AGNES JACOBS
NURTURING EMOTIONAL WISDOM C o n s c i o u s n e s s
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ow do we define true “wisdom”? Are we wise if we shine with academic brilliance and have a high IQ? Or is a wise person someone who integrates different ways of knowing beyond intellectual prowess — for example, intuition, feelings, and emotions? Is there a form of wisdom that includes an ability to readily develop positive relationships, caring, and compassion? Do we need to pay more attention to “emotional wisdom”? In 1995, when psychologist Daniel Goleman redefined “intelligence” in his groundbreaking book Emotional Intelligence:Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, he struck a nerve with readers. Not only did the book become a bestseller but it started a movement—a movement to change the way we educate children, and change the way we view wisdom. Today, Goleman reflects, “Between 1995 and now there has been a huge increase in schools interested in social and emotional learning, not just in the United States, but around the world. This is a global movement.” Goleman explained in his book that we have “two brains, two minds — and two different kinds of intelligence: rational and emotional.” He stated, “The old paradigm held an ideal of reason freed of the pull of emotion. The new paradigm urges us to harmonize head and
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heart. To do that well in our lives means we must first understand more exactly what it means to use emotion intelligently.” The current generation of children, says Goleman, seems to be particularly troubled emotionally; more children are depressed, angry, and aggressive. The shock wave of recent shootings in schools has left educators with a new sense of urgency about the need to foster traits that produce healthy, balanced individuals. Goleman believes that through emotional education, crucial qualities such as impulse control, empathy, self-awareness, and sensitivity to one’s own feelings, as well as the feelings of others, can be encouraged and supported. This movement goes beyond simply a change in school curriculum and goals. The implications for society are enormous. The vision of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) is to create “a global wisdom society in which consciousness, spirituality, and love are at the center of life.” An underlying perennial question has been: How do we nurture wisdom? Today, hundreds of research projects are under way examining emotional intelligence, but the results are not yet conclusive. Ten years ago, very little scientific research was conducted in this area, although the idea of emotional intelligence has been explored for decades. In the late ➣
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1980s, Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner proposed that human beings are capable of a whole range of different intelligences, including social intelligences, which Gardner labeled “interpersonal” and “intrapersonal.” When Goleman wrote his book, he discussed Gardner’s research and acknowledged that he owed the specific concept of “emotional intelligence” to Peter Salovey, who wrote an article with John “Jack” Mayer in 1990 defining emotional intelligence as a scientifically testable intelligence. Salovey, who is now the chair of Yale University’s Psychology Department, recalls his initial research. “I was doing a lot of work in my lab where we would arouse emotions in people, usually through film or music. We looked at the way it changed their thinking processes and even their behavior. We found that the arousal of an emotion would often make them better at solving a certain kind of problem or task. We then realized that individuals differ in their ability to understand, harness, and use their emotions in thinking, problem-solving, and creativity.” He and his colleagues are currently exploring whether strengths or weaknesses in emotional intelligence correlate with family relations, coping with stress, and the abilities to form friendships and work in groups. “Our research now involves looking at these individual differences quite concretely, and seeing how they relate to outcomes in the world.” Even though we’re waiting for more definitive answers, the public’s attitude toward the importance of emotion has already changed. “We used to believe,” says Salovey, “that emotions and rationality can’t co-exist—the two are antithetical. We know now that is not true. What excites me most is that we are helping to usher in a new way of looking at emotion, a new respect for emotion. Darwin argued that we evolved an emotional system because it helps us survive. Somehow that idea got lost; we minimized emotions so they didn’t get in the way of rational decisionmaking. Nothing could be further from the truth.” In other words, Salovey stresses, emotions don’t get in the way—they pave the way. “There’s increasing neurological evidence to support that idea. Antonio Damasio’s book Descartes’ Error reveals that if the parts of the brain that deal with emotion are damaged, one ends up not being able to make good rational decisions. The two areas are interlinked. Descartes’ Error makes the case neurologically why the separation between rationality and emotion makes no sense.”
