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Every morning, Ms. Mitchell thinks about how her feelings will affect her teaching. If she feels frustrated or overwhelmed when she arrives at school, she takes a deep breath and makes a plan for managing her emotions so that she can fully engage with her students and coteachers. She greets children and families as they walk through the door and asks how they are feeling. Throughout the day, children use a classroom mood meter to acknowledge their feelings. Ms. Mitchell also uses the mood meter to talk with children about her own feelings, how characters in books feel, what happened to cause their feelings, and how characters' emotions change throughout a story. In many different ways, Ms. Mitchell models emotional intelligence and supports its development in her students.
Emotional intelligence is a set of skills associated with monitoring one's own and others' emotions, and the ability to use emotions to guide one's thinking and actions (Salovey & Mayer 1990). Emotions impact our attention, memory, and learning; our ability to build relationships with others; and our physical and mental health (Salovey & Mayer 1990). Developing emotional intelligence enables us to manage emotions effectively and avoid being derailed, for example, by a flash of anger.
Emotional intelligence is related to many important outcomes for children and adults. Children with higher emotional intelligence are better able to pay attention, are more engaged in school, have more positive relationships, and are more empathic (Raver, Garner, & Smith-Donald 2007; Eggum et al. 2011). They also regulate their behaviors better and earn higher grades (Rivers et al. 2012). For adults, higher emotional intelligence is linked to better relationships, more positive feelings about work, and, for teachers in particular, lower job-related stress and burnout (Brackett, Rivers, & Salovey 2011).
Drawing from Mayer and Salovey's (1997) refined theory of emotional intelligence, Brackett and Rivers (2014) identified five skills that can be taught to increase emotional intelligence: Recognizing emotions in oneself and others; Understanding the causes and consequences of emotions; Labeling emotions accurately; Expressing emotions in ways that are appropriate for the time, place, and culture; and Regulating emotions. These skills, which form the acronym RULER, are the heart of an effective approach for modeling emotional intelligence and teaching the emotional intelligence skills...