Since the 90s, emotional intelligence has been gaining more and more ground, and today we can say that we are living the Emotional Revolution. This new paradigm opens the debate emotional intelligence vs. classical intelligence, and even Daniel Goleman, the American psychologist who popularized this concept with the publication of his book Emotional Intelligence in 1995, assures that the emotional quotient will replace the intellectual quotient in the assessment of people. According to Goleman, the intellectual quotient is not a good indicator of who will succeed in life, given that a high percentage depends on external factors. The ability to face them and adapt will be essential to achieve both individual goals and objectives and to attain well-being.
All these reflections sparked the interest of psychologists, neuroscientists, and educators in emotions in fields such as education and healthcare, and how including emotional education in classrooms could help today’s children become adults who know how to manage their emotions in all areas of life and be more conscious, responsible, and happy individuals.
The need to educate a child in emotion management
From the very moment we are born, we are emotions. During our first years of life, we are emotions in their purest state, without repression or control, and it is throughout our lives that we learn to regulate them. The objective of current society, forced to reformulate itself due to the great economic crisis that has hit Europe, and which has brought about the resurgence of values such as solidarity or social and collective responsibility, is for people to be aware of their own emotions in order to regulate them appropriately, to be aware of the importance of the emotional climate around us and to contribute to creating emotionally positive and healthy environments.
There is a relationship between emotion and health since an emotion is a physiological response. Emotions are felt physically as they are neurological responses, so they can also be medically measured and have repercussions on our health. Including emotional education in schools is also health education.
Greater need for teacher training
In Spain, there are several initiatives on emotional education in classrooms that reflect this change of direction: until now, schools were based on a model anchored in content work, and today, it is the teachers themselves who demand emotional education content within primary and secondary curricula. In Castilla-La Mancha, emotional education is already part of the curriculum. In Extremadura, a network of schools with emotional intelligence has been created, and the Provincial Council of Guipúzcoa has trained thousands of teachers to work with emotions in the classroom. But teacher training remains the pending subject.
As much as emotional intelligence is part of the educational project of 21st-century schools, without qualified teachers, the change of model will not be possible. There is a clear training deficit, which begins in the universities themselves. Hence, institutions like ISEP add programs such as educational coaching and neuroeducation to their offer of master’s and postgraduate degrees and design new training courses on emotional education for teachers. The aim is to offer new knowledge that allows them to facilitate emotion management in the classroom, because emotional intelligence is simply this: knowing and managing emotions. An emotionally intelligent person is one who can recognize, express, regulate, and use their own and others’ emotions to adapt to different situations that arise and succeed in overcoming them and feeling good. This is the main challenge for teachers in the emotional revolution: that their students achieve this and then apply it to their lives, in all areas.
Because emotional intelligence can be learned by practicing. How can a teacher equip a 5-year-old child with emotional competencies? Through play. An example could be asking them to draw their family, to understand how they feel within it and which people they consider part of their circle. Or playing the emotions game, where each child chooses a doll representing an emotion (such as anger, love, joy, happiness, fear, or sadness) and is asked to explain a situation that makes them feel that way. For example, Lucia is happy when her mother lets her eat chocolate custard, and Marcos is sad when his mother doesn’t let him use the mobile phone.
The ultimate goal is to know what we feel, work on resilience, cultivate self-esteem and self-motivation, flow with pleasure to overcome a challenge, master social skills, have tools for conflict resolution, regulate emotions, know how to organize your life with appropriate goals and objectives, and always do everything with a positive attitude. The new teacher training model must include emotions as an essential subject.