Emotional and social development are key topics that nowadays, we can encounter in all sectors of our personal and professional lives. “Emotional competence” is defined as the functional capacity wherein a human can reach their goals after an emotion-eliciting encounter (The Development of Emotional Competence.Carolyn Saarni. The Guilford Press, NYC,  1999). Dr. Saarni defined emotion as a building block of self-efficacy. She described the use of emotions as a set of achieved skills which then lead to the development of emotional competence. Attainment of the skills within emotional competence is crucial to self-efficacy.

This training will analyze the different perspectives on the main topic of “emotional competence” and lists emotional competence skills like the 8 defined by Dr Saarni and more recent ones:

Awareness of one’s own emotions
Ability to discern and understand other’s emotions
Ability to use the vocabulary of emotion and expression
Capacity for empathy involvement
Ability to differentiate subjective emotional experience from external emotion expression
Adaptive coping with aversive emotions and distressing circumstances
Awareness of emotional communication within relationships
Capacity for emotional self-efficacy.
Made as a training for professionals, teachers and educators. Usually our training on emotional competences starts from basic concepts which are quite obvious like “Emotional competence describes the ability a person has to express his or her own emotions with complete freedom.” But later explore more complex concepts “it is derived from emotional intelligence, which is the ability to identify emotions. Competence is the level of skill with which someone interacts constructively with other people”, developing a deeper common understanding focused on staff development. Educators train themselves in order to improve their personal and professional competencies and address their learning to “learners”.

Socio-emotional competence

Another individual aspect of emotional competence is social competence, which refers to empathy towards others. It encompasses the skills we need to be successful in a work atmosphere and in relationships. It is very important to use effective communication and to know how to manage conflicts.

Teacher education, emotional competencies and development education: why it matters and how to teach it.
Teaching young people skills such as active listening, self-awareness and empathy can equip them to succeed both academically and socially.

On one end this training helps educators discuss and learn more on emotions, touching most of the psychological literature; On the other end, it fosters the understanding of the need for a common teaching method based on the development of “emotional competencies” skills in learners/students. While Education has perhaps been slow to recognise the importance of such emotional capacities, recent work has  sought  to  address this  lacuna.    Perhaps  the  best-known  representation  of  this  trend  is  the work  on  Multiple  Intelligences  (Gardner  1983;  1993)  and  on  Emotional Intelligence  (Goleman,  1996;  Mayer  et  al.  2000,  Bar-On,  2002).  

In educating nowadays – in a wider European perspective – we know the EU guidelines on the new “Key competences for the lifelong learning” (Recommendation May 2018) and other guidelines based showing the need to develop other key aspects like:

Active listening,
Vocabulary for feelings, 
Developing self-awareness, 
Showing empathy being ‘with’ others, 
Managing emotions and self-regulation.
This training will help educators improve their teaching method, by reflecting and increasing their knowledge on the main topics, widening perspectives and broadening their work to new cooperations with colleagues and international educators.

Link:

https://associazionejump.it/course/emotional-competences/