14i33.15111

Authors' Contributions: Aracelli del Carmen Gonzales Sánchez: conception and design, drafting the article, critical review of important intellectual content. Nancy Rita Trujillo Mariño: acquisition of data, critical review of important intellectual content. Ivonne Luz Ruiz Pelayo: critical review of important intellectual content. Yolvi Ocaña-Fernández: analysis and interpretation of data, critical review of important content. All authors have read and approved the final version of the manuscript.