Teachers can help students in developing these skills, including these ways:

1.  Active listening

It is recommended that Teachers practise Active listening.The skill of active listening is a key part of helping create genuine two-way communication – and it is about far more than just paying attention. It involves genuinely following dialogue and responding to others using your own body language, then being able to demonstrate that you have understood by verbally summarising back key messages that have been received.

Understanding  that students’ mindsets, attitudes, and motivations are key to persistence and effort, actively listening to them is critical.

Teachers need to facilitate two-way, truly interactive dialogue with students by:

•       focusing on both yourself and the student during dialogue;
•       being aware of your non-verbal cues;
•       validating that you have listened through appropriate responses; and
•   maintaining awareness of the environment.

This approach can be particularly relevant when a teacher may want to deliver feedback.

2. A vocabulary for feelings

It has been seen that interpersonal skills can be enhanced by helping students increase their emotional vocabulary. When teachers encourage students to understand the difference between “sad”, “disappointed” and “upset” it acts as a springboard to develop appropriate strategies for each. In short, every emotion word you learn is a new tool for future emotional intelligence.

A simple way to introduce this to students is to play the alphabet game: as a class you see how many different emotions you can come up with for each letter of the alphabet. Afterwards, discuss the differences between each, what might prompt the emotions, and how students could individually respond.

3. Self Awareness Exercises

It is a proven fact that anxiety can be triggered by negative self-talk

Since self-awareness involves becoming attuned to our internal dialogue, exercises to help build self-awareness can be a first step toward challenging these irrational processes.  Therefore, by helping students develop self-awareness, teachers can help them deal with challenges like exam stress or test anxiety.

One of the  recommendations to develop self awareness is encouraging students to keep a diary. This in turn, helps improve their meta-cognition, by inviting them to notice patterns or trends in their thoughts and behavior .

Another way of doing this is to encourage students to ask self-reflective questions such as “What could I have done differently?”

4. Showing empathy as being ‘with’ others

Empathy is the ability to take the perspective of another person while being non-judgemental, recognising the emotions they are feeling, and being able to convey their perspective back to them.

It has been found that reading is a great way to develop Empathy. Reflecting back the other person’s perspective helps to make the other person feel understood, which in turn increases the likelihood of collaboration and support. Students generally develop empathy through observing how others show it  including watching teachers and students empathise with each other. Using phrases such as “I understand/realise/can see” can help to show students how understanding of other perspectives can be expressed.

5. Managing emotions and self-regulation

Helping students improve their self-regulation, which is the ability to manage thoughts and feelings, is one of the most effective and efficient ways to support students. This is especially so in secondary schools, with the gap between impulse control and sensation seeking being at its widest in early teenage years.

Some of the  self-regulation techniques include seeing events as an opportunity rather than a threat and helpful self-talk , for example.

Teachers have to reinforce to students that emotional management skills are not fixed but can be developed. This takes a considerable amount of effort and patience from both the student and the teacher, as it is often a gradual process over a large period of time.

 Emotional Intelligence Lesson Plans

Teachers can design their own lesson plans or use others to help develop Emotional Intelligence.

Some EI lessons that can be used include: 

1. Self Talk: How Thoughts Affect Feelings and Behavior

Lesson plans  can be designed to come to terms with the impact that our thoughts can have on our feelings and behavior. It does so by helping teens develop an awareness of when thoughts and self-talk may be having a negative or irrational influence on the way they act.

Part 1: The teacher introduces the concept of self-talk. Discuss the idea that we often talk to ourselves about the way we feel, and that these internal dialogues often play a part in how we behave.

Part 2: The Sharing Circle itself invites students to put up their hands if they sometimes talk to themselves.

Even if there are no volunteers, emphasize the fact that we do all have internal dialogue, despite not always being able to recognize it as such. Ask the students to think about whether their self-talk is kind (nice, positive) or critical (negative) and invite them to give some examples of what their self-talk might sound like when they are facing a tough situation.

Part 3: The third part is the skill introduction, during which the teacher will explain that self-talk is the way that we say things to ourselves mentally, and can often be about who we are or what we are capable of.

Describe that self-talk can have a strong impact on how we feel and behave and that this can vary based on whether our self-talk is negative or positive. In situations where we are able to turn negative self-talk positive, we can start to have control over how we feel.

