Emotional Intelligence in the classroom E-Book

Michael Brearley

• Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2000

Beschreibung

Providing practical strategies for integrating Emotional Intelligence across the curriculum, this book reveals the power of emotion in learning. A thoroughly practical work, containing numerous reproducible resources. "A must for those who are serious about a multi-layered approach to learning."

Leseprobe

Emotional Intelligence in the Classroom

Creative Learning Strategies for 11–18s

Michael Brearley

Table of Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Chapter One Emotional Intelligence and the Structure of Learning

The Sequence of Learning

The Process of Learning

Levels of Learning

Chapter Two Emotions and Learning

The Emotional Brain

Neural Intelligence, Serial Thinking and the Brain’s IQ

Experiential Intelligence, Associative Thinking and the Brain’s EQ

Emotional Memory

Co-operation Between IQ and EQ – Unitive Thinking

Emotions and Performance

Emotional Growth

Chapter Three The Unlearned Lessons of Emotional Intelligence

A Brief History of Emotional Intelligence

Affective Education

Invitational Education

Abraham Maslow

Porter and Lawler

Reuven Feuerstein

Carl Rogers

Howard Gardner

Bandler and Grinder

Affective Education and Emotional Intelligence

Chapter Four Self Review – The Habits, Attitudes, Beliefs and Emotions of Success

Classroom Outcomes of Emotional Learning

Emotions for Success

Habits, Attitudes and Beliefs

Chapter Five Emotional Intelligence and Social Inclusion – A Case Study

The Beginning

The Middle

Chapter Six Conclusion – The Magic Learning Programme

The ‘When and Where’ of Emotional Learning

The ‘How’ of Emotional Learning

The ‘What’ of Emotional Learning

Summary – Emotional Intelligence and the Future

Bibliography

Copyright

Introduction

“Emotional Intelligence is a master aptitude, a capacity that profoundly affects all other abilities, either facilitating or interfering with them”

Daniel Goleman

Author

Two and a half years ago I visited a school that ran a programme in social and emotional learning. It was a sharp and invigorating November day; I decided to enjoy the journey, take the underground and walk. Eventually I found the school, having asked the way from the usual array of second-hand-car salesmen, small groups walking in the neighbourhood park, and the local police. I was a bit taken aback to be met by two imposing, armed security guards at the school gates. They seemed something of a paradox for a school that was determined to make an impact on the social and emotional learning of its students, and gave me a moment of reflection about my recent casual stroll.

I had an appointment with the leader of the school’s programme, Sandy Parker. Dedicated and tirelessly committed to the development of learning for young people, she had a hard-nosed grasp of the challenges that confront them today. She was confident in her belief that the work they were doing at the school would make a difference for all young people, some of whom were otherwise destined to fail in school as well as in life.

Sandy knew the problems her students brought to school and she knew she couldn’t make them disappear. She couldn’t remove the poverty, mend the broken homes, remove the alcohol and drug abuse or turn every experience a child had in school into a magical event of learning. What she did believe was that she could help her students look at their world in a different way. That she could show them how to overcome the sense of helplessness, how to value themselves, develop lasting relationships, learn from conflict rather than be a martyr to it and be a success both in the classroom and in their lives. She believed that she could show young people how they learn and help them take away those self-inflicted blocks to learning that deprive so many young people of access to this most fabulous of all human activities.

“What lies before us and what lies behind us are small matters compared to what lies within us. And when we bring what is within out into the world, miracles happen”

Henry Thoreau 1817–62 Author and Naturalist

The school had a strong belief in its students’ ability to learn; a belief that the achievement of the students represented only a fraction of their potential. A belief that all students are intrinsically motivated to learn, but too often cut themselves off from the key that will unlock fabulous achievement, success, enjoyment and personal fulfilment. The school’s goal was to engage the motivation that young people have to learn, take away those self-inflicted inhibitions to learning, develop positive beliefs about what each student could achieve, and give the students a comprehensive tool kit for learning, to enable the students to become lifelong learners with a seamless ability to develop and grow.

Sandy realised that the school’s aims applied to all young people, those whose backgrounds were damaged by emotional and financial poverty as well as those whose lives were financially and emotionally secure but where expectations, both within and outside school, often place an artificial ceiling on achievement – where success is graded by doing what you are asked, and not considering what it is that you might be able to do.

