Developing Emotionally Competent Teachers

Classrooms are emotional places, filled at different times with enjoyment, excitement, anger, hurt and boredom. The teacher’s skill in working with emotional information and in regulating their own and their pupils’ emotion impacts upon what and how pupils learn. But what emotional competence do teachers need? Can they learn this in pre-service teacher education? And should this kind of ability even be categorised as emotional skill, competence or intelligence? Given recent policy initiatives in this area, these questions have become increasingly pressing.
This book focuses on how pre-service student teachers develop the competence to work in and with the emotionally rich life of the classroom. Building on the concept of emotional intelligence, it examines the skills used by student teachers in perceiving and regulating emotions, generating particular emotional states to facilitate particular types of thinking, and understanding the processes of emotional change in their classroom. Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative data, it explores what pre-service teachers can be seen to have learned through an emotional competence training programme and how this impacted upon their teaching.

Roisin P. Corcoran is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Psychology at Yale University. Her doctoral research focused on emotional competence and pre-service teacher education, particularly the role of emotion regulation and emotional intelligence in teaching, learning and learning to teach. She has served as a reviewer for both psychology and education peer-reviewed journals and is Communications Chair of the American Educational Research Association Social and Emotional Learning Special Interest Group. She has taught in pre-service teacher education for some years and is the recipient of numerous grants and awards for her emotion-related research. This book links directly with her doctoral research for which she was awarded an IRCHSS scholarship.
Roland Tormey is a Conseiller pédagogique at the Centre de recherche et d’appui pour la formation et ses technologies (CRAFT), École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne. He is co-chair of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe Expert Group on Competences in Education for Sustainable Development. He has worked in teacher education, education research and curriculum development for fifteen years and was formerly Head of the Department of Education and Professional Studies at the University of Limerick. This book links directly with his ongoing programme of research on emotion, metacognition and global citizenship education.