“Your self-talk can tell you how you are feeling and how to react, even when you’re not aware of it. Sometimes those thoughts can become negative and harmful, so it’s important for us to be aware of them. That can be difficult because there are so many distractions in life, from homework to social media. We sometimes need quiet in our lives in order to tune in to our self-talk.”

Here, you can bring the discussion back around to the examples that they put forward in the sharing circle, and illustrate how vicious negative thought cycles can occur. This example from the authors may help (Elias & Tobias, 2018):

bad thing happens → we feel bad → we use negative self-talk → we feel worse →we react based on our negative feelings → more bad things happen

Acknowledge the reality that negative things do occur and that feeling bad about them is natural. Emphasize that it’s when we repeat these negative thoughts and allow them to take over, that situations can become worse.

This can be developed further through the use of examples and inviting students to give positive alternative self-talk alternatives. At the end of the lesson, emphasize again that the first step to challenging negative self-talk is to become aware of it.

2. Facilitating Mindfulness

Mindfulness, meditation, and Emotional Intelligence have shown to be connected.

 If you can’t see yourself motivating teenagers to meditate with you—let alone in a classroom setting—don’t worry.

This Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) lesson from Edutopia.org is more about helping teens and students facilitate mindfulness for the first time.

Step 1: Invite the students to form a circle of chairs. Get them to put their feet flat on the ground and open the session by starting a discussion about the benefits of mindfulness. It may help if you begin by pointing out that mindfulness is not limited to meditation, but has other advantages. “It is not strictly meditation, but rather a practice in supporting your mind to take care of yourself.”

Step 2: Encourage students to get on board with the activity, or offer them the chance to opt-out. If you are already familiar with your class of students, you may already have a good idea of how to get them to participate meaningfully.

Step 3: Share the personal benefits that mindfulness practice has had for you. You may wish to relate a personal anecdote where a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction exercise or similar approach has helped you overcome negative emotions.

Step 4: Outline and justify each step as you proceed. Start with asking your students to close their eyes and take three slow, deep breaths in and out. You can do this as a group and reflect together silently before you move on to asking them to reflect.

The subject of this reflection may vary. One idea is to start by asking your students to reflect on their current state. How they are feeling, and validate that feeling without any judgment. You may then want to move on to a specific theme that you have prepared for the rest of the lesson.

Step 5: Each step involves balancing the time that you spend giving instructions with your students’ reflection time. Ballard uses this line as an example: “Now we are going to hold that focus for a little while. We just focus on where our air is entering and exiting our body.”

Step 6: Address only behaviors that are ‘unsafe’. You may choose to respond to giggling or messing around simply by reinforcing the mindfulness; reiterate the goal of the current stage in a calm and gentle way.

Step 7: Reflect on the exercise and gather feedback. The idea behind this step is to make sense of the whole mindfulness exercise. Students may feel more comfortable talking to a classmate, while you can also let them know that direct feedback is welcome.

3. Social Communication Skill: Assertiveness

This exercise from NobelCoaching.com is designed to help an individual teen or student develop assertiveness. Nonetheless, it can be easily turned into a larger group activity if you ask students to work with a partner. This allows them to appropriately express how they feel while building their self-confidence and self-esteem.

Saying no to others can sometimes be difficult, but necessary. This exercise asks teens to start a dialogue that involves asking someone else for something while expressing their feelings.

To start the exercise, create a ‘list of social challenges’, and construct a deck of cards from this. Each challenge should ideally reflect teen-relevant social situations and be tailored to their age. Each student will then pick out a card at random and carry out the challenge either over the next day or a few days—this will vary as per your schedules.

Some of the social challenge examples, could include :

•   contacting your favorite shop’s customer service and requesting information about a product that you’re interested in;
•       Finding out 6 new facts about a classmate; or
•   Giving someone an honest compliment.

As a critical last step, open a dialogue with the student about how they felt as a result of the challenge. Ask them to think of different ways they could have expressed themselves, made their request, or asked a question. What were others’ reactions?

Teaching Emotional Intelligence to Teens and Students (Incl. PPTs) (positivepsychology.com)

Emotional intelligence: why it matters and how to teach it | Teacher Network | The Guardian

Emotional Intelligence: What It Is and How to Apply It to Your Life (healthline.com)

MiddleWeb.com.