Emotional Intelligence- The Skills Our Students Deserve | Ronen Habib | TEDxGunnHighSchool

when I was a senior school I applied to serve all of them except for my safety school which was UC Santa Cruz I was devastated by that and to make matters worse I have a terrible sense of direction now I'm not sure if you're familiar with the UC Santa Cruz campus but if not I want you to imagine a huge forest with a bunch of classes stuck in different parts of it as a joke my high school friends actually gave me a watch with a compass on it so I get from place to pay you know they were right I needed a compass that year but not one that would get me from class to class one that would help me find my way to live a more happy and more fulfilled life you see when I was a freshman at UC Santa Cruz I was lost and unhappy I was taking courses in computer science that I hated because I was told major in computer science you get a good job you'll make a lot of money and you'll be rich and happy I was following this moto suffer now so you can be happy later and most importantly don't question it but my girlfriend at the time who's not my wife she did question it and she asked me why why are you taking these courses and I was like what do you mean I have to take these courses which is like no actually you don't have to take these courses you can choose to drop these courses in major in something you enjoy learning about and to me this was a moment because you see up until that point I never asked myself what I enjoyed learning about to me that question seemed indulgent luckily she pushed me to take a class called personal empowerment taught by Professor Frank Andrews and Frank taught me that paying attention to what makes me feel alive what makes me feel happier is not wrong and it's not a luxury it's actually critical to my happiness and also to my success most importantly Frank taught me that paying attention to my emotions and using this information to make decisions in my life was the compass that I needed to live a more fulfilled and happier life I thought getting into UC Santa Cruz was the worst thing ever he turned out to be the best because after that class I started to live or more fulfilled and happier life I actually started to do things that I enjoyed more that I was drawn to and I decided to become a teacher now fast forward about 10 years I find myself teaching AP economics to seventeen and eighteen year old kids who are really smart really hardworking and a lot of whom are actually also really detached from their emotions all of them are really stressed and some of whom lack social interpersonal skills now here's the thing I don't teach a discipline I teach people and I wanted my students to have the skills that so fundamentally changed me these skills that amount to our Daniel Goleman calls emotional intelligence and he defines emotional intelligence is the ability to monitor unknowns and other people's emotions to label these emotions appropriately and to use emotional information to guide our own thinking and ultimately our behavior it includes components such as these self-awareness social skills empathy self-regulation motivation take a look at these from one moment if you haven't used at least one of these in the last 24 hours we really need to talk because we use these things all the time 10 minutes ago when I was backstage I looked like this because it's scary to speak in front of a thousand people and be recorded right I had this negative self-talk telling me all no one's going to want to listen to this you're going to make a fool out of yourself no one cares about this right so I had to take a deep breath and remind myself why this is important to me try to shift my focus as much as I can away from that voice and I decided to visualize something that makes me feel calm and centered that puts me in the present moment and for me it's the incredibly cute pictures of my kids yeah yeah thank you I appreciate that ha and so they helped me realize they help you remember like why this message is so important so this is my way right of self-regulating to do this but look these skills come in handy in so many different ways if you had have you ever procrastinate because he didn't want to do something right motivation comes into play have you ever been in conflict with someone what skills do we need in conflict we need to notice when we're triggered when we're flooded we need to be able to active listen to the other person we need to be able to empathize with their emotions and their feelings we need to be able to assert ourself in a non blame full way these are all skills and by the way these are skills that companies such as these highly highly value okay in education teachers around the world I ask ourselves do we provide 21st century skills to our students but this question is never answered in the world of Education all the conference's I go to it's okay I like floats there and I'm curious I want to know and so I ended up going to a conference where top HR executives from these companies listed the skills that they want people to possess before they work for them and here they are and this is in order of importance they want people who can work well with others that's hard to do who can creatively solve problems they want people who have base not of subject matter they want people who can persevere through adversity and they want people who can be ruthlessly intentional with their time they also said that it's very very difficult to find people who possess these skills and these are rooted in emotional intelligence very difficult to find people who have these skills and so let me paint this picture to you right now okay these companies are offering emotional intelligence courses like at Google they offer a course called search inside yourself okay and they're offering these courses because our educational system is failing to provide these courses that offer the skip the private sector so dearly wants but what if we did offer these skills in our educate like what if we offer these courses in schools imagine the benefit to our society well beyond the workforce imagine the benefit to our society like for marriages and child-rearing if we had emotionally intelligent parents who could attuned to their kids needs we're creating motion coach their kids imagine the benefit to our nation if we had lawmakers who actually knew how to self-regulate and how to and be empathic and an active listen and the thing that's crazy to me is that these skills are completely trainable you know we assume that second graders don't know how to multiply how to divide and how to read and that's why we teach it to them as we should why do we assume that second graders know how to self-regulate or self-managed or even be empathic you see schools across the nations have embraced something called a common core standards and with common core you know if you go to the website there's actually a section in the common core standard that says what is not covered by the standards okay and in that section there is a line that says social emotional and physical development are not covered in the standards which can only make sense if you live alone in a cave so why are we not offer while they not in the common core maybe the research is in robust enough well it turns out that Gorman writes in his book that there was a meta-analysis of 668 schools that implemented SEL program social and emotional learning programs or Weisberg at the University of Illinois found that schools who do implement SEL programs see up to 50% of children improving achievement scores 38% improving GPAs suspensions dropping by 44% and kids showing 63% significantly more positive behavior these results are remarkable teacher kids are learning more and schools are safer and they're remarkable to the point that the state of Illinois decided to implement SEL standards