Emotional education, or how to recognise and manage our emotions

In our fast-paced daily lives, we face a number of demands and responsibilities and have to adapt to constantly changing environments. In this context, interior balance and well-being are essential.

What is the emotional education?

We must be familiar with our own emotions, know how to manage them and react accordingly. Knowing who we are and what we feel, as well as being patient, confident, empathetic and respectful towards those around us, are essential aspects of a happy and fulfilling life.

The way we react to the different stimuli and situations we face in life originates in the emotions that we feel. This is why it is so important to learn how to manage our emotions and how we interpret the world around us. Faced with a situation that we perceive as threatening, our reaction tends to be automatic; we impulsively react to the stimulus without thinking. Our organism is uncapable of choosing which emotions we feel, but we can decide what we do with these emotions.

In education, we should aim to equip students with the tools and skills they need to recognise, understand and manage their own and others’ emotions. As schools are a place of learning and children spend much of their time here, they are the perfect place to develop these skills.

What is emotional education and its importance?

Centres from the Best Schools in Spain (BSS) network are committed to providing a comprehensive education that covers academic, cognitive and intellectual aspects, but also focuses on emotional development and certain values such as respect and tolerance towards others. The key to the latter lies in the degree of emotional responsibility that exists between students, a determining factor to progressively reduce rates of violence among teenagers.

What’s more, emotional intelligence is an essential aspect of self-control and plays an important role in the development of social skills that allow us to adapt to changes. It is also linked to self-confidence and self-assurance, emotional control and self-motivation to reach our goals.

We must constantly and continually work on these skills during all stages of education and throughout life in general. Therefore, emotional education must be established as a cross-curricular element in education.

What’s more, discovering how emotions influence reasoning, memory, decision-making and our attitude towards learning is part of the learning process. If we manage our emotions in a negative way, we react impulsively and this can be frustrating, cause rejection or make us throw in the towel. However, if we learn how to manage our emotions, they can help us learn better by stimulating brain activity.

When emotions are involved, our brain consolidates what we have learnt better.

At centres from the Best Schools in Spain network, students learn how to manage their emotions in a fun and motivating way. Games and stories are teachers’ favourite tools for developing emotional intelligence in the classroom. 

But …

In short, emotional education covers a wide range of tools, abilities and skills that we must work on to improve our own well-being and that of those around us. 

These are the seven main objectives of emotional education at BSS schools: