You may have glanced at the diagram accompanying these sets of articles on emotional self awareness.

Take a good look now at the diagram that opens these articles, it has been referred to as the Wheel of Emotions or Plutchik’s Flower and it was developed by Robert Plutchik, his psycho evolutionary theory of emotion is one of the most influential classification approaches for general emotional responses.

He considered there to be eight primary emotions  anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, anticipation, trust and joy.  He used the Emotion Wheel to show these emotions and he coordinated them in pairs of opposites: joy versus sadness; trust versus disgust; fear versus anger and anticipation versus surprise. Like colours, primary emotions can be expressed at different intensities and can mix with one another to form different emotions.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Plutchik)

Children and adults need to be able to recognise and name a feeling, this is central to the SPHE curriculum and to a good emotional intelligence  If we cannot recognise when we are angry or sad, this will affect our behaviour and others. If we cannot see that someone else is angry, it may be hard to listen and empathise.

Here are some activities based on the objectives in the SPHE curriculum and emotional self awareness.

Rating scale/diary-

This is a good activity for the teacher and child to take part in. You might even ask the parents to do it as well!

The objective is for children to share their feelings in a safe way. Introduce children to the idea of rating or numbering their feelings. Ask them to keep a mood diary, technology or paper based. Simply, they rate how they feel from a 1-10. They can do this in the morning and just before home time.

Name that feeling

The teacher can give the children the main feelings as per the Plutchik above. Get them to think and name how they look and feel when they feel angry, sad, etc.

The objective is for the child to name their actual feeling and share these with the class or a small group of children. Set up the class in a circle time layout. If you use a talking object, use it here to get the children to start off with “I feel”

Different types of feelings.

You can see by the Plutchik diagram that there are different variants or shades of feelings. For developing the children’s emotional literacy, they need to be able to think about what they are feeling and name the type. For example, very angry or annoyed.

The objective is for children to name different feelings and their shades.

Make flashcards with feelings written on them as per Plutchik. Ask the children to stand by the feeling they are feeling at the minute. Even the closest to the feeling they are feeling at present. If there is a feeling not listed, write it down and add it to the cards. These feelings cards can be displayed in a central place for reference or to add to as the year goes on and the children develop their EI skills.

Journal Writing

Every morning or evening, the children can take 5 minutes to write about how they feel or how their day went. Journalling has been proven to be a very useful aid in dealing with emotional overload and stress. These journal entries may never be read out, just kept and read if they like.

Feelings and behaviour

There are many ways for you to teach the connection between how we feel and how we act. One way is to use the feelings that the class have been working on and get them to identify the time they felt an emotion, e.g. They were annoyed that they didn’t win a prize in a handwriting competition. Then, they need to identify the Action that this could/did lead to. This might be Action: I ignored my friend when she won, making her and me upset and fight.

This could be written in a column on board or copybook. Emotion(feeling) on one side with (could lead to) Action on the other. Lots of examples could be worked into this. Write up some emotions and actions and get the children to connect the most likely action with its corresponding feeling. The goal is for the child to realise that when they feel something, they do not always have to react to it. They have the choice.

I have given you a start point for your work in emotional self awareness, in the last article at the end of this series, I will give you some general references where you can find more.

To begin with, try some or all of these activities and if you are enjoying them and find them useful, we can work some more up on anseo.net.

Next week, I will be starting on the competency of Assertiveness, a hugely important life skill for all!

Emotional Self awareness and the primary school curriculum

In my last post on emotional self awareness, I defined what it means to be emotionally self aware. It may seem a simple defintion but there is a lot more to this competency than simply being aware. You also need the ability to be able to differentiate between your feelings. For example, what is the difference between angry and annoyed? How do I feel when I feel these things? How do I look? What things tend to provoke certain feelings and can I notice these shades of feelings in others and distinguish well?

The last part of being emotionally self aware is to recognise the impact that your feelings have on those around you. So, as you can see, there is a lot more to this competency that one would think at first glance.

