So what is emotional intelligence? The term itself was coined by Peter Salovey of Yale University and Jack Mayer of the University of New Hampshire while they were researching factors important to functioning well in society (Mayer & Salovey, 1997). But it was Daniel Goleman’s (1995) book Emotional Intelligence that brought this idea to the general public in the United States and worldwide.
A good way to understand emotional intelligence is to take note of its shorthand acronym: “EQ.” EQ complements the acronym IQ, which has come to be recognized as signifying academic achievement, typically of a cognitive nature. If IQ represents the intellectual raw material of student success, EQ is the set of social–emotional skills that enables intellect to turn into action and accomplishment.
Without EQ, IQ consists more of potential than actuality. It is confined more to performance on certain kinds of tests than to expression in the many tests of everyday life in school, at home, at the workplace, in the community. EQ is the missing piece in true reform of education and preparation of students for academic and life success. Schools that see as their mission the joint and synergistic development of EQ + IQ must become the standard of education. Those who lead such schools know this well. Those who aspire to lead such schools are visionaries who are ready to prepare students for the complexities of life in the 21st century and beyond.
There are many definitions of emotional intelligence, and research continues to refine the nuances of this concept. CASEL, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (www.CASEL.org), continues to play a prominent role in monitoring and articulating these changes, especially through its ongoing process of reviewing EQ-related programs to determine their features and adequacy. However, it is useful to understand EQ as expressed by Daniel Goleman in Emotional Intelligence because this is the most widespread shared terminology in use.
1. Self-Awareness: the ability to recognize feelings as they occur in real-life situations
2. Management and Self-Regulation of Emotions: being able to cope with strong feelings so as not to be overwhelmed and paralyzed by them
3. Self-Motivation and Performance: being goal-oriented and able to channel emotions toward desired outcomes
4. Empathy and Perspective Taking: being able to recognize emotions in others and to understand others’ point of view
5. Social Skills: the ability to handle a range of social relationships
Resource A shows a more detailed elaboration of these areas and provides formats for assessing specific social and emotional learning (SEL) and EQ skills in oneself and in one’s students.
EQ, or skills for social and emotional learning, are therefore those skills that underlie the following elements of everyday classroom and school life:
• Communicating effectively
• Participating actively, genuinely, and cooperatively in group work
• Expressing and regulating emotions and impulses appropriately
• Resolving conflicts thoughtfully and nonviolently
• Living a life of sound character
• Bringing a reflective, learning-to-learn approach to all domains of life
Can there be true academic and social success without these types of skills? When the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) ran articles in Educational Leadership on effective middle schools, the common denominator among the schools was that they had systematic procedures in place for addressing children’s social and emotional skills. There were schoolwide mentoring programs, group guidance and advisory periods, modifications of the usual discipline systems, and classroom programs that allowed time for group problem solving and team building. Of course, they had sound academic programs and competent teachers and administrators, but other schools had these features as well. It was the social and emotional learning component that distinguished them.
When one looks carefully at the resilience literature and other examples of cases in which success occurs in unexpected circumstances and failure under favorable conditions, one can find “the missing piece”: The very nature of school-based learning is relational, and social and emotional skills are essential for building and sustaining learning relationships of the kind needed for academic success, citizenship, a civilized and nonviolent classroom, and effective inclusive education.
The missing piece in the process of civilizing and humanizing our children, without doubt, is social and emotional learning. Any protestations that this province is outside and separate from the domain of the school is inaccurate, harmful, and dooms us to continued frustration and Herculean efforts at damage control and repair. Meanwhile, the roster of social casualties will grow ever larger.
Sylwester (1995) documented the way in which memory is event coded, linked to social and emotional situations, and how the latter are integral parts of larger units of memory that make up what people learn and retain—including and especially what takes place in the classroom. Among the key points that show the centrality of social and emotional learning are the following:
We know emotion is very important to the educative process because it drives attention, which drives learning and memory. We’ve never really understood emotion, however, and so don’t know how to regulate it in school-beyond defining too much or too little of it as misbehavior and relegating most of it to the arts, PE, recess, and the extracurricular program. (p. 72)
Our emotions allow us to assemble life-saving information very quickly, and thus to bypass the extended conscious and rational deliberation of a potential threat… . Thus, stereotyped information can lead to irrational fears and to prejudicial and foolish behaviors that we may later regret when we get more detailed and objective information from the slower cortical analysis. (p. 73)
By separating emotion from logic and reason in the classroom, we’ve simplified school management and evaluation, but we’ve also then separated two sides of one coin—and lost something important in the process. It’s impossible to separate emotion from the other important activities of life. Don’t try… . Scientists have now replaced this duality with an integrated body/brain system. (p. 75)
The development of a long-term memory emerges out of an ill-understood, often conscious decision that elements of the current situation are emotionally significant and will probably reoccur [other memories—including initial skill learning—are believed to be linked to and encoded in terms of their social and emotional context]. (pp. 93–94)
Most of our brain’s neural networks process the complex interactions that lead to the analysis and solution of problems. (p. 106)
Three broad areas of organizing this information in our brain are described as temporal, spatial, and personal, the latter of which comprises intra and interpersonal awareness.
