Abstract: Social competence and communicative competence as its integral aspect are focused by social and behavior researchers during the last decades. Nevertheless the lack of a commonly accepted definition of the construct, it aims at describing the human potential and skills to function adapting to the various types of context and environment – family, school, professional activity, community in general throughout the life cycle – childhood, youth and early adulthood. Thearticle outlines the key role of the social and communicative competence within the wide range of the significant professional competences of the teacher. Theauthors review the results from two studies on this tropic. The first one measures and accesses seven key aspects of the social competence among education specialists, implementing the Bulgarian modified and adapted version of the Swiss self-report scale of А. Frey and L. Balzer (2005, 2007). The second one is detailing one of the teachers social competence aspects – their skills to manage conflict situations – by the means of studying their preferences and choice of leading communication strategy in problem situations.
Key words: teachers’ professional competence, social and communicative competence, effective professional communication, overcoming conflicts.
Rhetoric and Communications E-journal, Issue 8, April 2013, http://rhetoric.bg/, ISSN 1314-4464