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AND SENSIBILITIES IN SCHOOLS
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ne of the first schools in the United States to introduce social-emotional learning, long before research had been conducted in this area, was the Nueva School in California, founded in 1967 by Karen McCown. In the 1960s, McCown recalls, the focus was on humanistic education. It was a time of visionary idealism, and in her own quest to make a difference in society, she began to explore a vision of a school that would help students reach their full potential and become whole, healthy human beings. McCown, (who is an IONS member), sought the advice of many community leaders on how to start such a school. In addition, she held a meeting of Nobel prize winners and asked them to describe what would have been an ideal school environment when they were growing up. “They all said they would have had a much more rewarding life if they had learned more social skills, not felt so isolated from other students, and had a well-rounded education.” When the Nueva School opened, McCown introduced a pioneering “self-science” curriculum, based on the concept that “experiencing one’s self in a conscious manner — that is, gaining self-knowledge — is an integral part of learning.” Years later, when Goleman conducted his research, he visited Nueva and discussed in his book the successful components of their selfscience program. But the success story doesn’t stop at one school. McCown, along with Anabel Jensen, a former executive director of the Nueva school, decided to form an organization called “Six Seconds,” a nonprofit educational service organization that provides emotional-intelligence training and materials for schools, communities, families, and corporations. The “Six Seconds” name was chosen because it takes only six seconds for an emotion to flood human consciousness, and then dissipate. “With a sixsecond pause,” explains Jensen, “you can transform your life six seconds at a time.” This emotional intelligence network has been so effective that the “Six Seconds” process is now being used in many US schools, and in more than twenty countries.
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The Toolbox B Y
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In 1992, I worked as counselor at an elementary school in a small logging town on the coast of Northern California. The milieu is harsh, rural, and provincial. I was dismayed at the aggressive, unkind, and disrespectful behaviors that were accepted as the norm by some students and teachers. A tradition at this school, for example, was for older students to put younger students headfirst into garbage cans. The first year I observed and listened attentively. Then, over the next nine years, I developed a comprehensive curriculum rooted in nonviolence, selfawareness, and empathy for others. I had worked with tools as a home designer and builder, and through that experience grounded the curriculum in a toolbox metaphor. From kindergarten through third grade, I taught children to create their own toolboxes and insert twelve separate tools representing fundamental concepts of self and others. The children cut out pictures of actual tools. On the back of the first tool we write: “Our Breathing Tool—Calming Ourselves Down.” Next I introduce “My Personal Space—Where My Space Ends and Yours Begins.” This reminds students that they have a right to define a physical space where they feel comfortable. We illustrate this by using an eight-foot long piece of colored yarn, which visually defines this boundary. On the back of the third tool is the phrase, “Empathy— Thinking About How the Other Person is Feeling.” These three tools, along with nine others, provide the elementary building blocks for a common language, and a basis for literacy in social and emotional principles. The principles are reinforced as students move from grades four through eight. Through class meetings, role-playing, reading stories, and art projects, the toolbox curriculum builds the necessary skills for children to sort out and cope with the complexities of their feelings and behavior choices. The mother of a second-grader recently commented, “I think creating and teaching the toolbox is a wonderful idea. These skills are often not taught anywhere. I have watched Elizabeth use her toolbox at home when she feels hassled. I have seen her breathing, counting, and asking for ‘space.’ And she has reminded me many times to ’have empathy’ when I’m pushing her too hard.” Currently, the toolbox program is a pilot in four school districts in California, and ultimately I hope to introduce this program to the public school system throughout the United States. I have found through my work that children long for their parents and teachers to provide them with tools and a common language to navigate the complexities of their social and emotional world. For more information contact:
[email protected]
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n South Africa, for example, Ridge Park College is battered by societal problems. As the principal Tilly Reddy explains, not only is AIDS in Africa a crisis, but many regions are also witnessing a breakdown of family structures. “A family where one mother has five children from four different fathers is not uncommon. The public school system in South Africa faces this legacy in its attempts to address the AIDS pandemic.” Nearly three years ago, the teachers at Ridge Park College received training in emotional intelligence from Six Seconds, and then designed their own curriculum. “We emphasize the power students have to make choices—a movement away from the victim mentality,”says Reddy. “The ‘just say no’ approach is not working, and our focus is now on what students should do. As HIV/AIDS is primarily a behavioral disease, we concentrate on changing attitudes, instilling motivation, encouraging and rewarding the delay of gratification, and building impulse control—all emotional quotient (EQ) competencies.” Ridge Park College invited other local schools to participate in their teacher-training sessions, and they also organized an EQ conference. Reddy observes: “The relationship between teaching emotional intelligence in schools and the development of a society is unquestionable. The skills learned in schools are transferable to the real world. If a student learns delayed gratification in school, for example, this can impact the choices he or she makes throughout life. If you possess greater emotional awareness of your own feelings, you manage them better. If you are able to identify the emotions of others, then you understand others better, and can make better decisions. Emotional intelligence is crucial to the moral regeneration of our society.”