SPHE Curriculum and emotional self awareness

In the Infants SPHE curriculum, in the strand unit of Growing and Changing, we see plenty opportunities to strengthen this skill, at the tender age of a Junior Infant, which is great!

The strand unit of Feelings and Emotions gives us some learning objectives like:

• naming a variety of feelings and taling about situations where these may be experienced
• exploring the variety of ways in which feelings are expressed and coped with
• begining to be sensitive to the feelings of others and to realise that the actions of one individual can affect the feelings of another
• exploring and discussing occasions that can promote positive feelings in himself/herself

This strand unit perfectly covers this competency.

In the 1st and 2nd Class SPHE curriculum, we see again the same type of objectives in the strand of Growing and Changing and in the strand unit of Feelings and emotions,

• name and identify a wide range of feelings and talk about and explore feelings in different situations
• realise and explore the various ways feelings can be expressed and dealt with and choose which are the most appropriate and acceptable
• identify people with whom he/she can discuss feelings and emotions
• explore the various feelings that change as one grows
• recognise that individual actions can affect the feelings of others

I am delighted with these objectives as they still focus in on the key competencies of emotional self-awareness and add an important one in which the children can identify the people in whom they can discuss emotions and feelings with. All very healthy stuff.

In the 3rd and 4th Class SPHE curriculum, in the same strand of Growing and Changing and the strand unit, Feelings and emotions, we find:

• talk about and reflect on a wide variety of feelings and emotions and the various situations where these may be experienced and how they may be expressed
• identify strong feelings and learn how to express and cope with these feelings in a socially appropriate manner
• explore how feelings can influence one’s life

What is great about these is that they focus in on the key competencies of emotional naming, awareness and understanding how their emotions and feelings affect other people and situations. I particularly think the second outcome, where the child has to identify strong feelings and learn how to cope and express these in a socially appropriate manner is excellent. If every adult in the world was competent at this one, we would have a very different and easy world!

In the 5th and 6th Class SPHE curriculum, we have more of the same thing but developed as the child is changing into a young adult so these will really start to help them as they start to experience the highs and lows of the teenage years, peer pressure and learn how to delay instant gratification. They will learn that their emotions and feelings can be now affected by hormones and this is where tactics and diet, exercise, mediation can really help them deal with issues that are sometimes out of their control. That is where the last outcomes comes in. It links back nicely to the first competency I covered in the very first articles, self actualisation.

• acquire the ability and confidence to identify, discuss and explore a range of feelings, especially those that are difficult to express
• discuss and practice how to express and cope with various feelings in an appropriate manner
  
• understand how feelings help in understanding himself/herself
• differentiate between needs and wants and recognise and explore the concept of delayed gratification
• identify and learn about healthy ways to help him/her feel positive about himself/herself.

So, I am delighted to be able to say that the SPHE curriculum is an extremely emotionally self aware curriculum at every level and possible more! In the next post, I will be giving you some ideas for how you can implement these objectives into your class at all levels.

The next set of articles will develop the intrapersonal realm, self actualisation is within the intrapersonal realm and so is our second skill of Emotional Self Awareness.

You may think that this is a self explanatory skill, you just need to be aware of what you are feeling, right?

Yes, right but there is a lot more to this competency that we think at first glance.

Bar-on’s definition of emotional self-awareness is:

This intrapersonal sub-factor is defined as the ability to be aware of and understand our emotions. Emotional self-awareness is the ability to recognize our emotions. It is not only the ability to be aware of our emotions, but also to differentiate between them, to know what we are feeling and why, and to know what caused those feelings-http://www.reuvenbaron.org/bar-on-model/essay.php?i=3#intra

Emotional self awareness is the foundation stone on which most of the other skills of EI are developed from so it is a really important competency. It is the only way in which you will begin to understand yourself and change yourself, if needed.

If you can master this one overarching skill, this will empower you to work to improving other areas in EI. People that do have good emotional self-awareness know when they are feeling down, sad or tetchy and they can understand how these feeling can affect their behaviour, which in turn affects other people around them. These people can even target exactly what happened before that feeling and why their feeling happened.

