Importance of Emotional Intelligence

This week’s article summary is What You Learned in Preschool is Crucial at Work.

The article builds on what we discussed at Wednesday’s meeting: the importance of emotional intelligence in personal and professional success, in particular cooperation, empathy, flexibility, dependability, and perseverance.

Clearly the article’s intended audience is school’s that focus exclusively on cognitive achievement. 

It’s not surprising that schools that are measured on their students’ standardized test scores devote the lion share of their school day to activities that prepare students for those tests. 

Fortunately, Trinity has always been committed to the development of the whole child—yes, cognitive development but also social-emotional, physical, aesthetic, character, etc. 

This article points out that while technology is replacing a lot of manual skills, it most likely will never be able to replace skills like nuanced decision making, and, as such, emotional intelligence today is more crucial in the workplace than ever before—and is something more schools need to give more time to.

Joe

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 For all the jobs that machines can now do — whether performing surgery, driving cars or serving food — they still lack one distinctly human trait. They have no social skills.

Skills like cooperation, empathy, and flexibility have become increasingly vital in modern-day work. Occupations that require strong social skills have grown much more than others since 1980. And the only occupations that have shown consistent wage growth since 2000 require both cognitive and social skills.

To prepare students for the change in the way we work, the skills that schools teach may need to change. Social skills are rarely emphasized in traditional education.

Machines are automating a whole bunch of these things, so having the softer skills, knowing the human touch and how to complement technology, is critical, and our education system is not set up for that.

Preschool classrooms look a lot like the modern work world. Children move from art projects to science experiments to the playground in small groups, and their most important skills are sharing and negotiating with others. But that soon ends, replaced by lecture-style teaching of hard skills, with less peer interaction.

James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, did groundbreaking work concluding that non-cognitive skills like character, dependability and perseverance are just as—if not more--important as cognitive achievement. They can be taught, he said, yet American schools don’t necessarily do so.

These conclusions have been put into practice outside academia. Google researchers, for example, studied the company’s employees to determine what made the best manager. They assumed it would be technical expertise. Instead, it was people who made time for one-on-one meetings, helped employees work through problems and took an interest in their lives.

These conclusions do not mean traditional education has become unnecessary. In fact, traditional school subjects are probably more necessary than ever to compete in the labor market. But some schools are experimenting with how to add social skills to the curriculum.

At many business and medical schools, students are assigned to small groups to complete their work. 

So-called flipped classrooms assign video lectures before class and reserve class for discussion or group work. The idea is that traditional lectures involve too little interaction and can be done just as well online.

Another way to teach these skills is through group activities like sports, band or drama. Students learn important workplace skills: trusting one another, bringing out one another’s strengths and being coachable.

Maybe high schools and colleges should evaluate students the way preschools do — whether they “play well with others.”