There were to be no quick fixes, though there was going to be success built into the very fabric of the school, allowing children to learn within the context of the political realities that are determined for schools wherever they are. There is a growing global agenda in education of national testing, league tables, performance management and greater central control. Any innovation has to fulfil its own agenda as well as the criteria determined by the national programme of improvement. The success of the programme would surpass that agenda and engage the students’ intrinsic desire to learn, which is as potent a force as sex, physical well-being or love, and yet all too often is not only a battle in school, but one that is tragically engaged and then lost.

Successful learning is the combination of feeling, thinking and doing. What we feel determines not only what we think, but how we think. The consequence of this powerful and irrepressible partnership is behaviour that may sometimes be intelligent or sometimes not. The control centre of learning is our emotions. They are the enablers and paradoxically the constrainers of what and how we learn. You can never not learn, though you can very powerfully constrain yourself from learning positive, constructive and generative lessons. We can only apply our tool kit for learning when we understand our emotions and how they dominate our development.

Breaking the blocks to learning would involve the students learning to use their emotional intelligence, and being empowered to succeed. The school set out to enable every child to become ‘emotionally literate’, to be able to describe their feelings and understand them, both for themselves and for others. All children would become leaders of their own emotional learning, able to use their power to build relationships and create opportunities for magical learning and personal growth. Through this process of emotional development the students would begin to understand how they learn and be able to use tools that would make them a success both in the classroom and in their lives.

The school’s programme was called the ‘Passages Programme’. It was designed to confront the emotions that at different times we all bring to school and that block our learning and inhibit achievement. The emotions may be a deep-seated response to emotional memory, a consequence of events at home, the challenges of adolescence or the more mundane though no less influential impact of the daily environment – those feelings we have on rainy days when students come into our classroom having decided to find as many puddles as they can, basking in the adolescent bravado of being soaked to the skin. Our task, at this time, is to teach the curriculum, just as it is on the hot Friday afternoon when motivation is at an all-time low or when the children have just fought their way down a packed corridor from a slightly anarchistic time with the supply teacher.

All are occasions when the emotional state of the students is getting in the way of their learning. The students are feeling rebellious, lethargic, frustrated or just down about themselves. As a teacher you may even bring your own emotions, which may not be helping others to learn as well as you would want. The school’s goal was to help the students become aware of how they feel and give them the tools to change it – to change the way they feel so that it will support their learning and not hinder it. Their goal was to develop the students’ emotional literacy and emotional learning through the Passages Programme and within the subject-based curriculum.

During my discussions with Sandy we were interrupted twice as the intruder alarms went off and the two guards, armed and somewhat threatening, searched the corridors. This was clearly no ordinary school. Sandy told me of the gun battles that were a regular feature of her students’ lives and the difficulties the staff found in helping students learn after they had been shot at! The school was University Heights High School in the Bronx, New York, and it has become a beacon school in emotional learning. The school has very particular problems. They work in a violent and intimidating atmosphere, though their approach has provided an insight into emotional learning that will benefit every child in every school. The emotional state of the students at University Heights may be exceptional and it may be prompted by extremes. The issue it highlights is the power of our emotions to enhance or inhibit our learning and the work that can successfully be done to empower students to take control of how they feel and use that knowledge to achieve success in the classroom and in life.

Emotional Intelligence is the ability to control and use our emotions to enhance our success in all aspects of our lives – success that is determined by a concept of intelligence that is broadly based, accessible to every student and capable of continual growth. Rather than another fad, another attempt to bring some light to the world of learning within schools, emotional intelligence draws on the strength of much that is good that has preceded it. EQ defines the nature of learning as being capable of creating a future where schools will fulfil and exceed the expectations placed upon them and the magic of learning will be available for every student and every teacher.

“Failing is not falling flat on your face, it’s not getting up”

Steve Cowley Vice President IBM Software

Emotional intelligence draws on the affective education movement, which has such a rich history but has been poorly understood and badly applied. It draws on the work of Howard Gardner in the field of multiple intelligences, Bandler and Grinder and the work that is ongoing in Neuro Linguistic Programming, and the accelerated learning movement so well described and chronicled by Alistair Smith and which has contributed so much to the recent development of learning. I shall describe in greater detail the contribution that these schools of thought have made to the development of EQ and how emotional intelligence has a history, a potency in the present and a great future in the development of learning in our schools and in the development of learning schools themselves.

