Life Span Development II School Age and Adolescence

Life Span Development II: School age and Adolescence 3 (2+1)

Lesson 19 : Emotional Maturity and adjustment during Adolescence

Promoting emotional development in classroom

Emotions are an important part of classroom dynamics. Teachers can best promote emotional development by considering children’s emotional reactions, interpretations and regulation as competencies. To cultivate emotional competencies in the classroom the know the following suggestions

1. Create an atmosphere of warmth, acceptance, and trust. Students learn and perform more successfully when they have positive emotions. Ex. When they feel secure happy, and excited about the subject matter. They are more likely to confide in a teacher about troublesome issues. Help them to feel free to express to the teacher regarding their inner feelings.
2. Encourage students to express their feelings: children and adolescents can better deal with their feelings when they are aware of their own feelings. Informal discussions with the students or sending mails or letters to the teacher if they are confidential.
3. Helps students to become astute observers of others emotional cues: children and adolescents are more successful in their interpersonal relationships when they learn to pick up on the subtle cues that reveal other people’s emotional cues.
4. Discuss emotions of the characters you study in literature and history. Stories in the classroom can provide many opportunities for students to draw inferences about emotional states. Study history of yields many tales of inequities, hostilities and societal transformations.-good fodder for discussions about feelings and coping.
5. Take cultural differences in to account
6. Help students to keep their anxiety at a manageable level. Many adolescents become excessively anxious during taking tests, speaking in public etc. teachers can do variety things to keep anxiety at a manageable level. For instance assigning oral reports, creating index cards, administer a practice test, by serve as a models for staying calm in stressful situations, and they can help relieve students anxiety by talking through problems in a warm and supportive manner.
7. Model appropriate ways of dealing with negative emotions: modeling appropriate ways of coping by the teacher.