Development of the Teacher Posted on April 10, 2008 Address the social-emotional skills of educators, says Marc Brackett (bio), and you will see better results with your curriculum.

One teacher I was working with a few years ago, our curriculum is literacy-based. So emotion terms, they get introduced to children through these steps. So there are words like addiction that we want adolescents to understand. What is addiction? Why does it matter?

So they just arbitrarily decided to go into our word list and cross out the word that they just didn’t want to do. So one teacher crossed out like half the words. She’s like, “I’m not doing that. I’m not doing that.” And I said, “I don’t think that's, that’s not gonna work.”

And she’s like, “I can’t talk about addiction. My father was an alcoholic. And I’m just not comfortable with it.” So that was just one teacher who just changed my whole way of thinking about training. I realized that we’re all coming to the table with different life experiences that are going to have an impact on the way we impart information.

And that was when I decided that I had to develop a program specifically for teachers themselves. So that was when we developed our emotionally intelligent teacher program so that we had a full training on:

We know we care about you. This is about you, teachers. Not about how you teach. But about you and your stress and giving you strategies to be more effective in the classroom. And to not ruminate, and to just feel more comfortable, and to understand your students more, and understand yourself more.

And we found that was what we had to do in order to get our curriculum for students to work better. So development of the teacher, and then we didn’t get that kind of feedback, saying — because then they realized, "Wow, I really have to, why would I want my student to have the same sort of hang-ups I have about addiction? I can actually talk about this. It’s not that taboo of a topic. And I’ll be comfortable with it now. And now I can teach it."

So when we originally went to do our work, we only trained the teachers how to do the programs. Now we take a step back, and we train the teachers themselves. Then we train them how to do the curriculum. And we found that level, that sort of way of working in makes a big difference.

« Back to Article