Emotional inteligence
500/661children who are faltering and identified as "troubled,"but a set of skills and understandings essential for everychild.The emotional-literacy courses have some remoteroots in the affective-education movement of the 1960s.The thinking then was that psychological and motivationallessons were more deeply learned if they involvedan immediate experience of what was being taught conceptually.The emotional-literacy movement, though,turns the term affective education inside out—instead ofusing affect to educate, it educates affect itself.More immediately, many of these courses and the momentumfor their spread come from an ongoing series ofschool-based prevention programs, each targeting a specificproblem: teen smoking, drug abuse, pregnancy,dropping out, and most recently violence. As we saw inthe last chapter, the W. T. Grant Consortium's study ofprevention programs found they are far more effectivewhen they teach a core of emotional and social competences,such as impulse control, managing anger, andfinding creative solutions to social predicaments. Fromthis principle a new generation of interventions hasemerged.As we saw in Chapter 15, interventions designed totarget the specific deficits in emotional and social skillsthat undergird problems such as aggression or
501/661depression can be highly effective as buffers for children.But those well-designed interventions, in themain, have been run by research psychologists as experiments.The next step is to take the lessons learned fromsuch highly focused programs and generalize them as apreventive measure for the entire school population,taught by ordinary teachers.This more sophisticated and more effective approachto prevention includes information about problems suchas AIDS, drugs, and the like, at the points in youngsters'lives when they are beginning to face them. But its main,ongoing subject is the core competence that is broughtto bear on any of these specific dilemmas: emotionalintelligence.This new departure in bringing emotional literacy intoschools makes emotions and social life themselves topics,rather than treating these most compelling facets ofa child's day as irrelevant intrusions or, when they leadto eruptions, relegating them to occasional disciplinarytrips to the guidance counselor or the principal's office.The classes themselves may at first glance seem uneventful,much less a solution to the dramatic problemsthey address. But that is largely because, like good childrearingat home, the lessons imparted are small buttelling, delivered regularly and over a sustained periodof years. That is how emotional learning becomes
- Page 450 and 451: 450/661But studies that have follow
- Page 452 and 453: 452/661attracted to their defiant s
- Page 454 and 455: 454/661aggressive kids learn to con
- Page 456 and 457: 456/661Dana, sixteen, had always se
- Page 458 and 459: that predispose children to react t
- Page 460 and 461: 460/661worldwide. When I asked expe
- Page 462 and 463: 462/661more severe episodes later i
- Page 464 and 465: Indeed, when depressed children hav
- Page 466 and 467: 466/661when they get a worse grade
- Page 468 and 469: 468/661The good news: there is ever
- Page 470 and 471: Learning these emotional skills at
- Page 472 and 473: 472/661study allows a clean compari
- Page 474 and 475: 474/661observed that these girls "h
- Page 476 and 477: 476/661Ben then stalks off to his e
- Page 478 and 479: 478/661being sad, angry, or mischie
- Page 480 and 481: make the difference—even when all
- Page 482 and 483: 482/661the circle of friendship wit
- Page 484 and 485: 484/661One current scientific theor
- Page 486 and 487: 486/661helped ease their anxiety or
- Page 488 and 489: 488/661treated for addiction to her
- Page 490 and 491: 490/661core of resilience to surviv
- Page 492 and 493: ineffective. A few, to the chagrin
- Page 494 and 495: 494/661Those children who got the m
- Page 496 and 497: 496/661anxiety. A key ability in im
- Page 498 and 499: 16Schooling the EmotionsThe main ho
- Page 502 and 503: ingrained; as experiences are repea
- Page 504 and 505: A POINT OF CONTENTION504/661But as
- Page 506 and 507: 506/661could also be part of lighte
- Page 508 and 509: 508/661spiral into aggression. Whil
- Page 510 and 511: These are the topics of gripping im
- Page 512 and 513: 512/661responsibility for decisions
- Page 514 and 515: 514/661twenty thousand people emplo
- Page 516 and 517: bring in pictures of a person's fac
- Page 518 and 519: 518/661from the basics for yet anot
- Page 520 and 521: negotiated. And since that is an ap
- Page 522 and 523: 522/661Such interventions work best
- Page 524 and 525: 524/661school, Hamburg notes, are a
- Page 526 and 527: 526/661By fourth and fifth grade, a
- Page 528 and 529: 528/661into incidents like the hall
- Page 530 and 531: 530/661I don't try to do the negati
- Page 532 and 533: 532/661important for those prone to
- Page 534 and 535: New Haven schools, when teachers fi
- Page 536 and 537: 536/661responsible adults volunteer
- Page 538 and 539: 538/661such as problems with girlfr
- Page 540 and 541: 540/661The story seems innocuous en
- Page 542 and 543: • Better able to express anger ap
- Page 544 and 545: 544/661becoming better friends, stu
- Page 546 and 547: 546/661happens as children build th
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children who are faltering and identified as "troubled,"
but a set of skills and understandings essential for every
child.
The emotional-literacy courses have some remote
roots in the affective-education movement of the 1960s.
The thinking then was that psychological and motivational
lessons were more deeply learned if they involved
an immediate experience of what was being taught conceptually.
The emotional-literacy movement, though,
turns the term affective education inside out—instead of
using affect to educate, it educates affect itself.
More immediately, many of these courses and the momentum
for their spread come from an ongoing series of
school-based prevention programs, each targeting a specific
problem: teen smoking, drug abuse, pregnancy,
dropping out, and most recently violence. As we saw in
the last chapter, the W. T. Grant Consortium's study of
prevention programs found they are far more effective
when they teach a core of emotional and social competences,
such as impulse control, managing anger, and
finding creative solutions to social predicaments. From
this principle a new generation of interventions has
emerged.
As we saw in Chapter 15, interventions designed to
target the specific deficits in emotional and social skills
that undergird problems such as aggression or