Is it time for schools to try to boost kids' emotional intelligence?

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/04/05/the_other_kind_of_smart/?page=full

by robg • 17 years ago

14 7 17 years ago

tokenadult• 17 years ago

"In recent years, the results have started to come in, and they suggest that emotional knowledge can indeed be learned in the classroom. Emory University psychologist Stephen Nowicki has found that interventions can teach kids to read faces better. Mark Greenberg of Penn State has found that emotional learning classes can make kids better at controlling themselves when upset. Researchers looking at a curriculum called the Resolving Conflict Creatively Program found that such classes also made children less likely to falsely misread intent - in particular less likely to assume hostility in ambiguous social situations."

I Googled for some scholarly citations before posting this extract of the submitted article. It's interesting to hear that there are possibly some interventions in this area with a research base. The term "emotional intelligence" is almost certainly overbroad in designating a variety of modular abilities not closely related one to another, but some of those abilities appear to be subject to training effects, and most have plenty of real-world usefulness, so this will be an interesting area of research.

To answer the question posed by the article title, I would like to see schools do much better at teaching reading and math, supposedly their current job, before investing too much time in trying to teach emotional intelligence, which I think is more a family's job.

stcredzero• 17 years ago

Why are some parts of the country considered more "laid back" than others or considered to have more "nice people?" I suspect that environmental factors are very important in terms of teaching people emotional and social coping skills. The Lord of the Flies environment we've created in many schools, where the only adults that kids can model after are in the same unpopular, beleaguered position as umpires at a baseball game, and the only other available models are kids who have just been there a couple of years longer.

It's not that schools teaching emotional intelligence is a great idea. It's more that the status quo at most schools is just plain bad.