The concept of emotions affecting how we learn is hardly new. It follows that being a leader of our emotions rather than a martyr to them will have a dramatic effect on our ability to succeed in the classroom and in our lives. However, where before the power of emotions in learning reflected in the affective learning movement was a matter of belief, it is now verifiable through empirical research into brain function.

I will briefly cover the major issues of how the brain responds to what we see, hear and feel to create emotion. Much of the understanding of emotional intelligence comes from a common-sense approach to our lives and learning. Some people, as they read this book, will feel that they have been using EQ in their professional and personal lives for years. Recent developments in brain research mean that you can understand why your work is having such an impact and develop your current practice. Those who have been struggling rather uneasily with a world dominated by IQ and a belief in ‘filling empty vessels’ can now find an alternative that will bring the magic back to children’s learning, a new culture to classrooms and a sense of direction and purpose that will take much of the stress from teaching. Emotional intelligence has its roots in common sense and this is not to belittle it, but to give it enormous status and authority. It makes emotional intelligence accessible to everyone and with it the ability to develop our capacity to learn and succeed. Emotional intelligence may be common sense, but what it is not is common practice.

Learning is both natural and magical. We learn in order to achieve and succeed, in order to feel good about ourselves and our world. Learning is the single most potent feature of human motivation, growth and fulfilment. Understanding how people learn so fabulously well, how EQ is such a potent force, and how to translate that knowledge into classroom practice is the purpose of this book.

The book will engage three major questions and provide practical strategies to answer them (see Figure 0.1).

“The only kind of learning that significantly influences behaviour is self discovered learning – truth that has been assimilated in experience”

Carl Rogers Psychoanalyst

Addressing these areas is not a simple matter of providing worksheets on emotional intelligence and teaching it to children. The very essence of emotional intelligence is that it cannot be taught. It can, however, be learnt. The distinction means that some teachers will have to reflect on how they create learning in their classrooms. Unleashing the power of learning is brought about by enabling, not enforcing. The teacher is the mediator of a process and not the force-feeder of information. This change of role is sometimes associated with a loss of control and therefore influence. The paradox is that by focusing on the process of learning and the teacher’s role as mediator, the influence over learning increases and achievement rises.

Figure 0.1: Three major questions

The changes in reframing the relationship between teacher, student and the process of learning are straightforward, though profound. A colleague with whom I worked (whom I shall call Mary – not her real name) was wonderfully committed and dedicated. She helped every child in her charge to achieve great results. For her the journey of learning was less important than the destination. The consequence was that the students were less well prepared to decide where they should go next and less skilled at making the next journey themselves. Learning was a matter of compliance rather than commitment.

What Mary did not recognise was the impact that the journeys we take have on the destinations we arrive at. The interventions she made with the students ensured that the outcome of any project would be excellent. By doing this she was taking responsibility for the learning of the students. She was leaving her footprints on the very personal process of the students’ growth and learning. The students were learning very little about how they learn and even less about how to apply that knowledge at different times and in different places.

After an emotional intelligence workshop on leadership in learning, Mary helped coach a programme for twelve- and thirteen-year-old students. One exercise involved a group problem-solving activity where the focus was on the process of learning. The relationship between the journey and the destination is that process (the journey) is merely product (the destination) in the making. Focus on the process and you will have as many high-quality products as you want. This will only happen if the children are allowed to take responsibility for their own learning.

Towards the end of this exercise, whilst I was observing the group, a student asked the teacher if they were allowed to fetch materials from outside to help solve the problem. Previously Mary would have either said yes or no, and if the answer had been ‘yes’ then she would have gone and done it for them. This time, she gestured with an open palm, engaged the child with a warmth I had never seen in her before and said “if you want to”. With this simple phrase, the full opportunity and responsibility was placed squarely where it should be, with the student. The footprints were no longer there.

Emotional intelligence provides the opportunity for teachers and students to use the tools we all have to learn. It removes the inhibitions, self-doubt and negative behaviour that so restricts achievement for our students and traps teachers in a world of trying to shoe-horn learning, when all they need to do is open the door.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to rediscover what we previously had and then use it today. I have seen few three-year-olds who lack ambition, optimism, self-awareness or a fascination with learning. The reason they are so captivating, challenging and tiring is that they have all those qualities in such great abundance. The training and materials associated with this book will show you how you can help others rediscover the joy and magic of learning and how you can create those opportunities in every classroom. At a workshop on emotional intelligence, a colleague remarked that “the children came with a sense of wonder and left with a sense of wonderment”. Emotional intelligence becomes the ‘wow’ of learning.

