Research Paper: Enabling School Children To Learn Through Emotional Intelligence Coaching

Introduction:

About 80% of schools in INDIA are designed in a way to bring about a massive shift in rational intelligence. They are measured with the ability to do mathematics and understand science. This particular way of learning by student, helped them to do really well in the industrial age but now the corporate world needs people who are brilliant in Emotional intelligence.

The % of emotional intelligence needed is 90% and rational intelligence is 10%. This particular research is based on the following:

1. What is the current reality?
2. What is the design behind schools?
3. Why the primary intent of schools is not fulfilled?
4. And how does the future look like?

This research is submitted from the space of an inquiry. Using this inquiry I’m looking forward to building a business model which will focus on

Enabling school children TO LEARN through EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE COACHING.

Metaphor of a horse and the car:

During the 19th century, horses were considered to be the fastest mode of transportation. But that fact was clearly broken when the cars were invented. Now, even the fastest horse cannot beat the speed of a car. In such a scenario, is there any point in beating or feeding good food to the horse? No there isn’t. So, if you choose to travel fast, you need to shift to cars.

The point is that:

When the old paradigm is not giving you what you needed, it is important to invent a new paradigm and achieve what you want.

What is the challenge?

More and more Children are getting disengaged in classrooms. In spite of knowing that classrooms are not the only way of learning, they still get restless when they hear news about a 5 year old kid, who made world record in Mathematics.

This is because the old paradigm is that teachers know everything and students know nothing. But the new paradigm is that both the teachers and the students can involve in collaborative learning.

In collaborative learning; teachers act as facilitators, students get to explore different ways to learn outside classroom and they express their creativity through their projects. In this way they get to work as teams and learn experientially from the other students.

What is the design behind Schools?

Definition from Wikipedia on the purpose of schools:

Examples of the purpose of schools include develop reasoning about perennial questions, mastering the methods of scientific inquiry, cultivate the intellect, create positive change agents, develop spirituality, and model a democratic society. The purpose and goal of the school is to teach pupils how to think.

From the above definition, it is clearly communicated that the fundamental design of a school enables students to think and does not teach them to handle their emotions which is a key part in their life.

The design of doing schooling for 15 years is created out of the necessity of the Industrial Age. They need to go through this process to get a job and lead a happy life. The school curriculum is filled with over 10 subjects and all of them enable students to understand them logically. They don’t have hands on experience on these subjects that they are learning doesn’t serve the purpose of learning.

The intent of schools is to enable the students to learn the art of learning. Education is defined as bringing out what is already there in the students.

But the way the schools are designed is to fill information in students’ mind. Students are treated as passive consumers. The teachers are the subject matter expert and they don’t make mistakes in what they are sharing. They are not allowed to challenge. Students are here to learn what teachers share and they need to share them back very well in their exams.

Exams are designed to check the student’s rational intelligence and not their interpersonal skills. This way of measuring their education impacts what students can achieve in their life. When any student scores high marks they get a feeling that they know everything and this attitude doesn’t help them to learn further or teach other students who are not doing well. Also, the students who score low marks start having some limitations. Their aspirations, dream for their life is decided by the marks that they score.

As the education system is treating them as passive consumers and exams are designed to test their rational intelligence, they generally fail to enable the students’ potential.

What is the inquiry?

New reality that we envision here is that, What if one of a student, gets to experience preparing themselves for their life and especially for their career while being part of schools?

What is the new paradigm?

The new paradigm that we suggest here integrates emotional intelligence and coaching.

What is emotional intelligence?

Emotions are involved in everything we do: every action, decision and judgement. Emotionally intelligent people recognize this and use their thinking to manage their emotions rather than being managed by them.

We agree with the definition offered by Sparrow and Knight in Applied EI (2006):

Emotional intelligence is the habitual practice of:

Put another way:

EI is thinking about feeling (and feeling about thinking) to guide our behaviour. This will lead to better management of us and better relationships with others.

What is coaching?

Coaching is one of the most powerful ways of communicating. When used effectively and appropriately it raises your awareness; it’s like a laser on your thinking that cuts through any procrastination and straight to the chase. We believe that coaching is about moving forward and helping people improve their individual performance, which has a ‘knock-on effect’ for organizations on team and organizational performance. The bottom line is coaching is about being a catalyst for positive change in a way that’s appropriate for individuals, helping them to be at the best they can be in. Tim Gallwey agrees with our thinking when he says:

It’s about evoking the best from people, including you.

Coaching ability can be defined in this simple equation by Tim Gallwey on potential equation:

P = p – i (Performance = potential – interferences)

What is the design behind learning?

For true, lasting development to take place, all change should be looked at using the four main elements of the KASH model described in Applied EI (Sparrow and Knight, 2006):

What did the last standard that students studied focused on?

In the majority of cases, the answer will be knowledge and skills. However, if your attitude about yourself is not right, all the knowledge and skills taught in the classrooms will not make any significant difference.

Take, for example, the student who doesn’t want to be in the classroom but has been asked to attend. Or what about the student in the presentation skills class with the belief, ‘I hate standing in front of groups. I can’t fit in’ Another way of looking at this is what we call the ‘Teaching iceberg’. Most of the Teaching Focuses entirely on knowledge and skills (using our thinking brain),

Deeper changes at the attitude (emotional brain) and habit level should also be addressed if sustainable change needs to occur.

For true lasting development to take place, attitude and habits (behaviour) connected to those attitudes usually need to be developed.

For example, if you want to develop your awareness of others, applying the KASH model might look like this:

Knowledge:

Reading about awareness of others and understanding what it is and how you can develop it.

Attitudes:

Understanding and challenging the negative attitudes you have connected to awareness of others (eg ‘He doesn’t listen to me, so why should I listen to him’).

Skills:

Practising using the knowledge you have learnt about actively listening to others, listening to what they say and the body language messages they send out.

Habits:

Gradually changing the way you act when in conversation with others, paying more attention, interrupting people less and asking more open questions to help understand them better.

What Emotional intelligent coaching can do?

Developing emotional intelligence:

Let’s get one thing straight from the start – developing your emotional intelligence (EI) will improve your learning performance.

EI is not about lots of unclear, touchy-feely ideas that are fun to read about or experience in classroom learning, but when a student is in school, nothing really happens.

Developing the EI for students will take time, but will lead to sustainable behavior changes that will improve the way you manage yourself and the way you work with others.

Just some of the advantages of developing your emotional intelligence are:

As discussed in what is coaching, the potential equation highlights how we could improve performance, and we’d like to expand that some more here. As Tim Gallwey said,

in every human endeavour there are two arenas of engagement: the outer and the inner’. The outer arena is what we see happening externally.

For example, for a student it could be the results he or she is achieving (or not, as the case may be) and the inner arena is about the internal attitudes and values either supporting that achievement or getting in their way. This is about overcoming our own obstacles, such as self-doubt, over-analysing situations, fear, assumptions that we make and our limiting beliefs.

So let’s review that equation once again:

P = p – i (Performance = potential – interferences)

The way to increase performance, using this equation, is to grow and develop the ‘p’ factor, the potential, and to reduce or eliminate the ‘i’ interferences.

Conclusion:

When schools take on enabling the children learn through emotional intelligence by bringing the coaching aspect in their curriculum they will notice significant difference in the interpersonal skills growth in children. Also, teachers will have great sense of achievement and satisfaction in the way they are teaching by seeing the growth in children. This will enable the virtuous cycle in teaching and learning in the school.

The dream that is being shared here is

teachers can take on the role of being emotionally intelligent coaches and students get to design their learning.

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