Emotional self-awareness is doubly important for teachers. If you have a personal issue or are feeling sad or down or angry, this can be taken into work and the children will see this straight away. It can cause the children to misbehave or use the bad feeling to their advantage. The ability to catch your emotion is an important skill, to be able to step back and ask yourself how you are feeling and then think about you are going to act.

Until my next post, I am going to get you to think about your own emotional self-awareness Think about the following, you may find a notebook will help you keep your feelings work together.

• Look at the feelings of anger, fear, anxiety, sadness and happiness- write down a situation or interaction that happened in the last week that gave you that feeling. You might just choose one feeling. Now, write down the circumstances that seemed to trigger that feeling. Next, list the bodily sensations that came with this feeling. Finally, list your inner dialogue or self talk associated with it.
• Repeat this for each feeling.
• Now, review the list of feelings. Rank how strong they were on a scale of 1 to 10. The strongest feeling probably indicates your “ouchy point” and if you probe this, you might find this will interfere with interpersonal relationships, reality resting and problem solving.
• To probe further, ask yourself for each feeling if the outcome was reasonably good? Was it neutral? Was it something you regret? Could you have handled it better? If it was neutral or unsatisfactory, write down ways in which your feeling may have helped you from achieving a better end result.
• List some of the emotions that you might be more aware of. Make a list of specific situations that usually set them off. Or make a list of people that trigger these strong feelings.

Try these for the week and I will have some ways to look at your emotional self awareness next week along with a look at the SPHE curriculum to see how emotionally self-aware it actually is.

From there, my third blog post will focus in on how you can develop and emotionally self-aware classroom through developing yourself, activities and planning your classroom focus.

Self actualisation, the SPHE curriculum and learning

I have defined what emotional intelligence is and why it is so important for us. I have focused in on the first competency of the EI framework, self-actualisation.

We have noted Maslow’s theory of motivation and self actualisation. We have discussed things a teacher needs to be aware of and finally, we have briefly looked into the SPHE curriculum and established if it covers elements of self-actualisation. We found it did, especially so at the senior end of the curriculum. This makes sense. 4-6 olds need a lot of external motivators but as they grow and develop, we hope their independence and self actualisation skills do too.

Creative classroom, creative teacher and creative learners

• Creativity could be seen as the very same thing as self-actualisation and it is more than coming up with zany ideas. Moyer and Wallace (1995) argued that the role of education is not to foster compliance, but to develop the self-actualization that springs from individuality and creative growth. Weiner (1992) stressed a mentor’s role in heightening students’ anticipation, expectations, individuality, and value—and creativity and self-actualization. Can teachers or students co-mentor each other? Yes.
• But, creativity does not come to everyone and it is not a special talent. Living creatively is developing your talents, learning to use your abilities, and striving to become what you are capable of becoming.  This is what self actualisation is.

Self actualising classroom

I could be forever writing about activities for the classroom that would help your students develop their self-actualisation. What I am going to try to do is give you some general activities that could be reused or altered to suit your children and the learning outcomes.

