Abstract
In recent decades, several authors have warned of the need to equip students with skills that include critical thinking, creativity, and emotional management. Emotions can facilitate or impede children’s academic engagement, commitment, and ultimate school success since relationships and emotional processes affect how and what we learn. Teachers are the main emotional leaders of their students, and the foundation for promoting emotional balance within their groups is their ability to recognize, understand, and manage their emotions. The SEL approach defends that, as with academic skills, the development of social and emotional skills must be accomplished through explicit instruction. In the academic year 2014/2015, three schools in the Portuguese region of the Alentejo began an innovative four-year project to promote change in learning. The main goal was to improve learning by promoting the acquisition of basic knowledge within the formal curriculum and to stimulate the development of analytical and practical reasoning skills, resilience and responsibility, as well as technological, emotional, social and creative skills. To this end, the research team created two programs to be developed in primary school, the Emotional Literacy Program (ELP) and the Creative Thinking Development Program (Flow) as well as a training program for teachers, Mediators for Well- Being Program. This article details a study analyzing the perceptions of primary school teachers who participated in the project. Data were collected by interviews and teachers’ reflections were analyzed. Content analysis was chosen as the analytical technique as it is appropriate for treating qualitative data. The results show very positive impacts on the professional and personal development of teachers. Teachers reported improvements in student behavior, in the relationships between them and in the classroom environment. They further emphasized the need for teachers to receive more training in emotional education in their academic and in service education.
Highlights
It would be hard, we would go so far as to say almost impossible, to find a text on key skills for the twenty-first century that fails to mention the rapid advance of science and technology, the swift rate of social change, and the unpredictability that the future holds
Seven questions related to the aspects of socioemotional and creative skills (CSEC) guided interviews with the seven PMACEAG-XXI teacher participants
401 recording units were coded, distributed among the 28 subcategories which fell into the four categories already mentioned
Summary
We would go so far as to say almost impossible, to find a text on key skills for the twenty-first century that fails to mention the rapid advance of science and technology, the swift rate of social change, and the unpredictability that the future holds. The author states: schooling today needs to be much more about ways of thinking (involving creativity, critical thinking, problem solving and judgement), ways of working (including communication and collaboration), tools for working (including the capacity to recognize and exploit the potential of new technologies) and about the capacity to live in a multi-faceted world as active and responsible citizens Sousa-Pereira and Leite (2019) posit that the Student Profile on Leaving Compulsory Schooling will lead to changes in pedagogical practices that will “promote critical thinking, autonomy, solidarity and attention to others, the ability to make decisions, and to live in a pluralistic and ever-changing society” Ten categories of skills are presented that must be developed throughout all academic disciplines, namely: languages and reading; information and communication; reasoning and problem solving; critical and creative thinking; interpersonal relationships; personal development and autonomy; well-being, health and the environment; aesthetic and artistic sensibility; scientific, technical and technological knowledge; and awareness and mastery of the body. Sousa-Pereira and Leite (2019) posit that the Student Profile on Leaving Compulsory Schooling will lead to changes in pedagogical practices that will “promote critical thinking, autonomy, solidarity and attention to others, the ability to make decisions, and to live in a pluralistic and ever-changing society” (p. 120)
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