Daniel Goleman Teacher Quotations

Emotional intelligence begins to develop in the earliest years. All the small exchanges children have with their parents, teachers, and with each other carry emotional messages.

A little girl who finds a puzzle frustrating might ask her busy mother (or teacher) for help. The child gets one message if her mother expresses clear pleasure at the request and quite another if mommy responds with a curt 'Don't bother me - I've got important work to do.'

Teachers need to be comfortable talking about feelings. This is part of teaching emotional literacy - a set of skills we can all develop, including the ability to read, understand, and respond appropriately to one's own emotions and the emotions of others.

Emotional 'literacy' implies an expanded responsibility for schools in helping to socialize children. This daunting task requires two major changes: that teachers go beyond their traditional mission and that people in the community become more involved with schools as both active participants in children's learning and as individual mentors.

Teachers need to be comfortable talking about feelings.

Educators, long disturbed by schoolchildren's lagging scores in math and reading, are realizing there is a different and more alarming deficiency: emotional literacy. And while laudable efforts are being made to raise academic standards, this new and troubling deficiency is not being addressed in the standard school curriculum. As one Brooklyn teacher put it, the present emphasis in schools suggests that "we care more about how well schoolchildren can read and write than whether they'll be alive next week."

School success is not predicted by a child's fund of facts or a precocious ability to read as much as by emotional and social measures; being self-assured and interested: knowing what kind of behavior is expected and how to rein in the impulse to misbehave; being able to wait, to follow directions, and to turn to teachers for help; and expressing needs while getting along with other children.