By Flor de María Vila
Nowadays people contend that it is essential
to be able to handle certain difficult situations at work. These situations
usually are related to the ability of managing your emotions in a social
context.
What
does this have to do with teaching English? We think that our job is safe if we
have a good level of English, we know how to apply the different teaching methods
needed to instruct different kinds of learners and sufficient teaching
experience, don’t we? Shouldn’t that be enough?
Thinking
about this, a memory of a difficult situation came to my mind.
This is it:
I used to train teachers who gave lessons in a five-day program institute
and one of them came to me and related the following case: As part of his
duties, he had to give a grade for the homework done in the workbook. He needed
two scores per week, so he didn´t need to check students´ workbooks every day.
One day, he checked the students´ workbooks and after that there was a break. When
he returned to class, a lady (one of his students) was waiting for him outside
the classroom. She claimed that he chose the day she didn´t do her homework to
ask for it to make sure that she would fail. Unbelievable, wouldn’t you think? Everything
that came to his mind was: “What! What in the world is she talking about?” Instead
of retorting to the absurdity, which was his first spontaneous reaction, he tried
to calm down himself, and tried to understand why she was behaving that way.
Eventually, he realized she was extremely worried about the possibility of
failing the course, so he serenely explained to her that there was no way he
could know beforehand when she had o hadn´t done her homework. He also offered to
help if she had trouble doing the assignment if she didn´t understand. The
woman quieted down, returned to class and later in the course she asked for
help only once. After that, she became the sweetest person one could ever
imagine. Even more, she recommended him to all her contacts.
So, what had happened? Why didn´t this
episode with the woman become a nightmare?Had the teacher used his emotional
intelligence or Emotional Quotient-EQ, as David Goleman calls it? According to him
there are five components. Let´s see if the teacher in the example used them.
1. When
he calmed down himself and tried to understand his student, he definitely
identified his emotion and worked on regulating it. This covered two abilities:
self-awareness and self-regulation.
2. Offering
his help he showed he was able not only to understand how she was feeling but also
to manage his response at the light of this information. This is related to a
third component: empathy.
3. Being
able to interact well with others is another important aspect of emotional
intelligence. This ability is known as social
skill and he used it when he could manage the woman´s emotions by listening
actively when she was explaining what she thought was happening. He got her to
return to classes and, even better, later act as a reference for other
students.
4. Even
though the example given does not display a specific action that illustrates motivation, it is certain that the
teacher mentioned encouraged himself to achieve his goals which were beyond mere
external rewards. In fact, he used this experience as a driving force to use
his emotional intelligence every time it was necessary and became a teacher
whom everybody liked and wanted to work with.
Was he born with these qualities? Can we learn them?
Do we need to learn
them?
Many
employers find emotional intelligence extremely important since it is the one quality
that allows people to productively work with peers in better conditions.
Employers consider soft skills as important as hard skills since without them employees
find employment challenges insuperable.
For
us, teachers, the situations in which we may need to use our emotional
intelligence are many. Probably the most common ones are the circumstances in
which we interact with our students, our colleagues, our students’ parents or
relatives and our supervisors, whether they are coordinators, trainers or
directors.
A
tip that usually works for me is to think the following: Behave, react and
respond in the way that person would if he or she were you. For example, be the
teacher that student would need if he were you. In the example given lines
above, did he need an interlocutor as a punching back? or one that tried to
find out what was happening that made her behave that way? It´s certainly not
an easy job, but if we work on this, we will definitely be on the right track. Putting
myself in the other person’s shoes works for me. What about you?
And
if you do not want to love your neighbor as much as yourself, think about the
possibility of losing your job because it is very demanding for others to work
with you. If it is extremely difficult to manage your emotions with students,
it is very likely that the same happens with the other people with whom you
work. We need to educate ourselves or look for help.
We
would be “safe” and keep our jobs if we act proactively and update not only our
language skills and our methodological foundation but also train to improve our
emotional intelligence since this is precisely what technology would never
dominate, in the words of laureate professor Vikas Pota, Chairman,
of Varkey Foundation, a family organization seeking to improve global teacher
capacity and promote universal access to quality education.
What do you think?
Is Emotional Intelligence really important?
Have you ever been in a situation in which you needed to use it?
Have you trained yourself or is it natural in you?
References:
Goleman,D. "Emotional Intelligence
(Goleman)," in A Blog by Concordia University, November 17, 2017, https://education.cu-portland.edu/blog/classroom-resources/daniel-golemans-emotional-intelligence-theory-explained/
Pota, V. World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/people/vikas-pota
BIOGRAPHICAL DATA
M.A. in Cognition, Learning and Development from PUCP, B.A. in Education with a major in English Teaching. Ms. Vila is currently Teacher trainer, Pedagogic Consultant and Member of the Research Team at Centro de Idiomas de la Universidad del Pacífico. She is Academic Director of International Contacts (test training & foreign applications advisory) and relationship manager for American universities´ MBA admissions officers with International Contacts. She is official Examiner for several University of Cambridge tests, freelance consultant with Universidad ESAN, experienced speaker on diverse English teaching issues for prestigious institutions, and senior international examinations trainer (GMAT, GRE, TOEFL, IELTS).
