Emotional Intelligence for Primary Schools

This course is the result of our work with literally hundreds of thousands of school children and provides a rigorous understanding of Emotional Intelligence for staff and provides them with the tools to fully integrate the principles of EI into the primary school classroom.

Emotional Intelligence is the buzz phrase that is current in so many schools. In recent years there has been a growing awareness of what effect our emotions have on learning. Low-level disruption has added to the current interest in the subject of our emotions.

Often, the essential basis of EQ is missed and to look at that basis we must start from the brain itself and then work outwards to the mind and then outwards from there to the world as we experience it in our daily lives.

The brain has learnt a model of our emotions as it stands today; it knows, in its own way, how to cope with the events of life, for good or ill. It started almost immediately after conception and it would re-modify itself on a millisecond by millisecond basis as new events occurred: in our early years this would be chaotic, giving rise to the ‘terrible 2s’! From there-on, the changes and reframing would be a constant process. On reaching school age it would have to adapt to the events and actions of others, initially it would get it wrong and frequently adversarial correction would be applied which the brain would consider a threat. The way it copes with that threat is what leads to discussions on unacceptable behaviour. These are the fundamental reasons for the importance of Primary School, Parenting and caring for young children. If the wrong approach is used, then distortions develop into a life script that will affect the individual for life.

Therefore, while the brain is pliable to new inputs, it is essential that emotional reframing takes place in primary schools. It is my sincere belief that every child from 2 to 11 years old should engage in activities that help them to reframe and test their emotions before they become cemented in the growing architecture of their developing brain as at that age the frames are weak and can easily be changed.

The picture inside the frame is the event or situation with the surrounding frame being the emotion we apply to the event or situation.

The younger we are the more likely we are to change the frame to one that is more acceptable to others around us; the more help we can give in this re-framing process the faster the individual develops, it is for this reason that Emotional Intelligence matters more than IQ.

To change this frame, which I will refer to as reframing, we need to use methods that the individual will reframe themselves internally. These methods must be those that the brain used to construct the original however, it uses pictures and not words. In other words, telling someone to change cannot work and this is especially true when it comes to Young Children. Why do you think that over 3 million words have been written on student’s behaviour and no real improvement has been seen?

Again, let me state the reasons why extrinsic systems fail to work: the delivery of the new model is usually given in terms of words and not new pictures, for it was in pictures that the initial model was created. If we take a young child of five years old, what is the size of their vocabulary and out of all of those words, of how many of them do they actually know the accurate meaning?

In our discussions with over 350,000 year 11 students prior to taking their GCSE examinations, it was noticeable that, despite the fact that they knew the importance of the examinations and had countless motivational approaches to work harder, they refused to listen: why? Again, this proves my point that extrinsic systems do not work.

Another compelling reason for failure is the fact that there is not a structured approach in the teaching of our emotions. We have a set curriculum for all subjects apart from emotional intelligence and thus, students do not know how to recognise there own feelings and emotions and understand how to cope with them.

Students are not taught the wide-range of empathic skills, hence the levels of mental and physical bullying are not subsiding. Young students in primary school are terrified of going to school because of bullying.

It must have a curriculum structure taking the approach of providing training a little and often over a period of 3 years: in effect, EQ lessons.

• It must have trained facilitators to deliver the subject.
• It must involve parents in the very structure of the training; this will require that parents are taught how to be involved and what is their role. The simple mathematics of this is that every child lives for 8760 hours per year and is at school for 1200 hours per year. Therefore, only 13% of our inputs come from school and 52% come from outside school, also our emotional model, for good or ill, will run and use the dominant frame in use. It has no other option. Our emotions, unlike any other subject, will be used everyday until death.
• The training of the emotions has to be carried-out in a safe and judgement-free environment where trust and confidentiality is paramount unlike traditional subjects that can be taught where these factor are not so high.
• The training environment must not have desks, only chairs, and a room large enough to all allow each student to have their own personal space.
• The techniques used in the training must be ones where words are minimised and pictures are dominant; students must be able to have, and adjust, their feelings on a wide variety of events and situations that occur in everyday life.