Emotional Intelligence in the Curriculum

Emotional intelligence, or EQ, is the ability to understand your own emotions and those of people around you. The concept of emotional intelligence means you have a self-awareness that enables you to recognise feelings and helps you manage your emotions.

On a personal level, it involves motivation and being able to focus on a goal rather than demanding instant gratification. A person with a high emotional intelligence is also capable of understanding the feelings of others. Culturally, they are better at handling relationships of every kind.

Just because someone is deemed 'intellectually' intelligent, it does not necessarily follow they are emotionally intelligent. Having a good memory, or good problem-solving abilities, does not mean you are capable of dealing with emotions or of motivating yourself.

Highly intelligent people may lack the social skills that are associated with high emotional intelligence. Savants, who show incredible intellectual abilities in narrow fields, are an extreme example of this: a mathematical genius may be unable to relate to people socially.

However, high intellectual intelligence, combined with low emotional intelligence, is relatively rare and a person can be both intellectually and emotionally intelligent.

The BAAT approach to raising EQ in students of all ages is an incremental one; treating EQ the same as we treat the subjects that make up IQ, such as mathematics sciences and English etc.

We have addressed this in the design and structure of the Life Science Curriculum. The Curriculum consists of 50 lesson plans, each one focused on to a particular skill contained within the broad framework of Emotional Intelligence.

To appreciate the difference between IQ and EQ and its importance, and the role it plays in learning, look carefully at the following comparisons:

Compare the teaching of Mathematics with Self-Awareness: in Mathematics we start with simple addition and subtraction and then progress to Calculus over the period of a student's school life - no incremental approach is given to self awareness.

The Life Science Curriculum trains teachers how to teach these specific life skills in a curriculum format. It is an approach that WORKS: children only get one chance and it is up to us to help them make the best of it!

Teaching these specific skills will have the following benefits for a school:

• Low-level behaviour dramatically reduced
• Students apply these skill every single day
• Parents notice a difference in their child's behaviour at home
• Academic Performance improvement of 30% can be expected
• Teachers find getting and keeping their students on task very much easier
• Truancy is reduced
• Absenteeism through feigned illness is reduced thus improving attendance
• High-level parental involvement in the school due their close participation in the curriculum
• More caring and happy school results from the introduction of the curriculum
• Lower levels of extreme behaviours occur

The life Science Curriculum is available for the following groups in their own specific format:

• Playgroups (Years 1—5)
• Primary School(Years 5—11)
• Secondary Schools and Colleges