Emotional Management Of Teachers

We can all get a clear idea of ​​the emotional management of teachers, as we have certainly seen a corresponding deficiency before: teachers who scold their students, who lack empathy, who punish them for actually saying something should “When you need help, I’ll be there,” and sometimes even go so far as to focus only on the students’ weaknesses.

This type of attitude is the result of an inability to regulate one’s emotions. This is something that we are not taught, either at home or at school – regardless of what profession we pursue. Hence, it seems almost impossible to achieve good emotional management. Generally, while great importance is attached to such concepts, very little is done to convey them and to pass them on to the people who should use them.

Let us put ourselves in the place of the teachers

The aim of this article is not to blame the teachers: most of them do their best in what they can and what they know. In many cases, in addition to the teachers’ lack of emotional management, there is also the fear of having to face social challenges in relation to dealing with students who have problems at home, with parents who do not come to the speaking days at school , but at the same time extremely demanding and always looking for explanations and excuses when their children come home with bad grades.

The truth is that problems like bullying in schools keep increasing. But who prepares a teacher for these violent situations? Few or no teachers have dealt intensively with the emotional management of such conflicts. Yet the vast majority of teachers have already experienced this.

In any case, the emotional control of a group begins with regulating one’s own emotions. And teachers are not machines that enter the classroom and leave their emotions at the door. They teach with their own dreams, but also with their own concerns. On the other hand, many pedagogy students drop out precisely because they exhaust their illusions or beliefs too much.

The influence of the teacher on his students is so great that they change when they change too. Hence, good emotional management by teachers has very positive effects on students.

“Our teachers influence us forever and no one can say where their influence really ends.”

Henry Brooks Adams

Basic skills for healthy emotional management of teachers

There are five basic emotional management skills that are particularly important, but not limited to, teachers. The scheme in which we would like to present them comes from Peter Salovey, who organized them as we present them below:

• Self-Awareness:  Knowing our own emotions and their relationship to our thoughts and actions can help us become more aware of ourselves and improve.
• Emotional control:  This allows us to reduce the impulsiveness that can lead us to make bad decisions in a stressful situation.
• The ability to motivate others:  It helps us to know how to motivate ourselves, and this knowledge also enables us to motivate others, for example our students.

• Empathy: Empathy makes it easier to empathize with the students, to understand them better and to reach them. Because that one student who refuses to open his book in class may have parents who are separating and don’t care about him.
• Social and leadership skills:  These enable effective interaction with students without losing our authority.

“Students are like fresh cement: everything that falls on them leaves a trail.”

Haim Ginott

A protective factor against teacher stress

Effective emotional management gives teachers more resources to better cope with certain stressful situations in which their actions may promote or hinder student learning and wellbeing. It also enables them to face the challenges and difficulties that a conflicting class, a large number of students or the lack of motivation to learn from some students bring with it. Furthermore, disorders such as depression and anxiety can be avoided in this way.

Being a teacher is not easy; We have all experienced this ourselves. Full classes, unmotivated students and the constant burden of having to support everyone in the best possible way. However, we must not forget that many years ago we sat behind those desks ourselves and had our own problems, convinced that no one understood us. How good it would have been for us back then if, instead of receiving condescending looks from those teachers to whom we had not paid any attention, they had come to us after the lesson and had told us with just one sentence that he wasn’t has forgotten that feeling he himself felt not so long ago when he himself was sitting in one of these chairs.