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ne of the main concerns of schools throughout the world is the cost of special curricula. Both Jensen and McCown, who head the Six Seconds network, stress that their approach can be taught within the current curriculum of any school; it doesn’t have to be a separate class. “Basically,” says Jensen, “once
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a teacher becomes skilled and comfortable with the process, it can be incorporated into any subject matter. There’s probably not anything I do that hasn’t been blended or brushed with the stroke of emotional intelligence. In addition, when you cut down on the discipline problems in today’s classroom, you create more time for instruction you didn’t have before.” A specific concept taught in the Six Seconds process is the damaging effect of “killer statements,” whether said by a teacher or student. “A ‘killer statement’ is any kind of negative comment, criticism, or put-down, such as ‘that was a really dumb thing to do’ or ‘how can you not understand that?’ ” explains McCown. “Kids really see why it’s important not to communicate with each other that way. It changes the atmosphere of the school. Sometimes parents declare, ‘This isn’t the real world because people in the real world always say unkind things to one another.’ My response is that we’d like these children to understand that there’s another way of being in the world — so they can make a choice. When I go to high schools I ask, ‘Is there any parent or any teacher here who wouldn’t like kids to be more self-aware, self-motivated, have more compassion and empathy, more self-control? No? Well, that’s what this is about.’ ” Some are also claiming that when emotional intelligence is applied in their classrooms, academic skills improve. Jill Green is the principal of Explorer School, a public charter elementary school in La Jolla, California, which earned the highest math and reading test scores in the San Diego Unified school district in 2002. (Explorer uses the Six Seconds process together with Second Step, a social and emotional violence-prevention curriculum developed by the Committee for Children.) ‘‘It’s clear,” says Green, “that if children feel safe, comfortable, and valued in a classroom, they’re going to be better achievers. That just makes good sense. By emphasizing only the academic, cognitive, and competitive aspects of education, we lead people into the same kinds of split allegiances of ‘I’m right, you’re wrong.’ To be wise, you have to be aware of alternatives, and you have to be able to see other points of view.” She adds, “Teaching emotional intelligence is bigger than just enhancing a student’s education. If people don’t learn how to understand differences, and develop an acceptance of each other, there’s not much hope for the world.”
