Dispositions and Emotional Intelligence

 

This month's Educational Leadership magazine has a series of articles on the need to be aware of the emotional state of the students in any classroom.  It profiles things like emotional intelligence, dispositions and so forth.  In looking over the titles of the articles it occurred to me that we need to think about these issues in relation to the programs of teacher education.  I know that the Ontario College of Teachers, in its new Enhanced Teacher Education Program, mandates that teachers in the province need to include in their programs things that help students feel good about themselves. New teachers are being taught about diversity, mental health, and so forth.  However, the question must be asked as to how we attend to this same issue with the teachers as THEY are being prepared to enter classrooms of their own. Teacher Educators make the assumption that candidates for certification are already at a place where they want their future students to be and that is a huge assumption.  As the chair of a department of Teacher Education, I had to deal with far too many students who finished the program eventually but had major issues of mental health and a paucity of positive dispositions to teach. We all can admit that we had teachers who were really not empathetic or student oriented.  When we talk about excellence in teacher education, we have to some how acknowledge that dispositions to teach have to be overtly talked about and taught and we have to figure out a way to either help students who are struggling emotionally so that they are then ready to take on students themselves or to counsel them out of the program.  If you think about talk therapy, or self-help groups, they are most often lead by people who understand or appreciate the flawed journeys of the people in their groups.  They understand because they have been there. Too often teachers are not emotionally ready to deal with a classroom full of students who have the same mental health issues that their teachers do. If we really aspire to excellence in teacher education, we have to include work on the dispositional component of education overtly, not just in passing. The future mental health of our students depend upon that.