Coaching Emotional Intelligence in the Classroom

A Practical Guide for 7-14

Steve Bowkett, Simon Percival

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136842870
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Education
• Categoría: Education General

Coaching Emotional Intelligence in the Classroom is a practical resource to help Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3 teachers explore and understand a range of concepts, principles and techniques gathered under the term 'emotional intelligence', and the way that this powerfully influences pupils' behaviour and learning in the classroom. Creative activities are suggested throughout, leading towards a more explicit focus on coaching methods to help pupils become independent, creative and effective learners able to set goals, generate ideas, solve problems and arrive at reasoned decisions.

This book focuses on five key areas:

• 
  
  

• self-awareness
• innovative and inventive thinking
• independent enquiry
• collaborative learning
• communication skills.

Dealing in an engaging way with social and emotional aspects of learning, personalised learning, thinking skills and social inclusion, the authors offer teachers all of the necessary tools to help pupils build life- and people-skills which will extend beyond school. It will be of interest to all practising teachers, teaching assistants and school counsellors working with young people.

CHAPTER 1
EI basic skills

We would like to suggest that a sound basis for developing emotional intelligence to any useful degree includes the key elements of –

Awareness of self

Awareness of others.

The creative coaching activities that follow will help develop these two ideas. Both elements evolve out of our natural curiosity, the ability (and the tendency) we have to ‘be nosy’, in other words to notice and to question. The suggestions in this book will help refine our exploratory nature, which informs the aims and the structure of this book.

We can begin to map out these broad notions under the headings of –

Reflective Thinking. This includes engaging with philosophical ideas and moral dilemmas, asking questions that explore values, considering options, forming judgements, reaching conclusions and making decisions.

Metacognition. This means noticing and thinking about the thinking we do. It presupposes the evolving ability to internalise the attention and to become increasingly aware of the connections between our thoughts and feelings (and the reactions that may follow from them).

Empathy. Being able to appreciate how the world looks from another’s perspective. Although ultimately this is an act of the imagination (since we can never truly know another’s reality), it has validity since we are all linked by a network of human experiences and reactions.

Creativity. This makes active use of two basic human resources, those of memory and imagination. Memory in this sense is not just our ability to consciously recall or remember particular incidents. Our ‘map of memory’ (misleadingly but frequently called the ‘map of reality’) operates largely at a subconscious level. What we have previously experienced allows us to make sense of the world now, as we function within it moment by moment.¹

Imagination is the incredible power we possess to form mental constructions (thoughts, ideas, scenarios) that need to have nothing to do with our immediate experience. The creative use of imagination necessitates making new connections – i.e. moving away from so-called ‘routine thinking’ – by exploring things in as many different ways as we can. The effort to forge new links, making a larger and more elaborate idea from two or more simpler ones, keeps our thinking fresh, flexible and dynamic. Furthermore, changing a perspective can also generate new insights that allow us to make progress in our lives (Notice that ‘routine’ rendered down becomes ‘rut’.)

As a way of dipping our toe in the water of these ideas, here are some quick and simple activities that you can try out with your group.

1. What-If Scenarios. These can be quickly and easily created and focussed on any topic area. Once a what-if question has been asked, append these three sub-questions–

What would the world be like?

What problems might we face?

How can we try to solve those problems?

Some of the what-ifs we’ve used in the past, and which might be more immediately pertinent to the themes of this book include:

a. What if people changed colour depending on the feelings they were having? (So as well as blushing red with embarrassment or turning white with fear, we actually would go green with envy, yellow through cowardice etc.)

b. What if your thoughts could be read by anyone for five minutes every day? (You don’t know when that five minutes will happen and you don’t know who might be looking in on your mind. Scary!)

c. What if every five years everyone had to change places with someone else in the world? And it could be anyone! (Decide whether this means just doing their job, living with their family etc., or actually inhabiting their body.)

d. What if global warming happened much more quickly than everyone has predicted, and that within twenty years half of the presently habitable land in the world becomes a desert?

e. What if people became physically bigger depending on how intelligent they were? (This opens up the can of worms of what ‘intelligence’ means. It also leads quickly into philosophical discussions and political debates… Maybe not such a quick and simple activity as we promised!) Other ideas the children might enjoy are:

What if nobody ever figured out how to do Maths?

What if an asteroid had not made the dinosaurs extinct?

What if George Bush had not given up drinking? (okay, too political)

Note: If you run a what-if game, be prepared to think on your feet as children ask questions about the basic premise. The only rule is that once an answer is given, everyone has to stick by that decision.

2. Mini Moral Dilemmas. These are situations, briefly described, that prompt children to reflect on how they might feel and react. Once your group becomes familiar with the idea, children can make them up for themselves. So for example…

a. You find a wallet in the street. It contains £100 and nothing else. What would you do? Would your reaction be different if you found the wallet in the middle of the countryside, with no houses for miles? What if the wallet also contained the business card of a local window cleaner...