• Enjoying what you do-Students and teachers need to enjoy what they do every day to the point that they experience “flow” Flow was a book written by Csikszentmihalyi’s (pronounced “Smith’s”) and it defines flow as the experience being intensely enjoyable.  It would also mean giving the students freedom to learn what they want to learn and to choose how they want to learn it.
• Broad and balanced curriculum-Think about a broad and balanced curriculum, subjects like sports, games, art, and hobbies are generally where we experience enjoyment and self actualise. Also, experts like artists, athletes, musicians, chess masters, or surgeons experience flow because they are doing exactly what they want to do. As a teacher, we need to ensure we are giving value and time to each individual subject, that way the children will get a chance to do something they like and achieve self actualisation.
• Independent projects are perfect for creativity and self actualisation.
• Creative writing is an excellent way for children to learn creativity and to learn how to self actualise. However, to do this properly, teachers need to dedicate a 8-12 week block for one piece of work. I teach the narrative genre by beginning to introduce the class to many types of narrative and discussing what are the elements of plot, narrative, character. We then look at the most integral parts of a plot and stories. Children gradually learn how to get creative ideas in writing, I have written several articles on creative writing in the classroom so take a look. The process and product are as important as each other, put the focus on the product but be aware of the process of learning with the class. Help the children reflect on their product and what they would do the next time or what they would like to write about. Encourage them to write outside of school, setting themselves mini tasks for homework or use a class blog for students to submit work that fellow students can comment on.
• Best buddies-Help children set goals and use the “Buddy system” for this-Children can choose a buddy who they think will help them set goals. A good buddy doesn’t have to be a friend, it might even be someone they don’t know or like that much. This teaches children to get on and work with different types of people. The teacher will have to control this slightly as they will be attracted to working with their friends! They will have to get each other and share information about each other to begin with.
• Goal setting-Now, the best buddies can help set up goals together. Get them to think about different areas in their life that they would like to improve. Get them to think of three goals and ask them to ask their best buddy to help keep them motivated through weekly chats in class. The teacher needs to explain SMART goals, children will inevitably be attracted to huge goals like, I want to be a pop singer. Encourage them to think about the small goals they need to put in place on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis to achieve this.

“Social, personal and health education provides particular opportunities to foster the personal development, health and well-being of the child and to help him/her to create and maintain supportive relationships and become an active and responsible citizen in society.”#

A noble and inspiring statement. What an amazing curriculum the SPHE one is! Despite the life changing effect the SPHE curriculum could have for students, we are still only meant to be teaching it for 30 minutes a week. Of course, we have the whole school day and the class climate where we can informally help our students learn about all these important life skills. I won’t get started on this particular rant now though!

In my last post, I defined what self actualisation means. We looked at Maslow and his work on hierarchy of needs, I hope I left you with some thoughts about how we can help children obtain their basic needs before we move onto the aspirational need of self actualisation.

We also need to remind ourselves of why self actualisation is so important, why do we need it at all?

The need and drive to achieve is one of the strongest factors of success, it distinguishes between average performers and stars. If someone is strong in this area then it will lead to a sense of fulfilment beyond materialistic measures of success. Victor Frankl, a psychiatrist who was a Holocaust surviver, says that a sense of meaning is the most important drive in life. Think about that. If you or the students don’t have a meaning in life, where does it leave you or your students?

Some ways of improving your self actualisation drive in the classroom would be to:

• Enabling the children to have access to a full and broad and varied curriculum. We have 11 unique subjects with their own skills, content and attitudes. Children should be encouraged to explore areas that could be interesting to them, they may discover hidden talents and interests.

• Set up your classroom and your plans around the theory of letting the childrne do and learn about things that interest them. Google insist that their employees spend a certain amount of time in their job on whatever interests them. Try this for children. I don’t need to spell out how, just start thinking about how you can do this!

• Challenge all the children in your class, set goals for them that will push them. Use your own assessment to guide this.

• Motivate yourself as the teacher by setting goals for yourself in areas of professional development, keep yourself fresh and the children will follow and be inspired!

• As part of your job, you are already teaching the children about postponing immediate pleasures for long-term goals. Hard work and focus throughout the year should culminate in a success for all of the children in your class. Celebrate the small and bigger achievements. Focus on effort and outcome by having a brilliant reward system that steers away from the good behaviour only approach.

• Self actualisation is not just about the final success, it is also about finishing things that you complete. We all are guilty of being excited about starting a new project and losing the motivation as we go on. We need to discuss this with our class and how we will keep ourselves motivated using external rewards or a set of SMART objectives. Keeping the aims small and date related to keep motivation peaking.

• You may have heard of the “double bagger” analogy. Think about the person who packs your bag at the check out. This job usually involves little or no education. But, like all jobs, it can be done in a differing way with different results, depending on the bagger’s feel or attitude. You can teach the children to be double baggers, rather than single baggers! Anything that is worth doing is worth doing well! Use this slogan, print it out and repeat it as a mantra, the children will remember! If you want to read more about the double bagger theory, read Heartwork by Revuen Bar-On and Claus Moller ir at the TMI link http://www.tmiworld.com/be-double-bagger

• Optimism and happiness are linked strongly with self actualisation and I will be speaking further about these as we go on.

