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Denmark: abstract "Can Emotional Intelligence Be Taught?"
This is an abstract from the article
“Can Emotional Intelligence Be Taught?”, The New York Times, Magazine - September 11, 2013
Emotional skills are crucial to academic learning. A dozen of studies show that emotion can either enhance or hinder your ability to learn. They affect your attention and your memory.
Being to school is a constant stream of academic and social challenges that can generate feelings from loneliness to euphoria. Both parents and educators have for long time thought that a child´s
ability to cope with such stresses either depend on their personality – a matter of temper – or something they will “pick up along the way” in interaction with other students. But in practice
many children never develop these skills. It is important as a teacher to work with social and emotional skills the same way as you work with teaching English or Math.
The theory that children need to learn to manage their emotions in order to reach their potentials started with studies in the 1980´es done by psychology professors at Yale and New York Universities. The first studies showed that having “social intelligence” had a significant impact on everything from problem solving to getting a job in job interviews.
Later studies have shown that non cognitive skills such as for example self restraint, persistence or self awareness might be better predicators of a person´s life path than academic
skills.
In USA they look very closely on incorporating the teaching of social and emotional skills into the core curriculum – but they are aware of how effective these standardized programs are in the long run. Current research shows that working with social and emotional learning programs influence neurological pathways in our brain, activating the frontal cortex to the benefit of learning skills such as abstract reasoning, long time planning and working memory. This is recent studies and researchers await the coming years for further results in the area.
If you want to know more about “how to work” with social and emotional learning, read the whole article on: