Carly's Ramblings Blog - Style

Emotional Intelligence

Today's blog...

Blog City – Day 412

Prompt: Emotional intelligence.
If you were to design teaching emotional intelligence in schools what would your curriculum include?

Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to monitor one's own and other people's emotions, to discriminate between different emotions and label them appropriately, and to use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior.

Salovey and Mayer proposed a model that identified four different factors of emotional intelligence: the perception of emotion, the ability reason using emotions, the ability to understand emotion and the ability to manage emotions.

Perceiving Emotions: The first step in understanding emotions is to accurately perceive them. In many cases, this might involve understanding nonverbal signals such as body language and facial expressions.

Reasoning With Emotions: The next step involves using emotions to promote thinking and cognitive activity. Emotions help prioritize what we pay attention and react to; we respond emotionally to things that garner our attention.

Understanding Emotions: The emotions that we perceive can carry a wide variety of meanings. If someone is expressing angry emotions, the observer must interpret the cause of their anger and what it might mean. For example, if your boss is acting angry, it might mean that he is dissatisfied with your work; or it could be because he got a speeding ticket on his way to work that morning or that he's been fighting with his wife.

Managing Emotions: The ability to manage emotions effectively is a key part of emotional intelligence. Regulating emotions, responding appropriately and responding to the emotions of others are all important aspect of emotional management.

One program that our board has instigated was put forth by Mary Gordon - Roots of Empathy.
http://www.rootsofempathy.org/

Classes have a little teacher - a baby comes with their mother and a faciliator who guides the students through the process. Those hard to reach students have found success through this program. Aggression is lowered and lines of communication are opened. The classroom teacher can extend the program by having regular class meetings that help and guide the students through issues that come up in their lives at school.