|For Immediate Release:
June 15, 2010
For more information, contact:
Kristina Gawrgy Campbell
NAEYC Radio presents…
Creating emotionally literate schools
(Washington, D.C.) – This month’s NAEYC Radio segment features Marc Brackett, Ph.D., who shares the research behind the importance of emotional intelligence as a foundation to other learning and how teachers and administrators can work toward having emotionally literate schools for our children.
Rae Pica and Mark R. Ginsberg interviewed Dr. Brackett in this month’s segment of NAEYC Radio, a program brought to you by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) and the BAM Radio Network.
In this segment, Dr. Brackett says an emotionally literate school is one in which every student and every stakeholder involved in education is using five key skills his or her everyday life. These five skills are the following:
R - Recognizing emotions
U - Understanding emotions
L - Labeling emotions
E - Expressing emotions
R - Regulating emotions
Not having these five skills makes learning more difficult, especially for young children, says Dr. Brackett. He also says most adults, including educators, often lack emotional literacy skills because there are no institutions set up to teach these skill sets.
“We believe that everyone involved in the education of a child needs to be trained,” says Brackett. It is also important for adults to model good emotional behavior once they learn it, says Dr. Brackett.
“If you model rolling your eyes at someone who does something inappropriate, guess who’s going to start rolling their eyes?” says Dr. Brackett. “So in our work, it’s absolutely critical for teachers to become more self-aware…about the words they are choosing to use. It all comes to being a proactive role model for children, in our view.”
Dr. Brackett is a Research Scientist in the Department of Psychology at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. He also is the Deputy Director of Yale’s Health, Emotion, and Behavior Laboratory and Head of the Emotional Intelligence Unit in the Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy. Dr. Brackett also presented on this topic earlier this month at NAEYC’s National Institute for Early Childhood Professional Development in Phoenix, Arizona.
Mark R. Ginsberg, Ph.D., is the executive director of NAEYC.
The BAM Radio Network was originally launched as a resource for parents, aimed at delivering the most reliable information on early childhood development and developmentally appropriate parenting to busy moms and dads. Created by leading early childhood experts, the programming quickly became a popular resource among teachers and educators and was expanded to include an Educators' Channel.
Founded in 1926, the National Association for the Education of Young Children has nearly 90,000 members worldwide. The association is the largest and most influential voice for early childhood education professionals and the field of early childhood education in the United States.
Founded in 1926, the National Association for the Education of Young Children is the largest and most influential advocate for high-quality early care and education in the United States.