What Are Interpersonal Skills? Seeking to Understand Updates to Social and Emotional Development in Louisiana’s Early Learning & Development Standards

Derrick Toups, M.Ed.

After nearly three years of debate and a public process roller coaster, Louisiana updated its Early Learning and Development Standards (ELDS) in March 2024 (Louisiana State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, 2024). Going against recommendations from the ELDS Standards Review Committee – which was composed of over 30 local early childhood experts – the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) approved revisions to the ELDS that replaced “social and emotional development” with “interpersonal skills.”

Along with cognitive, physical, and linguistic development, social and emotional development is one of the four key domains of a child’s healthy development as recognized in both the educational and medical literature of the past few decades (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, n.d.; National Association for the Education of Young Children, 2020). Furthermore, social and emotional development was part of previous versions of Louisiana’s standards. So why was social and emotional development replaced by interpersonal skills? What are interpersonal skills, and how do they compare to social and emotional development?

Explanatory text published by the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) alongside the ELDS states: “School readiness not only means that children are intellectually prepared for school, but also that they have the interpersonal skills that prepare them for success in the classroom. One of the primary goals of a quality early childhood program is to foster healthy interpersonal skills in young children” (Louisiana Department of Education, 2024, p. 79). Generally, interpersonal skills refer to the ways in which an individual interacts with others: things like communication skills, active listening, empathy, and conflict resolution. While most parents,  teachers, and policymakers would likely agree that these are good things for children to learn, there is not much academic literature that groups these skills with the term interpersonal skills or clearly defines interpersonal skills; rather these prosocial skills are more commonly associated with well-established domain of social and emotional development.

The ELDS explanatory text goes on to say: “To be successful, children must be able to develop relationships with others, cooperate with peers and adults, understand others’ feelings and perspectives, and maintain some control of their behaviors and feelings. These characteristics help to ensure that children are able to get along and participate with others in the classroom” (Louisiana Department of Education, 2024, p. 79). Positive, cooperative relationships and perspective taking are important interpersonal skills that are fostered in high-quality early childhood classrooms; however, the concept of children maintaining “some control of their behaviors and feelings” refers more so to intrapersonal skills and social and emotional development than to interpersonal skills. While emotional regulation supports healthy relationships with others and teachers are a key piece of promoting that self-awareness in the early learning setting (Thümmler et. al, 2022), the updated ELDS language places an outsized focus on a child’s interactions with others and seems to misunderstand and assign less importance to the internal processes associated with the “control” of – or as more accurately reflected in the literature – the “regulation” of emotions.

The following are the four standards that are part of the updated “interpersonal skills” domain in the ELDS:

• Children engage in and maintain positive relationships and interactions with adults.

• Children engage in and maintain positive relationships and interactions with other children.

• Children recognize themselves as unique individuals and express confidence in their own abilities.

• Children regulate their emotions and behavior and respond to the emotions of others.

The first and second standards refer to maintaining positive relationships with others (interpersonal skills), while the third and fourth standards refer to developing competencies related to positive self esteem and emotional literacy (intrapersonal skills). As a result, the “interpersonal skills” domain title is misleading and confusing, since all four standards do not fit cleanly into the updated category. It is, therefore, difficult to understand why the state body tasked with setting education policy made a deliberate shift away from the recommendation of the review committee to retain social and emotional development which appropriately captures each of the four standards.

BESE’s decision to update ELDS language that is not aligned with the academic literature is informed by a fundamental misunderstanding of social and emotional development by opponents, including the superintendent of education, who have incorrectly conflated social and emotional learning with critical race theory and view it as a vehicle for indoctrination (Sentell, 2022). Unfortunately, this political theatre obfuscates the importance of social and emotional learning and may cause confusion for early childhood teachers who are tasked with implementing the state standards in their classrooms. Below are a few recommendations for early childhood leaders tasked with supporting teachers in implementing the new “interpersonal skills” standards:

• To increase clarity and understanding of the updated standards with teachers, discuss the difference between interpersonal and intrapersonal skills and how they are related to the larger concept of social and emotional development.

• To reduce confusion among teachers, connect and map the interpersonal skills language used in the updated standards to social and emotional development language used in other early childhood tools and assessments like SmartTeach.

• To support teachers in understanding key concepts of the new standards, help them focus on the progression of development by age as noted in the standards’ examples.

References

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (n.d.). CDC’s developmental milestones. https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/actearly/milestones/index.html

Louisiana State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. (2024, March 6). Official board minutes.

https://bese.louisiana.gov/docs/default-source/bese-official-minutes/2024-03-06-bese-me eting-minutes.pdf?sfvrsn=9774a469_2

Louisiana Department of Education. (2024). Louisiana’s Early Learning & Development Standards (ELDS).

https://doe.louisiana.gov/docs/default-source/academic-standards/ldoe-early-learning-dev elopment-standards-(elds).pdf?sfvrsn=712819a4_4

National Association for the Education of Young Children. (2020). Principles of child development and learning and implications that inform practice. https://www.naeyc.org/resources/position-statements/dap/contents

Sentell, W. (2022, December 5). Amid new bickering, BESE to consider learning standards up to

age 5. Nola.com. https://www.nola.com/news/education/political-bickering-still-hovers-over-early-learning-goals/article_6f25cf22-74c0-11ed-a582-63910a60290a.html

Thümmler, R., Engel, E.-M., & Bartz, J. (2022). Strengthening emotional development and

emotion regulation in childhood as a key task in early childhood education. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(7), 3978. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19073978

Derrick Toups teaches education and child development courses at Tulane and multiple Louisiana community colleges and is a Ph.D. student at LSU. Derrick works at Agenda for Children and helps oversee public funding and contracts to increase access to quality early care and education in New Orleans. He can be contacted at derricktoups@gmail.com.