So, let’s focus right in on the SPHE curriculum and see where self-actualisation comes in, if it comes in at all.

In the Infant curriculum, we have no specific learning outcomes related to the field of self actualisation but don’t let that worry you! I have spoken about how self-actualisation can work in a positive classroom atmosphere as opposed to stand alone lessons.

In the 1st and 2nd class curriculum, we see more of a shift towards independence and self actualisation. the strand Myself  and the strand unit Self identity give us these aims:

• develop an appreciation of and talk about personal strengths, abilities and characteristics

• identify and talk about personal preferences, dreams for the future and hopes

In the 3rd and 4th curriculum for SPHE, we have aims that are truly self actualising! Look at the strand Myself  and the strand unit Self identity.

• recognise, describe and discuss individual personality traits, qualities, strengths, limitations, interests and abilities

• identify realistic personal goals and targets and how these can be achieved in the short or long term

• realise that each person has a unique contribution to make to various groups, situations and friendships

• identify personal preferences, dreams for the future, and hopes

I love the second goal, setting realistic goals and targets and how they can be achieved in the long and short term. If we were to enable children to learn and understand this, we have won as teachers!

And finally, in the 5th and 6th Class curriculum, in the Myself strand and the strand unit Self identity, we have

• reflect on his/her experiences and the reasons for taking different courses of action

• identify realistic personal goals and targets and the strategies required to reach these.

All of these objectives would indicate that the SPHE curriculum is very much a self-actualisation curriculum. I have only outlined the specific curriculum objectives that relate to self actualisation. Many of the other SPHE outcomes are naturally shaped and linked to achieving goals and success. In my next blog post, I will be putting these objectives into some more practical activities and ideas for each class level. Until then, think about how you can start self actualising. How are you going to put these ideas into action for success for your students and yourself as the teaching professional?

(Image taken from www.seomraranga.com)

Emotional Intelligence

You most certainly have heard of emotional and social intelligence. You may have read Daniel Goleman’s book on the subject.

However, back in the 1980s, a psychologist called Reuven Bar-On began work in the field of emotional intelligence. He wondered why some people did better in life? He wondered why intelligent people seemed to fail in life? He found the answer by  developing an instrument called EQ-i. He believed emotional intelligence or EI was made up of a series of overlapping but distinctly different skills and attitudes that could be grouped under five general “realms” and then further divided into 15 components or “Scales” A tool was developed to measure emotional intelligence.

I am interested in how teachers can develop their own EI and have a knock on effect on the children in their care. I am also interested in how Irish teachers can utilise the SPHE curriculum to develop their children’s EI. I have been using a number of EI packages from the UK and the US and would like to share my ideas with you. I am by no means an expert but I do believe passionately in the importance of EI for personal and professional happiness and I know that EI can be improved so let’s go!

Self-actualisation

The first component or competency I would like to discuss is self-actualisation. An important and integral life skills.

The definition of self actualisation is:

“The ability to realise your potential capacities…is manifested by becoming involved in pursuits that lead to a meaningful, rich and full life. It can mean a lifelong effort and an enthusiastic commitment to long-term goals…persistently trying to do your best and to improve yourself in general.”

and

“Self actualisation is associated with feelings of self-satisfaction. Individuals with healthy self actualisation are pleased with the location they find themselves at…with respect to their personal, occupation and financial destinations.”#

Maslow and the basic needs of life

Abraham Maslow came up with the term “self actualisation” in the 1940s as part of his hierarchy of needs theory. This theory looks at the concept that there are 5 basic needs that humans must have satisfied to live and then afterwards to go onto to live happy and achieved lives.

If you look at the Maslow Hierarchy of Needs diagram here, you will see the first basic needs that needs to be fulfilled-these are biological and physiological needs.