We are a social organism, depending on others for many important things in life. (p. 114)
It’s difficult to think of linguistic, musical, and interpersonal intelligence out of the context of social and cooperative activity, and the other four forms of intelligence are likewise principally social in normal practice. (p. 117)
Sylwester (1995) outlined six areas in which emotional and social learning must come together for the benefit of children and schools.
• Accepting and controlling our emotions
• Using metacognitive activities
• Using activities that promote social interaction
• Using activities that provide an emotional context
• Avoiding intense emotional stress in school
• Recognizing the relationship between emotions and health (pp. 75–77)
The skills and areas that Sylwester identified mirror the skills identified by Goleman (1995) and by Mayer and Salovey (1997) as essential for EQ or “emotional literacy” and by CASEL (Elias, Zins, Weissberg, & Associates, 1997) as the basis of programs and other efforts to promote social and emotional learning.
Democracy was under direct attack on September 11, 2001. As is now clear, the defense of freedom is not purely a military matter. Our freedom depends on an informed citizenry exercising sound judgment and stepping up to help others in need. It depends on skilled social and civic participation and protection of civil liberties from assaults from abroad and within.
Beane and Apple (1995) illustrated how EQ truly connects diverse aspects of learning and schooling with life skills and everyday interpersonal decision making to foster a synergy that can be put into place more systematically than currently occurs.
To say that democracy rests on the consent of the governed is almost a cliche, but in a democratic school, it is true that all of those directly involved in the school, including young people, have the right to participate in the process of decision making… . In classrooms, young people and teachers engage in collaborative planning, reaching decisions that respond to the concerns, aspirations, and interests of both. (p. 9)
The democratic way of life engages the creative process of seeking ways to extend and expand the values of democracy. This process, however, is not simply an anticipatory conversation about just anything. Rather, it is directed toward intelligent and reflective consideration of problems, events, and issues that arise in the course of our collective lives. (p. 16)
The New Jersey Core Curriculum Standards recognizes the central place of social and emotional skills in the context of cross-setting workplace skills and as the centerpiece of comprehensive health education. The curriculum standards of other states, as well, contain a number of implicit and explicit SEL/EQ connections (Norris & Kress, 2000). When one delineates standards for skills that children must have to be considered well educated, it is no longer responsible to omit SEL/EQ from any such list.
Educators need to see more than how social and emotional learning is critical to the process of civilizing, humanizing, and educating students. The very nature of school-based learning is relational. Social and emotional learning is essential for building and sustaining learning relationships of the kind needed for academic success, citizenship, a civilized and nonviolent classroom, and effective inclusive education. Educational leaders must take a leading role in making the case that many of the problems in the schools are the result of social and emotional debilitation that children have suffered and continue to suffer.
The basic skills of social and emotional learning are necessary for students to be able to take full advantage of their biological equipment and social legacy and heritage. As schools provide the conditions that allow even the most “at-risk” students to become engaged in the learning process, new possibilities open up and new life trajectories are made available to them. Resilience research makes clear that in even the worst conditions within our inner cities, one can still find some children emerging in positive ways. In these cases, expect to find that social and emotional learning was provided to such children by one or two caring people, often those in their schools.
Academic and social success should not be the product of good fortune or of privileged upbringing; it is based on conditions that are created in the lives of young people. “EQ + IQ” provides administrators with background, examples, and guidelines to foster these conditions in schools—programmatically and systematically—so that their existence for all children is left less to chance than currently is the case.
The chapters that follow in Part I provide essential background, evidence, and perspective for understanding the relationship of EQ and IQ. With Part I as a base, the examples of how EQ has been brought into schools and districts presented in Part II may be more deeply understood, and the principles that underlie them may become more apparent, allowing application to diverse settings.
Beane, J. A., & Apple, M. W. (1995). The case for democratic schools. In M. W. Apple & J. A. Beane (Eds.), Democratic schools (pp. 1–25). Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Elias, M. J., Zins, J., Weissberg, R. P., & Associates. (1997). Promoting social and emotional learning: Guidelines for educators. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence. New York: Bantam.
Mayer, J. D., & Salovey, P. (1997). What is emotional intelligence? In J. D. Mayer & P. Salovey (Eds.), Emotional development and emotional intelligence (pp. 3–31). New York: Basic Books.
Norris, J., & Kress, J. S. (2000). Reframing the standards vs. social and emotional learning debate: A case study. The Fourth R, 91(2), 7–10.
Sylwester, R. (1995). A celebration of neurons: An educator’s guide to the human brain. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.