The programme for developing emotional learning is called ‘The Magic Learning Programme’. The title may seem somewhat pretentious, though it has its roots in a very practical world. The title was given to me by a community worker in Greenwich who was achieving some remarkable results in getting truants to go back to school. I went down to meet her and find out what she was doing that was making her so successful. I spent the day with her and shared some of my own thoughts about learning and schools. As she was dropping me off at the tube station she asked again, with the sound of Bow Bells in her voice, “Now darlin’, tell me again about this magic learning you’ve been doin’”. She was so real, so committed and successful in what she was doing that she gave the phrase real power and potency – it stuck.

Magic Learning is a programme to give every student an emotional tool kit for success, to decide which emotions are going to allow the student to achieve their full potential and teach them to access those emotions when they need them. I can think of few things more frustrating than to feel confident and focused the day after the exam! We do not have to be slaves to our emotions, though all too often we allow ourselves to be just that. We accept how we feel as given when in reality we can feel just how we need to at any point in time. We can teach children to be emotional wizards, to feel what they need to feel to achieve success both in the classroom and in their lives.

The Magic Learning Programme (a series of programmes to develop learning styles and strategies for teachers, pupils and parents, not detailed in this book but available separately) is based on the premise that the five emotions of success are:

Self-awareness

Ambition

Optimism

Empathy

Integrity

These have been derived from researching the five models of Emotional Intelligence detailed in Chapter Four. The list is not intended to gain universal approval. If students are given the opportunity to come up with their own list of success emotions and then use the tools in the Magic Learning Programme to deliver what they believe will bring success, then I will have achieved my goal.

Chapter One

Emotional Intelligence and the Structure of Learning

“In times of change the learners will inherit the earth, while the knowers will find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists”

Eric Hoffer

Psychologist

Developing Emotional Intelligence will remove the barriers to learning that we all build as we grow. We build barriers to protect ourselves from a changing sense of failure, from a view of ourselves increasingly dependent on the approbation of our peers. We move as we grow from being a question mark in our approach to learning to being a full stop. This metaphor was first coined by Edward de Bono in his book Teach Your Child How to Think, and is a valuable insight into our changing self as learner. Because we have been someone different in relation to learning means that we can always go back there if we choose. In order to give people that choice, it is important to beak down Emotional Intelligence into the dual parts of emotional literacy and emotional learning. Emotional literacy allows you to describe and understand your emotions and those of others. Emotional learning is the application of the power of emotion, controlling this potent force and using it for the benefit of all aspects of our lives.

Becoming a fabulous learner requires a deep understanding of both emotional intelligence and the process of learning. There is a growing and not very helpful tendency in education to break learning down into its component parts in the misguided belief you can then put it back together again and re-create the whole. It is rather like trying to put the pieces of a broken mirror back together and expecting to have a perfect image. Emotional Intelligence can only be fully understood as an integrated part of the process of learning and is not something that can be bolted on like another literacy or numeracy hour.

Bringing together Emotional Intelligence and learning creates something that is different from the perceptions that may abound when they are considered separately. Beer and lemonade make shandy, yellow and red orange, a girl and a boy a couple. By adding one thing to another something new is created. Emotional intelligence and the process of learning will look, feel and sound different when they are together. The perception of learning and the achievement of personal excellence in our schools will then perhaps begin to make sense.

Learning is a process that has both breadth and depth, though all too often learning in school is reduced to its end product, the learning outcome. The magic and power of learning are in the process and the successful outcomes are then a natural consequence of that focus. Looking at outcomes does not help us to understand the process. Looking at the outcomes of learning actively blocks our ability to see what we need to see about the process of learning. We focus on destination at the expense of the journey and the consequence is that we paradoxically often do not end up where we want to be and certainly not where we need to be.

Figure 1.1: What is learning?

Seeing learning as outcomes camouflages and distracts our attention from the process of learning and sends many students away from school surrounded by negative beliefs about themselves. It is not the destination any school wants, but it is where many end up. It is not what schools are doing that is the issue but how they are doing it. Students are not able to consider their relationship with learning because it is clouded by what they are being driven to achieve. A poem I read, about a woman considering leaving her partner, serves as a good metaphor for the relationship students often perceive they have with learning. It read:

Shall I leave him?

I’ll write a letter

Or should I,

Get to know him better?