Emotions drive learning, decision-making, creativity, relationships, and health. In nutshell, Emotions drive our lives. It is very important to reimagine the way how education is perceived in the 21stcentury.
The need to integrate emotional intelligence in the form of social-emotional learning in every classroom and equipping students and people to explore their unbound potential will play a key role in shaping the future of our next generation.
SEL is the process through which children and adults (teachers and educators) acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions
- Set and achieve goals
- Feel and show empathy for others
- Establish and maintain positive relationships
- And make responsible decisions.
A student spends maximum in time in school and then at home. Schools are an ideal setting to support the social and emotional well-being of students and offer resources and opportunities to build important humane skills such as empathy, kindness and resilience. When schools support social and emotional well-being, students typically have fewer disciplinary issues, can focus more on school work, and can develop skills to communicate better. This can translate to improved academic outcomes and better health later in life.
“A state of well-being in which every individual realizes his or her own unbound potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to her or his community.”This goal comes from a source that’s not often associated with education: It’s the World Health Organization’s definition of mental health.
We don’t often see education and emotional well-being and mental health as parallel. It’s assumed that we need different tools and different specialists for each field. But that the more we separate the two the less each will achieve its aims for young people.
Children growing up in low-income families experience greater violence, family turmoil and insecurity than their wealthier peers, which may explain why poorer children have higher rates of emotional and behavioral problems. They more often struggle to manage aggression, regulate anxiety, get on with other children, communicate, concentrate, and follow rules and routines; it’s no surprise that they find it more difficult to succeed at school.
Therefore, prevalence of such issues amongst children from this demographic must therefore be referred to as an educational challenge. The holistic development of children is abysmal, primarily due to the absence of Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) interventions in classrooms and exposure to its co-relationship with academic performance and emotional well-being. These issues require a solution that actively engages teachers, students and community.
Understanding the need of the hour, it’s imperative to solve the social-emotional gap in the existing teaching methodologies in public schools and low-income communities by conducting SEL workshops. SEL workshops, is a ground-breaking solution for the various emotional and early stage mental health challenges faced by children and to equip the teachers to adequately address these endemic problems.
Although awareness of mental health has begun to grow over the past few years, mental health professionals remain scarce, and out of proportion to the scale of need. And the more emotional distress and its behavioural effects are seen as medical, the more teachers feel unable to help. In the absence of widely accessible psychological services, vulnerable children are left stranded between mental health professionals who lack the capacity to help everyone, and teachers who think they can’t.
As we’ve seen, though, mental health–like education–is about thriving. It’s about handling problems and realizing potential. This is what teachers dedicate themselves to, and there is plenty that they can do.
For decades, education system has focused on developing students’ academic intelligence but not their emotional intelligence. Since education is transitional, educators and researchers have begun to realize that developing students’ emotional intelligence may be just as important and is the missing piece in the puzzle in reimagining a new education system. Connecting education to emotional well-being and mental health by incorporating Emotional Intelligence in a child’s life is a potential solution to social emotional well-being. About time, we focus and start giving social emotional well-being the importance it deserves.
By –JUHI SHARMA, FOUNDER AND CEO OF Light Up ( Emotions Matter Foundation)