Helen Maffini




Developing Children's
Emotional Intelligence

Today's world presents children with a wide-range of challenges that can hinder their personal and academic development. It is essential, therefore that as educators we equip children with the knowledge and skills they need to be successful not just academically but also in life. Although there is a real pressure for schools to meet academic standards, it is possible for practitioners to stimulate emotional growth through everyday classroom activities. By carefully planning a curriculum that encourages children to explore their feelings through imaginative media and make-believe play, healthy emotional growth can occur. The authors of this timely book provide a wealth of practical tools and techniques that you can use with your children to successfully develop their emotional intelligence.

Emotional Intelligence

“I want all children to have the opportunity to learn emotional intelligence skills. These are skills that will help them well into their adult life. Is our goal not for happy, fulfilled people who make the world a better place? If yes, then we as educators and parents need to instill this in our children from an early age” –Helen Maffini

Third Culture Kids

“Being a third culture kid myself has enabled me to help my own daughters on their path to becoming citizens of the world”–Helen Maffini

Early Childhood Education

“Children are exceptional. They are highly intelligent and able to see things in ways that many adults have long since forgotten”–Helen Maffini

David Caruso: “It is very important to understand that emotional intelligence is not the opposite of intelligence, it is not the triumph of heart over head -- it is the unique intersection of both.” (“Emotional What?”)

Freedman et al.: "Emotional Intelligence is a way of recognizing, understanding, and choosing how we think, feel, and act. It shapes our interactions with others and our understanding of ourselves. It defines how and what we learn; it allows us to set priorities; it determines the majority of our daily actions. Research suggests it is responsible for as much as 80% of the "success" in our lives."
--From Handle With Care: Emotional Intelligence Activity Book

Salovey & Mayer: “We define emotional intelligence as the subset of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions.”
--From “Emotional Intelligence,” 1990

Mayer & Cobb: “The ability to process emotional information, particularly as it involves the perception, assimilation, understanding, and management of emotion."
--From "Educational policy on emotional intelligence: Does it make sense?", 2000

John Gottman: "In the last decade or so, science has discovered a tremendous amount about the role emotions play in our lives. Researchers have found that even more than IQ, your emotional awareness and abilities to handle feelings will determine your success and happiness in all walks of life, including family relationships."
--From Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child

McCown et al: "Experiencing one's self in a conscious manner--that is, gaining self-knowledge--is an integral part of learning."
--From Self-Science: The Emotional Intelligence Curriculum

Salovey, Mayer, Goldman, Turvey, and Palfai: "People in good moods are better at inductive reasoning and creative problem solving."
--From Emotion, Disclosure, and Health, 1995

John D. Mayer: "An emotion occurs when there are certain biological, certain experiential, and certain cognitive states which all occur simultaneously."
--From EQ Today, Spring 1999

Mayer & Salovey: "People high in emotional intelligence are expected to progress more quickly through the abilities designated and to master more of them."
--From “What is Emotional Intelligence” in Emotional Development and Emotional Intelligence: Educational Implications, by Peter Salovey and David Sluyter. 1997 Education..a journey not a race
-unknown

Good schools, like good societies and good families, celebrate and cherish diversity.
-- Deborah Meier

Every student can learn, just not on the same day, or the same way.
-- George Evans

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
-- Doris Lessing

What is important is to keep learning, to enjoy challenge, and to tolerate ambiguity. In the end there are no certain answers.
-- Martina Horner

Do not train children to learning by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each. -- Plato

As a teacher I feel I have a moral obligation to help the children in my classroom grow toward becoming full human beings and to feel successful. Teaching cognitive skills is not enough...
-- Jean Medick

Learning to teach is a bigger job than universities, schools, experience, or personal disposition alone can accomplish.
-- Sharon Feiman-Nemser

In a completely rational society, the best of us would aspire to be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have.
-- Lee Iacocca

Don't set your wit against a child.
-- Jonathan Swift

It must be remembered that the purpose of education is not to fill the minds of students with facts... it is to teach them to think, if that is possible, and always to think for themselves.
-- Robert Hutchins

The secret of teaching is to appear to have known all your life what you learned this afternoon.
-- Anonymous

They may forget what you said but they will never forget how you made them feel.
-- Anonymous

The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves.
-- Joseph Campbell

I hear, and I forget. I see, and I remember. I do, and I understand.
-- Chinese Proverb

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.
-- Mark Twain

Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire.
-- W. B. Yeats

The objective of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.
-- Robert Maynard Hutchins

There is a brilliant child locked inside every student.
-- Marva Collins

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
-- Henry B. Adams

Information cannot replace education.
-- Earl Kiole

We all need someone who inspires us to do better than we know how.
-- Anonymous

When will the public cease to insult the teacher's calling with empty flattery? When will men who would never for a moment encourage their own sons to enter the work of the public schools cease to tell us that education is the greatest and noblest of all human callings?
-- William C. Bagley

The kids in our classroom are infinitely more significant than the subject matter we teach.
-- Meladee McCarty

Teaching is not a profession; it's a passion.
-- Unknown

Your heart is slightly bigger than the average human heart, but that's because you're a teacher.
-- Aaron Bacall

Aim for success, not perfection. Never give up your right to be wrong, because then you will lose the ability to learn new things and move forward with your life. Remember that fear always lurks behind perfectionism.
-- David M. Burns

A professor can never better distinguish himself in his work than by encouraging a clever pupil, for the true discoverers are among them, as comets amongst the stars.
-- Linnaeus

A teacher effects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
-- Henry Adams

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
-- Mark Twain

It is books that are the key to the wide world; if you can't do anything else, read all that you can.
-- Jane Hamilton

An idea can turn to dust or magic, depending on the talent that rubs against it.
-- Bill Bernbach

Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
-- Aristotle

It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.
-- Alec Bourne

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
-- Aristotle

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten
-- B. F. Skinner

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.
-- Gail Godwin