They include basic life needs like air, food, drink, shelter, warmth, sex and sleep etc. Think about the children in your class and if all of them have access to these basic life needs. It is upsetting to think that some children will not have these basic life rights. How then can we as teachers try to enhance creativity and help them achieve learning outcomes in literacy and numeracy. Can you see how difficult or impossible a challenge this may be? Can a school or teacher provide for these? Some schools do with breakfast clubs and free lunch schemes. As a teacher, we do have a responsibility to look and be concerned about these things but we are not going to solve them today. The important thing is that we are aware of these basic human needs.

The second part of Maslow’s hierarchy are safety needs. These include protection, security, order, law, limits and stability etc. Again, how many children go home to a home of zero boundaries and chaos. They feel insecure and as if everything is out of their power. This is where a secure classroom can help. A classroom where there is structure and consistency. A teacher that they trust. A framework of rules, rights and boundaries. The children know what is happening every morning they come to school. They know P.E. happens every Wednesday. They know that the teacher expects certain things. Children and indeed adults thrive on these safety needs.

The third aspect of the hierarchy of needs is belonginess and love needs. Things like family, affection, relationships and the child’s work group form this section. This is where the SPHE and the whole school climate can benefit a child’s life hugely. Being part of a team or a group can really boost a child’s happiness and sense of belonging, but according to Maslow’s research, only when the other two basic ones have been met. So, let’s not get ahead of ourselves! It also links in nicely to the interpersonal competencies of emotional intelligence.

The fourth dimension covers the esteem needs. We will look at this further in the self-regard competency later on. A child can build their esteem by being giving responsibility and status. This is where the nub of self actualisation lies. A child working on a task or aim, no matter how small, getting enjoyment from it and finally achieving it.

When this and the the basic needs have been worked on and met as a basic human right, the child feels and see personal growth and fulfillment.

Teachers and self actualisation

I have talked about one of the competency of self actualisation within the area of emotional intelligence. We have discussed briefly the impact of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and how self-actualisation can be worked on. Now, think about how these basic needs are or could be met in your classroom. What type of lessons will you prepare? What type or classroom atmosphere will you invoke and what type of teacher will you be?

In the next post on self-actualisation, I will be looking at how to help children set action-orientated goals, setting the classroom up as a place where children do what they love and helping the children to set a balance in their lives. I will also be looking at which specific objectives the SPHE curriculum covers with relation to self-actualisation or does it cover it at all?

I’d like to look at the link between school leadership and emotional intelligence. I was forwarded on an article on this very subject a while back. It makes for interesting reading, here’s the main points.

• A group of principals and vice-principals were assessed on  their EQ level in Ontario in 2005. They were also asked to self score themselves in the area of leadership, using 21 simple “I” statement, they were asked to rate them from 1-10.
• On top of this, supervisors and staff rated the named principal using the same criteria and scoring system.
• Results showed that the self scoring and staff/supervisor scoring tallied in a major way.
• Above average emotionally intelligent principals tended to be stronger in4 scales. These were emotional self awareness, self-actualisation, empathy and interpersonal skills.
• Female principals scored higher in interpersonal skills but there were no other differences noticed between the sexes.
• The study also referred to Humphrey’s defintion of task-orientation leadership and relationship orientation leadership. People often think that being a leader (relationships)is more important than a manager( task) when in fact, they are intertwined. It found that task-orientated EI skills like emotional awareness, self-actualisation, problem solving, flexibility and impulse control were the most important ones. In the relationship-orientated skills, the emotional inteligence skills that were the most important in an effective school principal were empathy, interpersonal skills, flexibility and problem solving.
• Note that problem solving and flexibility were in both task and relationship orientated emotional intelligence skills for an effective school leader.
• So, what did these reports recommend? That professional development programs for school leaders needed to focus on developing these EI skills and competencies by using EI assessment tools in the recruitment and succession planning of incoming and outgoing principals.
• The study can be found here.

