Explaining EQ & Social & Emotional Learning
EQ is now widely acknowledged as equally important (and many argue, more so) than IQ – and as increasingly key to both personal life and professional success.
The tremendous upside of gaining EQ life skills.
Taught properly and universally, EQ skills help kids and adults.
- Feel much better after learning to manage negative emotions and self-defeating behaviors.
- Soar academically in school and later in work, and thereby reduce poverty.
- Get along better naturally – more lovingly, empathetically, caringly and cooperatively.
- Create healthy relationships and social lives.
- Understand themselves, feel confident, have presence.
- Develop positive and healthy mental states instead of anxious, angry and depressive states.
- Think and act clearly, critically, creatively and intuitively.
- Make good decisions.
- Set and achieve healthy goals and persist through setbacks.
- Collaborate and solve interpersonal problems without resorting to violence or abuse.
- Resolve conflicts generally.
Develop superb communications skills.
- Largely leave behind race, gender, and ethnic biases.
- Experience measurably improved mental and physical health into adulthood.
- Experience dramatic declines in bullying, acting out behaviors and discipline incidents.
- As adults, enjoy more harmonious homes, marriages, partnerships, and workplaces.
- Realize significant declines in both school and later adult substance abuse, crime, sexual abuse, suicides, screen addiction, and adult violence against women and children.
- Show up as ideal employees in a hiring market seeking talent with their life skills and with strong, healthy mindsets.
All this can lead to the development of the most mentally and emotionally healthy generation ever.
Emotional and social Intelligence life skills are a very big deal because they provide a pathway out of most human suffering and conflict, both personal and collective, which derives from lack of these learnable skills.
Our collective task is to make this learning universal – absolutely sooner than later.
We designed this website to be an eye-opener. You’ll see why families, businesses/workplaces, and communities will benefit greatly from supporting universal teaching of Social-Emotional Learning life skills.
PARENTS – Don’t miss EQ at home resources.
Sandy Hook mom speaks to parents.
What kids learn.
✤Self-awareness: Accurately recognizing and identifying one’s emotions and thoughts and their influence on behavior.
✤Self-management: Regulating one’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviors effectively in different situations.
✤Social awareness: Taking the perspective of and empathizing with others from diverse backgrounds and cultures; understanding social and ethical norms for behavior; and recognizing where there are family, school, and community resources and supports.
✤Relationship skills: Establishing and maintaining healthy and rewarding relationships and collaborations with diverse individuals and groups while learning not to take others behaviors personally. Includes the skill called “active listening.”
✤Responsible decision making: Making constructive and respectful choices about personal behavior and social interactions based on learning to consider ethical standards, safety concerns, social norms, the well-being of self and others, and to realistically evaluate the consequences of various actions.
✤Problem Solving: Identifying and solving problems and analyzing situations from a reflective sensibility.
✤Growth Mindset: The belief and accompanying learned skills to set goals and grow your talents with persistent efforts – and by embracing challenges and setbacks as crucial learning opportunities.
These are general categories supported by the dominant U.S. nonprofit organization working to refine and promote SEL skills among educators, the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL). Within these categories are many subsets of learning,
For example, training in relationship skills as students age can become increasingly sophisticated – right up to superior conflict resolution skills (that most adults lack). Schools ideally adopt programs and procedures chosen from thousands of age-related options that further student EQ life skills and their inner strength and resilience inside and outside of classroom environment.
Here’s a bonus: with student minds open to being taught, such “collaborative learning” practices as shared project studies, in which students creatively learn and solve problems together, become more frequently assigned. Students tend to love these – and often surprise with the quality of their work.
Let's understand EQ in a school context.
“Emotional Intelligence” as a concept gained broad public attention with the publication of Daniel Goleman’s New York Times bestseller of the same name in 1995.
EQ (as many now refer to Emotional Intelligence) is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one’s emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically.”
We at EQuip Our Kids! define it more broadly as “the know-how to manage yourself, relationships, career and life in brilliant and healthy ways.” This takes learning at home and at school a broad range of sophisticated modern life skills applied step-by-step at various age levels. Educators, as you are learning, dominantly call the range of teachings “Social-Emotional Learning” (SEL). Terms used in some areas are “Character Development Learning” or “Whole Child Development.”
“I learned how to be a critical thinker and I learned how to play out of my strength instead of worry about my weaknesses. I learned about what I was good at and how to hold that and use it to become better at things.”
The classroom reality.
There are dozens of companies and nonprofit institutions offering to schools excellent evidence-based teaching programs and materials designed to advance social and emotional learning. Many hundreds of other programs exist but have not yet been evidence tested.
Primarily created by child-development experts, educators, and university-based academics, these programs offer a range of curricula to suit many different school contexts. Alongside them is a body of policies and practices developed by educational institutions for nesting any chosen program comprehensively into a school culture, in-class and out, with buy-in from all stakeholders.
Many school districts seek to centralise identifying and purchasing the range of programs that best fit their varied student ages and cultures. Others leave it to school principals and teacher advisors.
Either way, it is most important that parents call for the multi-faceted life skills curriculum to be adopted as quickly and comprehensively as possible to give your children their best chance to operate from their best selves.