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n emotional education can be particularly beneficial to children who struggle with learning disabilities or behavior problems. At the Explorer School, one of the fathers describes the difficult time his six-year-old son was having. “My son is a wonderful child, but he was a challenging child. He had some significant behavioral issues.” The father, Edward (whose name has been changed to protect his family’s privacy), goes on to explain how his son would get mad at other children over the smallest issue. “He was easily frustrated, and would scream at the other kids. I believe if he had been put into a standard school system, these behavior problems would have led to a disaster.” At the Explorer School, he says, the teachers addressed these problems with extraordinary patience. Whenever his son misbehaved, he was told to go to the principal’s office—not for punishment but for guidance. “During his first year at the school,” says Edward, “my son talked to Jill Green, the principal, probably two or three times a day. She was nice to him but firm. She said, ‘You have to learn how to handle your frustration. This is what we expect: We don’t allow hitting or yelling. You have to learn how to calm yourself down.’ I think that you can have a principal who has the absolute command and respect of the students, and yet hasn’t done it by intimidation.” Those opposed to teaching emotional intelligence often raise the argument that it is the role of the parent, not the school, to teach children how to handle their emotions. Edward understands this point of view but responds, “We were never trained how to be parents, so we’ve been just trying to do the best we can with our son, and the school worked with us closely. We also saw an outside counselor, and this person was in direct contact with Jill Green. To acclimatize my son to the social necessities of sitting in the classroom, the counselor and the school initiated a ticket game. For every section he completed successfully without having any behavior problem, he had a hole punched.” Edward was impressed that the school not only went out of its way to help his child, but encouraged other students in the class to support his son during this difficult phase. “Jill put the whole class in this position of psychological support rather than ridiculing him. It’s a tes-
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tament to this school’s global approach that the other kids became interested in the ticket-punching concept and wanted my son to succeed. My son is perfectly fine now,” adds Edward, “but if it hadn’t been for the school’s commitment, we would have a huge dysfunctional problem on our hands.” Most emotional-intelligence programs include a parenteducation component. Sabrina Coble, who has a son and daughter at the Explorer School, comments, “It’s impossible to expect parents to deal with something that they haven’t been taught to deal with. Education should prepare our children for life, and it should do that by giving students the tools to handle both the emotional and intellectual parts of life. There will always be a difficult person or somebody who does something differently. If education can equip our children to handle these situations, to understand that there may be difficult people and not label them ‘bad,’ and find a way to help them, then the effect on society would be wonderful.” Tina Boughton, the Social-Emotional Curriculum Coordinator at Explorer, bases her work on these beliefs: “Wisdom has to start with a self-knowing. I can’t think of anything more important than helping children understand their own emotional world, so they know how they react to certain situations. For example, a child should recognize when he or she is feeling sad, angry or guilty, to identify the feeling and then know there are options for responding or feeling differently. Whether it’s an intellectual knowing, a physical knowing, or an emotional knowing, all three areas require awareness. They need to be integrated, and that is where wisdom comes from—when those different parts of our being communicate with each other to help us make conscious choices rather than working unconsciously. Ideally, if children were given the tools to develop their innate wisdom and their way of knowing in the world, we would have a wiser planet.”
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Anabel Jensen, Six Seconds’ president, you can benefit from emotional-management techniques. Jensen is currently an associate professor at Notre Dame de Namur University in California, and because she works primarily in the teacher-credential program, the average age of her students is around 45 years. During one of Jensen’s recent classroom sessions, two of her students suddenly started crying. One woman broke into tears when she began to describe a personal story about her daughter who had been given a drug at a party and ended up in a coma. Another woman was crying because she had just been in car accident. “These women were dealing with significant incidents in their lives,” acknowledges Jensen. “We stopped our psychology class and did self-science for fifteen minutes. It wasn’t on the agenda, but it was necessary in terms of the support that both of these people needed.” Because Jensen incorporates emotional awareness into her lessons, her students often tell her, “I wish I’d had this tool when I was a child. I wish I’d had this tool when I was raising my children.” Jensen and McCown both believe that although it’s never too late to introduce emotional-intelligence tools at any age, the elementary school level is ideal. “The sooner the better,” says McCown. “Scientific research is beginning to show that learning doesn’t take place without the emotional component. We now have a more sophisticated ability to understand how the brain and mind function.” She pauses and then adds, “Can you imagine a world where we valued equally our emotional intelligence as well as our intellectual intelligence? What a different world we would create.” R E S O U R C E
Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning: CASEL is conducting a comprehensive evaluation of school-based programs that promote social and emotional development. www.casel.org Committee for Children: “Second Step”curriculum. www.cfchildren.org Six Seconds: www.6seconds.org EQ Today magazine: www.EQtoday.com
en-year-old Paloma Beatriz Nikolic knows what to do when she’s feeling mad. “There are a few techniques like counting to ten, or walking away. And they teach us breathing exercises if we are frustrated so we calm down.” Whether you are ten years old or middle-aged, says
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G A I L B E R N I C E H O L L A N D is an associate editor of IONS Review. She is the author of A Call for Connection: Solutions for Creating a Whole New Culture, available as an e-book at www.CyclopsMedia.com. Contact:
[email protected].
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