So, effective leadership is not based on making things easier or giving more capitation grants to schools. Of course, these things wuld be nice but it is more important for principals to keep their own mental and emotional level healthy. Book yourself in for an EI assessment and work on a practical skill-based emotions pathway. It will help your staff, family and the children.

Rozz Lewis is a primary school principal in Saplings Carlow. She is licensed to administer, score, interpret and provide feedback on the Bar-On Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i). She can be contacted at rozz@anseo.net for more information or for a challenging debate!

It got me thinking about an article I read a while back when I was studying Emotional Intelligence. It really is worth a read but for your benefit and because I’m a nice girl, I’m going to summarise and present the main points and gift wrap them up for you in this article!

First, of all, let’s have a recap. What is emotional intelligence and does it really matter? Isn’t is a load of psycho babble? Just another soft skill?

Well, first a whistle stop tour of emotional intelligence. Sit back, grab a cuppa or something stronger and enjoy!

Where was it mentioned first? Leuner, some German guy who liked the alternative way of solving issues…

The first time the term Emotional Intelligence (EI) was mentioned was when it appeared in a German document called Praxis der Kinderpsychologie und Kinderpsychiatrie written by Leuner in 1966. Leuner was a German psychiatrist and in this paper he speaks about women who reject their social roles due to them being separated at an early age from their mothers. He suggests strongly that they had a low level of “Emotional Intelligence” (EI) and prescribed LSD for their treatment.

Moving quickly on…

Mayer, Salovey and Caruso

In the early 90s, Jack Mayer, Peter Salovey, David Caruso started to really look into EI seriously. But, it was Daniel Goleman who made the term commercial in the late 90s when he wrote the “Emotional Intelligence” book, which is excellent, by the way.

He suggests that we are in a social mess and we need to teach EI in our schools. On top of everything else. He’s right though. Vision Works publishes some amazingly brilliant teacher resources for this area. Expensive but a must in a primary school.And, for you sceptics, check out the research here. Forget standardised English and Maths tests, let’s standardise Emotional Intelligence for our kids. After, all it’s the most important predictor of life and work success. But, more on that later.

But, it might still sound a bit wishy washy to you? How can we measure EI, we can easily measure intelligence but what about emotions and intelligence? Can they be measured?

Yes, they can, in a short answer. A self assessment and 360 type approach might be the best way as there is a huge amount evidence that EI can be measured and that it does improve work and school performance.

See this research article here. (O’Boyle, Humphrey, Pollack, Hawver, Story, 2010)

Daniel Goleman

Goleman’s definition of EI is “abilities such as being able to motivate oneself and persist in the face of frustrations; to control impulse and delay gratification; to regulate one’s moods and keep distress from swamping the ability to think; to empathize and to hope.”

Reuven Bar-On

Reuven Bar-On’s definition of EI  says that it is “an array of non-cognitive capabilities, competencies, and skills that influence one’s ability to succeed in coping with environmental demands and pressures.”

Bar-On went on to develop a skill-based assessment called the Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i) that looks at and assesses five broad types of EI-these are intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligence, adaptability, stress management and general mood

Mayer, Salovey, and Caruso

These guys use a structure where EI symbolises a system for in-putting and processing emotional information. It has 4 main areas-emotional perception/identification, emotional facilitation of thought, emotional understanding and emotional management. They use a performance-based instrument instead of a self-reporting one called the MSCEIT (Mayer, Salovey, and Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test).

In part 2, I’ll be looking at  the report on the Ontario Principals’ Council Leadership Study (February 2005) and how this can be used a Board of Management and policy level to ensure school leaders are protected and developed, in turn, developing staff and students. A great spiral effect.

Principals have a really stressful job and what makes it worse is that we don’t even realise when we are stressed. This all links in nicely with emotional intelligence and being self aware of your feelings. But, what do we do when we do realise we need some help? Karen Belshaw gave an energetic but soothing work shop in the area of stress management. The audience all crammed in, it was over subscribed and packed to capacity. What does this say about our profession?

