What is emotional intelligence and social confidence?
Emotional intelligence has been defined as: “the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.” Salovey & Mayer 1989 and social confidence refers to a young person’s ability to manage social interactions and connections.
Why is emotional intelligence & social confidence so important for healthy functioning and early intervention?
All young people need exposure to situations in which they can develop emotional intelligence and build the social confidence to sustain meaningful fulfilling relationships. Social withdrawal and the isolation that accompanies is linked to whole range of poor physiological and psychological outcomes including high levels of stress, and in children and adolescents at the time, and in later life.
What can teachers do to improve and support the emotional intelligence and social confidence of the young people?
Helping a young person learn to regulate themselves is a big step towards them being prepared to better direct and focus their emotions appropriately and advantageously to their continuing emotional development. Breaking down Social and Emotional Learning into Emotional Intelligence and Social Confidence helps us to target specific areas a young person might be struggling with. We have suggested and developed a number of activities around talking about emotions and building social confidence individually and in groups, you can find these in the resources or read more sections.
3 top tips!
- Engage children in the classroom, encouraging them to communicate and express themselves using speech, hand gestures, movements.
- Help the children develop empathy by asking questions to make them think about why people do things.
- Be attentive and use information you gather about children to guide their learning.
