Superintendents from across the state got a lesson in emotional intelligence Wednesday at their annual back-to-school meeting, along with encouragement from the state education commissioner and a thank you from the outgoing governor.
“I know as superintendents you don’t get many people who ask you how you’re feeling,” Marc Brackett, director of Yale’s Center for Emotional Intelligence, told the group of 111 superintendents gathered at Prince Tech High School in Hartford. “Let me please ask you to take a moment … Are you energized or are you depleted? Are you pleasant or unpleasant?”
And Brackett asked, “What’s your strategy to regulate your feelings? … This is a small workshop, but what if you’re a student and you have to come at 8 o’clock in the morning and stay there til 3 or 4 or 5 … The life of a student is replete with hundreds of emotions throughout the day.”
Education Commissioner Dianna Wentzell said she thinks it’s important for educators as well as students to understand their emotions as part of creating a good climate for learning.
“Most districts have some sort of school climate approach,” Wentzell said. Brackett said he and his colleagues work with more than 20 districts and nearly 150 schools throughout the state.
“All of us in education need to have these skills so that we can best support our students,” Wentzell said.
Brackett said he conducted a survey at five Connecticut high schools, asking students five times a day for five weeks how they felt emotionally.
“About 70 percent of the day in school they tell us: tired, bored, stressed,” Brackett said. Research also shows, Brackett said, that teachers report feeling frustrated and stressed much of the time.
Brackett described ways in which he works with students and educators to help them identify their emotions and then move toward ways of increasing the positive emotions they would like to feel.
He noted that it’s not that people will feel happy all the time, but that for high school students, for instance, the experience might be flipped so that they spend 70 percent of the day feeling positive emotions, and only 30 percent of the day weighed down by negative emotions. He said that the Center for Emotional Intelligence has shown an 8 to 10 percent gain in academic achievement one year after implementing the program known as RULER.
Fran Rabinowitz, executive director of the Connecticut Association for Public School Superintendents, brought in the Center for Emotional Intelligence to work with students and educators when she was superintendent in Hamden and later in Bridgeport.
“It begins with the adults … to honor their feelings, who they are as a whole individual,” Rabinowitz said. “That was the key, then moving to the child. It cut down bullying, it cut down suspensions, increased attendance. I was only in Bridgeport for three years, but I was beginning to see changes in academic performance.”
She said that “honoring the kids’ feelings, I think, made them feel safe, made them feel that they could take risks academically and made them understand that we cared about them as people… If a child comes in angry in the morning and we don’t recognize that anger, that child’s not going to be able to learn too well.”
Bloomfield Superintendent of Schools James Thompson also talked about efforts to educate students about their emotions in that district. Citing a quote from the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, Thompson said that when children’s emotional and social needs are attended to as well as their learning, “you actually help shape the architecture of their brains, which opens the door for the future mastery of literacy and cognitive skills.”
Brackett told the group that his hope is to “make Connecticut the first emotionally intelligent state.”
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, who was known nationally as the “education governor” particularly during his first term when he implemented a number of changes in education, stopped by in the middle of the meeting to praise the administrators and thank them.
“To all of you, thank for what you do, day in and day out. You don’t have an easy job,” Malloy said. “It’s hard to make folks understand where you are trying to take them, if you don’t get there overnight.”
Malloy cited improvement in high school graduation rates and a narrowing of the achievement gap between white students and black and brown students during his tenure.
He also emphasized the need for more students educated to fill jobs in advanced manufacturing and the need for more young women to go into math, the sciences and engineering.
“Too few young women are concentrating in the areas where we know our jobs of the future are going to be,” Malloy said.