so in Illinois every student is learn is taught to recognize and accurately label their emotions and to identify non-verbal clues as to how someone else feels amongst many many other things what happens in the other states well students in the other states spend about 1,700 minutes or so in per week in the classroom instructional minutes and if you want to ask a student explicitly how many minutes are you trained in emotional intelligence they'll tell you the answer is either 0 or really really close to it so I decided to take a leap of faith and I wanted to start to incorporate emotional intelligence lessons into my econ class and I wanted to start with something called mindfulness because a mindfulness practice allows you to pay attention to your thought patterns and since what we're thinking about affects what we're feeling it was a natural place to start so I made a decision that my students are going to meditate in the beginning of class first three to five minutes my students are going to meditate and as soon as that thought came into my mind I look like this again and here's why that negative self talking back and said Ronnie you're crazy your students are going to hate this number one number two their parents are going to think you're initiating them into a cold okay ah and number three you're gonna lose instructional minutes so I had to take a deep breath again right and remind myself why this was important to me and I actually sought social support I went to my friends and dear colleagues and supportive colleagues in north encouraging me to do this and the next day my students meditated for five minutes at the beginning of class and we did it for the rest of the semester and here's why students loved it and they loved it because it was the only time in their really really hectic day and stressful day that they could feel at peace they could have five moments of feeling centered and I actually ended up gaining instructional minutes because with less time in the classroom I was able to cover more material because the students were present or here now the most important thing I think out of all this is that my students begin to notice their mental chatter what was going on in their head the comments the questions that they asked themselves this is incredibly important because when students don't do well in school they have a tendency to beat themselves up and I know this because I read their journals and we have one-on-one discussions and in my classroom we have discussions okay and I want to just give you a sense as to why paying attention to our questions is so critical in the comments in our head and to do that I'm going to take you through activity that I do in class and that professor tal ben-shahar used to do at a class at Harvard okay I'm going to show you a picture and you have twenty seconds and the question is how many geometrical shapes can you see do the best you can three seconds five more seconds okay so any answers real quick yes 75043 okay you know what here's the thing this is a very hard question I actually don't know the answer to it I'm sorry but I have another question for you how many kids were on the bus yeah so I mean you guys are like we're all on auto what kid what bus right so I think I was like what bus you're talking about yeah all right let me let me go back a quick okay there are five students on the bus and here's the bus now 2.2 my point though here's the thing when I asked you to pay attention to geometrical shapes your brain did a very normal thing it focused on one thing and filtered everything else out questions lead to focus which leads to reality when our students ask themselves why am I so stupid why is everybody else smarter than me why can't I never do this their questions lead them to focus which leads them to one reality which completely filters away another reality of how can I improve when can I see my teacher to work this out just like you didn't see the students on the bus these questions are not a sope attention training exercises allow our students to notice what types of questions they're asking themselves and the amazing thing about this is that I notice my students choosing to not beat themselves up and to actually say okay like I'm going to stop that and I'm going to you know focus on how to improve so I wanted to give more of that to my students but I was limited with time because I was teaching AP econ so I created a new course called positive psychology which is an emotional intelligence course and I was hoping that 25 students will sign up because it's an elective course 107 students signed up and the reason is because people care about this stuff people want to know how to become more emotionally intelligent and happier I want to share with you some some quotes some of my students messages that they brought the students who took the class so I had a student really worried about a science test and what she said was basically on my way to class I noticed my anxiety and I was able to catch my negative voice telling me that I'm so stupid and I'm not good at science I told my voice that I can't give it the attention it wants right now I need to focus on the test the student not only did better on the test she actually didn't dread the experience another student of mine said the gratitude and discussion in class actually made them not only feel happier but made them believe in themselves more okay and one final student after some emotional literacy lessons was saying I'm able to tune into my emotions more finally recognize which emotions and feeling which allows me to open up more to my friends and establish a deeper relationships these examples give me goosebumps this is why I teach there's nothing more than I want for my students than to feel empowered to be their best selves to fulfill their potential these examples also show mindfulness and emotional intelligence coming together to not only bolster a student's performance but to bolster their self-concept and if self-concept is what we believe about ourselves what we believe we can do then self-concept destiny this is a quote the next quote that I'm going to show you is by David Kelly the founder of the D school at Stanford he says what matters most in the end with creativity is your belief in your capacity to create positive change in the courage to take action that raising our students beliefs self-worth and happiness by equipping them with emotional intelligence skills should be a top goal of our educational system let's give this compass to our kids for if we do there is no end to what they will dare to create to invent and to innovate our world needs this from solving small interpersonal problem to geopolitical conflicts our world needs people with these skills and here's the three together we can do this we can achieve this world if you're a student listening to this right now either in the audience or listening to this later ask your teacher demand your schools to provide an emotional intelligence course if you are a parent educate yourself model these kids these skills to your child and you will raise an emotionally intelligent child and if you are a teacher you have the power to affect the lives of hundreds and hundreds of kids even small changes in your practice can make a huge huge difference together we can do it and if we do we will see a new generation of people who are more empathic more interconnected and more at peace leading to more color creativity and what matters most of all happiness thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 157,583

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Keywords: ted talks, ted, tedx talks, English, Education, Mental health, TEDxTalks, Psychology, Activism, United States, tedx, ted x, tedx talk, ted talk

Id: MCm9AnoeItU

Length: 18min 18sec (1098 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 20 2015