How Teachers’ Emotional Intelligence Impacts the Classroom

From 1967 to 1973, I was a teacher in the South Bronx, responsible for the education of children in the fourth and fifth grades (including one year as acting assistant principal, for grades 1-6). Although not my lifelong goal, I had taken an emergency exam in early October, and the following Monday I greeted my class of 42 students (without an aide)! Even though I had majored in psychology, and believed I had a high degree of emotional intelligence, I was not fully prepared for that day. During this time, I was enrolled in a graduate program to obtain my master's degree in educational psychology.

Emotional education integrated into the curriculum

Throughout those years I emphasized helping children develop skills in emotional awareness and regulation. I firmly believed that this was essential for both their motivation and their capacity to learn. I did not do so with a formal curriculum. Rather I integrated such education in the context of reading, social studies, history, and other areas, when relevant. Additionally, I became mindful to engage them with my skills in emotional intelligence. For example, I often asked the students to infer how characters were feeling when reading. Additionally, I asked them to identify what they might have felt in a similar situation. In this manner, I helped them to identify feeling words and foster empathy–skills that have been found to promote emotional resilience and decreased emotional reactivity.

Additionally, as the reading books were dated and not relevant to the socio-economic realities of the children, I often provided students a handheld tape recorder to record stories about themselves. I transcribed these and made copies for the class to read, helping to make their reading more relevant and motivate their interest in reading.

Teacher in classroom

Source: 123rf Stock Photo / Stockbroker

Emotional education through interaction

I quickly learned about the need to validate a child’s feelings in our interactions. For example, upon returning to our homeroom, following a presentation by several policemen as part of an outreach program, I directed the class to write a composition describing their attitudes or experiences with police. I had barely finished my instruction when one child, with his face red and contorted with disdain, yelled out, “I’m not going to write any composition about police. I hate the police.”

I responded in a calm tone, “Fine. Then write examples of what you have experienced that make you hate them.” My response caught him off guard. While he may have expected a war of words about why he shouldn’t feel that way, he looked at me with a big smile on his face and inquired, “Really? I can?”

I answered that if that was truly how he felt, that was what he should write about. The assignment was a writing exercise intended to explore his honest feeling. Consequently, he wrote the longest composition he had ever written. In it he described observing police in his community assaulting drunken individuals and cursing at others.

I praised his writing. After he read his composition out loud, I led the group in a discussion, first eliciting from them ways in which they viewed police as helpful. If I had focused only on teaching that child to respect police, I would be denigrating his feelings and challenging that student’s reality–and subsequently contributing to conflict and tension.

The impact of low emotional intelligence in teachers

Teachers with greater emotional intelligence evidence greater management of discipline in the classroom (Valente, Monteiro & Lourenco, 2019). By contrast, low emotional intelligence leaves teachers more prone to experience tension in the classroom, discomfort that impacts the general milieu of the room and impacts every interaction with their children. Additionally, teachers with low emotional intelligence obtained higher scores in emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, anxiety, depression, and stress, and lower scores in personal accomplishment (Martinez-Monteagudo, Ingles, Granados, 2019).

Emotional intelligence provides teacher flexibility in responding to the emotional challenges of children and teens (Valente, Veiga-Branco, Rebelo, 2020). It supports greater understanding of a child’s emotional state of mind, thus fostering an increased capacity for empathy. It helps to foster calm rather than emotional tension, and a degree of equanimity that is contagious in the classroom and essential for a self-regulating learning environment. In effect, teachers with higher emotional intelligence practice more integrating and compromising strategies for conflict management (Valente and Laurenco, 2020). Additionally, such teachers enhance the emotional intelligence of their children by modeling such behavior.

The need for enhancing emotional intelligence in teachers

Through training in emotional intelligence, teachers can enhance their capacity for managing difficult emotions that might arise in their interactions with students, parents, and others—and support effective education of their children. The need for emotional education is further supported by recent research indicating that teachers are increasingly having to respond to physical aggression and other threats in the classroom (McMahon, Worrell, & Reddy, et. al., 2024).

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Such skills allow a teacher to be more fully present with their emotions, those of the student, and in their interactions. This is essential for establishing a safe arena for learning. Enhancing emotional intelligence should be a requirement for all teachers.