Emotional Competence among School Teachers: Significance and Few Strategies for Teachers’ and Students’ Emotional Competency

Description

Page: 241-245

Sushmita Chakraborty (Department of Educational Psychology and Foundations of Education, NCERT, New Delhi)

School-going years in students’ lives are a crucial phase when they go through development in domains of physical, cognitive, psychomotor and most importantly socio-emotional. These development are shaped by interactions in their physical, emotional, and social environment as well as contribute in the ability to perform optimally in academic life, maintain healthy relationships with self and others as part of their personal and social life, and develop an overall sense of satisfaction towards’ ones’ life. In all this mental and emotional well-being is an important catalyst that facilitates students’ holistic development. The National Education Policy – NEP 2020 reiterates this and has visioned a transformative education system that encourages nurturing of students to not only develop as individuals with high cognitive capacities but also possess 21s_ century skills, along with being empathic, resilient and compassionate for which prerequisite is being emotionally competent. A supportive and facilitative environment in school plays a pivotal role in nurturing this competency, particularly that of teachers who are significant stakeholders in students’ school life. The present article attempts to put forth the significance of emotional competency among school teachers not only in playing their role as reflective and effective facilitators in teaching-learning process but also as torchbearers in promoting emotional competency among students. It also provides some strategies to enhance emotional competency following its conceptualisation by Mayer and Salovey (1997).