The movie, Waiting for "Superman", laid blame for our broken K-12 public school system with teacher unions. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan suggested teachers should come from the top third of their graduating classes. President Obama in a recent speech at TechBoston called for more reform and more money. Theories abound for fixing our schools, but the debate ignores an underlying current. The root of our failing education system from K-12 all the way through college is a lack of one basic skill: the ability to manage our emotions.
According to Daniel Goleman, the author of Emotional Intelligence, emotional management, the ability to identify, appropriately express and manage our emotions, forms the foundation for learning and making decisions. It is the platform on which other essential skills, like reading, writing, math, even social skills are built. As it is a skill, it has to be taught and continually practiced.
Dr. Goleman's research has found that academic achievement scores in students who learn key emotional skills improve by an average of 12 percent to 15 percent. These results underscore what literally happens in a brain distracted by emotions -- it has precious little cognitive ability available to take in new information or critically think.
So why doesn't every school teach emotional management and why is it not taught every year of school and even through adulthood? The answer lies in our culture's general discomfort with feelings.
According to Carole Robin, a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in organizational behavior, our ability to be in touch with and express our feelings is slowly socialized out of us. She gives the example of a toddler who bumps his head: the mother rushes to him and says "You're okay. You're okay." We're told to be okay even if we're not.
Then we enter school and we're told to be rational and not emotional. Later in the workplace, we're trained to put on armor. So over time, our ability to even access emotion gets thwarted; in her words, "our emotional muscles atrophy."
Though we're trained to tamp down our emotions, it's an illusion, because emotions don't go away unless addressed. "Human beings are leaky," Dr. Robin adds. Meaning, if you're not aware of your emotions you can't manage them and when you don't manage your emotions you encounter all manner of unintended results.
Some of which we can already see not only in poor student test scores and the escalating number of high school drop outs, but also in adults with enormous school debt and no jobs.
The reality is the circumstances of the lives of students and their teachers, for that matter, contain difficulties. But instead of facing them with key emotional skills, these difficulties become distractions that are felt in classrooms across the nation. Students and adults, alike, will only be able to learn more or be effective, if all of their faculties are focused on the task at hand, which is only possible if their emotional concerns are addressed and managed.
Dr. Robin's very popular class in inter-personal dynamics at Stanford, ironically dubbed "Touchy Feely" by students, offers a starting point. The class teaches future business leaders how emotions underlie communication and behavior. Armed with the vocabulary of feelings, students practice identifying and appropriately expressing their emotions. Lack of this simple skill can impede a leader's success in her environment -- the workplace, much like it affects the workplace of students and teachers -- the classroom.
While there are organizations like the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) working to integrate self-awareness training into the curriculum of schools, there don't seem to be any organizations focused on educating the public. Frankly, CASEL and other organizations with similar goals won't be successful at a scale to make a true difference unless our culture addresses the stigma attached to emotions.
We begin by understanding and addressing how emotions underlie everything we do. We may just find we're the superheroes.
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Emotional intelligence - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Trapped Inside Facebook's Walls
Emotional intelligence isn't just the key to educational success - it's the key to a successful and more satisfying, well-balanced life.
I'm not against the ideas outlined above, but question how they'd be implemented and taught to kids. I'd like to know more. Certainly identifying and understanding our emotions is a valuable asset which would benefit a person throughout all aspects of life.
I take issue, though, with the idea that "this should be taught in schools every day." I think it should be taught AT HOME every day. Aren't parents responsible for any aspect of child rearing any more? Or should we just dump it all on teachers?
The question — "What's going on inside me?" — is one that Teachers and Parents need to teach children to become adept at answering. My 20 years of working with kids and my clinical expertise in child psychotherapy has shown me that both parents and teachers have trouble with this issue.
We know how to teach our children to walk, talk and read, we need to teach children to recognize and express their feelings effectively,( starting with babies-) . If children learn how to process their emotions they won't need to medicate and express their emotional needs with tantrums ,misbehaving or food. You can read more on Food-Mood- Behavior -Connection and kids on my blog
http://bit.ly/hHkKpm
But I am not at all surprised that this is another new revelation to those on the outside seeking to "fix" the classroom.
You can be forgiven for your ignorance. What leads to student success is standardized testing and punishment of poor teachers. If your child is not Einstein, we must root out the teacher who held them back, and punish them to the full extent of the law. These poor teachers are easy to spot. Rather than relentlessly having their student prepare for standardized test by taking standardized tests, in school and at home, these poor teachers focus on understanding, creativity, arts, history, citizenship, and a love of learning. They must be stopped.
Here is a question for you. Does Mr. Goleman's Emotional Intelligence tests come in a standardize format with No. 2 penciled in bubbles that can easily be graded via electronic scanner? If so, we may have something we can work with.
*** satire off ***
Until it is recognized that the system should be aimed at developing human beings and not just children who test better compared to the rest of the world’s children, or our future workforce or voting public, we won’t improve the quality of the system. We can’t improve the system with the same level of thinking that was used to create it.
What must be understood is that the system is designed and managed to produce what it is and has been delivering for quite some time. Thus a fundamental change of the system and the way it is managed, not simply changes within the system is required.
http://www.forprogressnotgrowth.com/2011/03/07/want-to-improve-quality-listen-up/
Students demonstrated the ability to listen respectfully to each other, take turns speaking realize that there were multiple solutions to a given problem, and how to respect opinions different from their own.
Then lessons were designed with collaborative models in place, based on the knowledge of how children learn...visual, auditory, kinesthetic, internal thinkers, external thinkers, and so on. Classroom design reflected areas where students could work alone or with a partner while an area for small group problem solving was also available.
This form of instruction fosters deeper understanding and involves long term memory.
Now curriculum is driven not by how children learn but how to get them to pass the critical tests that measure the lowest levels of critical thinking...
.An emotional subject for those of us looking for intelligent guidance from educational leadership
Most professional development initiatives in good corporate settings recognise emotional intelligence as crucial. Executive coaching for senior managers often includes a focus on several aspects of emotional intelligence. Limitation on this professional development is due mainly to learning & development budgets in organisations. Even in recruitment, the language of "emotional intelligence" is very much used in the context of finding high quality leaders & team members.
With so much research available about the effectiveness of evidence-based, quality social & emotional learning curricula, it's astounding that departments of education have not adopted one of these curricula & incorporated it into teachers' professional development. When you read (via research published by organisations such as CASEL) that academic outcomes can improve by between 11 and 17% with quality SEL programss, & social and emotional outcomes are also vastly improved, you have to ask why this is not happening? The answer I think lies not in discomfort with emotions. It's economic and political.
Governments are not ready to pay and develop teachers in this area to the extent required. SEL must be part of curricula because kids are the next generation of parents; education is the opportunity to start 'leveling the playing field' regardless of family cultural background