I really enjoyed this as Karen gave us practical and useable techniques, like the happy face sticker technique. She gave us a sheet of stickers with smiley faces and told us to stick them somewhere we would see occasionally throughout the day. Everytime you see this happy face, you stop and breathe in and out deeply and slowly. After  about a month of doing this, everytime you see the happy face, your brain convinces itself it is breathing deeply. Whether you are or not.

Deep breathing slows your heart rate right down, gets oxygen into your brain and calms you right down! Useful for a potentially stressful conflict situation.

Another great tip she gave was to switch off before you go to bed by doing something that was the opposite of what you have been doing all day-colouring in, knitting, puzzles, anything as long as it’s creative and prepares you for bed.

Self-talk is really important too, she recommended making a positive statement or mantra that you can repeat to yourself. It is stronger if you chose your own. Some of the examples she gave were:

I am doing the best I can and that’s ok.
There is nothing I can do about this situation right now.

I am going to make sure that I practice deep breathing, eating well, exercising and doing fun things outside of school-generally switching off!

This article was written by Rozz Lewis and you can contact her at rozz@anseo.net if you have any questions or just fancy a chat!

www.stressmanagement.ie

When I attended the BETT educational conference in London recently, I had a few minutes to browse the management/psychology book section in WH Smith. There seems to be an influx of happiness or positivity books out at the minute, the publishing companies seeing their opportunity in the current depressing climate of recession talk.
Positive psychology and Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence has huge links with positive psychology or the idea of being happy, positive or optimistic. Bar-On’s model of measuring emotional intelligence is broken into 15 competencies or skills, you could call them. 2 of these are optimism and happiness. In the Bar-On measurement of Emotional Intelligence or EQ-i are all self measuring competencies. For how else can you measure happiness? A teacher cannot truly whether a pupil is happy or vice versa. It’s a personal thing.
Bar-on and happiness
In the a recent research article from the South African Journal of psychology, Volume 40(1) March 2010, the whole area of positive psychology were studied. Bar-On found that having a positive mood or feeling increases a person’s energy which in turn increases that person’s motivation. Fair enough. That seems obvious, no? But, he also found out some other interesting points.
Happiness is highly associated with emotional intelligence.
The 4 highest predictors of subjective well being or happiness/optimism were ability to understand and accept emotions, a striving to set and achieve personal goals, ability to verify one’s own feelings and finally being able to put things in perspective(reality testing).
The second predictor is most widely known as self actualisation. It means someone will not just perform well but they will be able to fix a realistic goal, timeframe and means and they will be able to take on that goal in the best way they can. Self-actualisation also needs good problem solving skills for making independent decisions on what needs to be done and then being assertive enough to be able to follow through with these decisions.
The most important finding in this research was that a person’s emotional intelligence has a huge impact on performance, happiness, well-being and a quest for meaningful life. This is the key to happiness.
Emotionally intelligent schools-we can’t base this on opinion only
In my own opinion, based on this research and experience in the classroom, there is a great need for primary schools to work on developing educational programs to improve emotionally intelligent behaviour.
This development must be based on empiricism or researched and proven experiments/theory. Teachers are not qualified to develop or give opinions in a field of psychology outside their remit. Sound bites in the media from well meaning people that are based on supposition and unsubstantiated theory cannot be taken into account, the area of emotional intelligence and positivity needs to be handled carefully and properly.
I believe that there needs a change to the way we work with children and parents. The first step is a review of the SPHE curriculum and all publications using current best practice in social and emotional psychology and learning. The second step is getting knowledge of emotional intelligence out there. If a teacher can become aware of their own emotions and feelings, then and only then can they begin to manage and be aware of the emotions of the children in their care.
It’s a long road but massively worthwhile.
If you want to see what America is doing in the area of emotional intelligence, check out http://casel.org and www.csee.net
If you are interested in the having an emotional intelligent quotient and assessment completed, receiving feedback for your own emotional intelligence development, you can contact me at rozz@anseo.net

This article was written by Rozz Lewis and you can contact her at rozz@anseo.net if you have any questions or just fancy a chat!