From Skills to Support: Teachers’ Perceived Social-Emotional Skills and Supportive Practice

Abstract Teachers’ social-emotional skills are widely regarded as foundational to effective classroom interaction, yet existing research often leaves unclear how teachers’ perceived social-emotional skills relate to supportive practice and how such practice relates to distinct dimensions of classroom functioning. Drawing on the Prosocial Classroom Model, this study differentiates three analytical levels—perceived general social-emotional skills, self-reported social-emotional support (hereafter, supportive practice), and classroom-related correlates—and examines their relationships among 505 in-service teachers in Shanghai, China. Observed-variable path analysis showed that perceived skills were strongly associated with supportive practice ( β = .75 ), which was in turn associated with teacher–student relationship quality ( β = .64 ), classroom management self-efficacy ( β = .53 ), and social and emotional learning implementation ( β = .55 ). Supportive practice occupied a consistent intermediate statistical position across all three domains, while smaller direct associations remained. A reverse-ordering model also yielded non-zero indirect associations, indicating that the observed covariance was compatible with more than one directional account. These findings refine the Prosocial Classroom Model by distinguishing perceived skills from reported supportive practice and by identifying supportive practice as a theoretically distinct, empirically consequential layer of teachers’ social-emotional functioning. The study further highlights the need to examine how institutional and cultural contexts shape the relation between social-emotional skills and classroom practice across educational systems.