Without a good command of a language, you cannot be a course instructor. Without good management skills, you cannot be the boss. This is clear 🙂 But there’s much more than that. Professional successes come easily to some teachers but are much harder to achieve for others. Some are so much sought-after by employers and course participants while others are not. Why? How does that happen? What can we do ourselves to fall into the former category? We all keep asking ourselves those questions, although some only inwardly 🙂 Therefore we have tried to look for answers to them.
Now we would like to ask how many of you know the notion of emotional intelligence. Do you what this term denotes? How can it be useful in daily life, both professional and private one? Although I know that I will not obtain an answer, I encourage all of you to answer the question for yourselves. And now let’s get to business.
A human being and his/her talents have fascinated the mankind for a long time. The history of the world is written through willingness to understand the world around us. It is also quote normal to aim at understanding ourselves better. This is why Intelligence Quotient (so-called IQ) tests were created, mainly to study the ability to think logically and draw conclusions. However with time it turned out that studying IQ does not suffice to determine whether a given person will be successful, e.g. in professional life. Researchers proved that there are many type of intelligence related to various skills, not just the one enabling solutions of logical puzzles.
One of them is emotional intelligence (so-called EQ [Emotional Quotient] or EI [Emotional Intelligence]), i.e. the ability to identify emotional states – both of our own and those of other persons. It is also the ability to use own emotions in social situations and to cope with emotional states of other people. Emotional intelligence also denotes empathy, i.e. understanding the emotion of other people. So much for the theory. And what is the practice like? Do you know why emotional intelligence is important? A person with high IQ but low EQ is likely to cope very poorly in professional life. This is attributable to the fact that their career development is blocked by difficulty in building relations with people. They have the talent, knowledge and skills, but are unable to communicate properly, to get on together with a team or with course participants. As a result whatever they do is countered with resistance, refusal – in a nutshell, with an effect exactly opposite to the intended one. Extreme cases of such people are e.g. psychopathic serial killers. Do you remember the Hannibal Lecter character of the „Silence of the lambs”? This is an example of a highly intelligent and well-educated person who is unable to recognise emotions and unable to empathise with the feelings of other people. In the case of the said character, the correlation between those two intelligence types is null.
Are you wondering what is the use of emotional intelligence for a language course instructor? You can say that students do not have to like the teacher. They are just supposed to learn the language. Therefore a teacher must first of all know the language well and be a good educator. But while the technical aspect is very important, it is worthwhile remembering that teaching is not just books, exercises and tests, but it also involves human relations. Student will not want to learn from someone whom that simply don’t like.
The issue of “being likable” in a language school is not a straightforward one. We don’t want the course instructor to be joking throughout the entire class, trying to please the students at all cost. So how to do that? Emotional intelligence to the rescue. Owing to the right skills, besides the ability to perform methodical classes, the course instructor tries to perceive and recognise the emotions of course participants, understand them and respond adequately. A good course instructor respects his/her students and their attitude expresses such respect. He/she pays attention to the students, interacts with them, tries to help overcome difficulties in learning. Well, nobody’s perfect. A person with high EQ knows this perfectly. He/she recognises when they perform poorly are even badly. They are able to admit this to themselves but also to apologise to their course participants because they know that such gesture is a sign of strength, and not of weakness, as is sometimes assumed.
It doesn’t make any sense to pretend that this is easy. Emotional intelligence requires a lot of work of us. It happens sometimes that a course instructor is not very fond of his/her students. Not liking a few students is quite natural. Well! You can even detest the entire group. The trick is that a person with high EQ understands where his/her antipathy comes from, is able to accept it and continue to focus effectively on the entrusted educational mission. Such a person understands that apprentices need a master, who is a role model for them and who believes in them. Nothing positive can follow from unconstructive criticism, which only results in proverbial “clipping of the wings”, weakening of motivation and contributes to growing antipathy.
Here I can recommend a statement heard during a TED conference, a story of Rita Pierson – an inspirational teacher with 40 years of experience:
In this regard, emotional intelligence supports the work of a course instructor, helps in initiation of relations and motivation for learning. It is very important how knowledge is transmitted. If teaching is accompanied by passion and commitment and assumes the form of an interesting story, this arouses emotions in students, and those are emotions that help remember facts.
Do you want to see masters in telling involving stories? Go to see a concert of a rock star and see how he/she “controls” the crowd”. Here you can watch an absolute master, who does very simple things, but owing to exceptional passion he controls the crowd of almost 100 thousand people:
The best thing is that while IQ is more or less a permanent value, it is possible and worthwhile working on emotional intelligence. We can guarantee that positive effects of such development are tangible.
So far we have focused mainly on presentation of the topic from the course instructor’s perspective, but the described mechanism concerns also other situations. A school manager or director will also benefit from enhancing of their EQ skills. According to business experts, it is the emotional intelligence that distinguishes outstanding CEOs from average ones by transforming the best ones into genuine leaders.
The key to success is listening to, and understanding – the students, inferiors, representatives of competition. Owing to careful listening and observations you will be able to identify the directions of changes in business, and owing to the ability to draw conclusions you will improve the effectiveness of the pursued business. Even Steve Jobs, who made decisions on his own, watched very carefully the development directions of related industries, e.g. of portable memory, or car design, and transposed conclusions onto his own products.
To be able to listen well, you have to be open to various opinions and sometimes to different perspectives – of teachers of various age groups, those teaching various languages, students at various learning levels, but also of a taxi driver or an MD you know. Only this way you can learn the full spectrum of opinions, and you will not become locked within a closed circle of the discussion of the methodologists of English language teaching for adults. And don’t be afraid to reject solutions that have worked for years – someday those solutions will become history, so you must be ready for changes.
To conclude with we would like you to check on your own what your emotional intelligence is like. You can complete a simple and quick test giving you a picture of how much self-development is still ahead of you. The test was created by Daniel Goleman, one of the authors of the emotional intelligence concept. You can find it at the following link: EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE TEST.
We encourage you to share the results and reflections about the obtained results in the comments 🙂