Emotional intelligence for teachers

Five skill areas, translated into school days

CASEL, the organization behind the most widely used social and emotional learning framework, groups these skills into five areas for young people and adults alike: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision-making. (CASEL, 2020) Teachers usually meet the framework as something to teach students. It reads differently when you apply it to your own day.

Your mood walks in before the lesson does

Jennings and Greenberg proposed what they called the prosocial classroom: teachers with stronger social and emotional skills and better well-being build warmer relationships with students, manage behavior more effectively and deliver social-emotional programs more faithfully, while teachers who lack those skills are more prone to burnout. (Jennings and Greenberg, 2009) It is a model built from a review of existing research, not a single test, but it matches what most teachers know from experience.

Moods spread in groups. In a lab study, a trained actor’s mood spread to the rest of a small group, and groups exposed to a positive mood cooperated more and argued less. (Barsade, 2002) That was adults in a decision task, not a classroom, so treat it as a reason to check your own state at the door rather than as a measured classroom effect. Thirty seconds outside the door before the bell (one slow breath, one word for how you feel, one decision about the tone you want) costs nothing.

When a student throws the first insult

Public challenges set off the strongest reactions because your authority feels at stake in front of everyone. The response that works best is almost always quieter and later than the one your body wants.

The private conversation is where emotional skill pays off. Students who blow up are often embarrassed, behind, or carrying something from home. Naming a guess (“you seemed frustrated”) gives them a way to answer without losing face. You can still set a consequence; you’ll set a better one with the full story.

Criticism students can actually hear

Feedback on work is an emotional event for students, especially ones who already doubt that school is on their side. In randomized experiments with seventh graders, essays returned with a note saying the teacher had high standards and believed the student could reach them were revised more often and more thoroughly, with the biggest effects for African American students who mistrusted school. (Yeager and colleagues, 2014) The note was one sentence long.

The adult version of this skill is covered in giving and receiving feedback at work, which also helps with observation debriefs from your own principal.

Parents, colleagues and the 9 p.m. email

A parent’s angry email usually arrives when you are tired and has been written while they were scared. Don’t answer it the same night. Draft, sleep, and send in the morning with the first line acknowledging what they care about: “I can tell you’re worried about Maya’s grade, and I want to help her finish the semester strong.” Then give facts and one next step. If the conversation needs to happen, move it to a call or a meeting; tone gets lost in writing, and the strategies in communicating under pressure at work apply to parent conferences as well as staff meetings.

With colleagues, the most common friction points are shared students, shared rooms and uneven workloads. A direct, early sentence (“I need the lab back by 2:15 on Tuesdays, can we make that work?”) prevents months of quiet resentment.

The cost of smiling through seventh period

Teaching requires constant display of emotions you may not feel: patience at the end of a long day, enthusiasm for the fourth repeat of a lesson. Across 95 studies of emotional labor, faking expressions without changing the underlying feeling (surface acting) was linked with poorer well-being, while trying to actually feel the required emotion (deep acting) showed weak links with strain. (Hülsheger and Schewe, 2011) The studies are correlational, but the practical move is clear: instead of painting on patience, look for a reason that genuinely produces some (“he’s asking the same question because he’s scared of being wrong, not to annoy me”).

Recovery matters too. Across 91 samples, people who mentally switched off from work in their off-hours reported less exhaustion and better sleep, and doing work tasks in the evening went with less switching off. (Wendsche and Lohmann-Haislah, 2017) For teachers that often means a hard stop on grading at a set hour, and a deliberate ritual that marks the end of the school day: a walk, a change of clothes, a podcast in the car. Emotional regulation at work has more on recovering from a job that requires a certain face.

What teaching these skills to students can do

A large meta-analysis of 213 school-based social and emotional learning programs found that students who took part improved their social and emotional skills, behavior and attitudes, and did better academically too: the authors equate the gain to moving an average student about 11 places up a 100-place ranking, compared with students who didn’t take part. (Durlak and colleagues, 2011) Programs differed a lot, and results depended on how well they were run. Separately, across more than 42,000 students, emotional intelligence correlated with academic performance at about ρ = .20, with no evidence yet about which causes which. (MacCann and colleagues, 2020)

The practical takeaway for an individual teacher: a program runs better in the hands of someone who uses the skills themselves. Students learn more from watching you handle a bad moment than from a worksheet on feelings. Parents asking how to do this at home can be pointed to how to teach emotional intelligence to a child.

A five-day self-check for the classroom

Habits that undercut the rest

• Demanding calm in a raised voice. Students copy the volume, not the instruction.
• Correcting in public by default. A public correction invites a public defense. Most corrections can wait for the bell.
• Reading every outburst as defiance. Some are, many are embarrassment, fatigue or trouble at home. Ask before you decide.
• Running on empty until June. Exhaustion shrinks every skill on this page. Protecting your evenings is part of the job, not a break from it.

For the research on how much emotional skills matter in jobs generally, see does emotional intelligence matter at work. If you want to see where your own strengths sit, the free EQ test takes about nine minutes and is meant for your own reflection, not for evaluating staff.