Emotional Social Intelligence

Emotional Social Intelligence, or ESI, is one of the hottest buzzwords in education today. It is the ability to recognize one’s behavior, mood, and impulses and to best manage them according to the situation. ESI has become especially important in our post-COVID world, where many people (children, teens, and adults alike!) have suffered from a lack of natural everyday interactions and the skills that are learned from these interactions. 

Feuerstein’s Emotional Social Intelligence seminar aims at training practitioners to teach students about social and emotional experiences with the help of cognitive functions. In this emphasis, the course materials present a dimension of cognitive processing with a somewhat unique perspective considering the various programs that teach “thinking skills.” 

In interacting with the world around us, accessing the social-emotional dimension of cognitive development is very important. Many individuals cannot innately understand or read social cues, and so it has become clear that we need to prepare children to develop awareness, skills, and insight into how to react to the emotional manifestation of their experiences, both internally (what they feel) and externally (what is present in the situation they are exposed to).

The tools taught in this course will help them develop the ability to recognize and explain certain conditions presented to them, which is particularly important in situations in which children cannot distinguish the emotional conditions of others, an essential prerequisite of empathy.  Also necessary is the ability to distinguish nuances of feelings, such as differentiating fear from surprise or understanding and observing the differences between happiness and joy.  These skills and awareness of them require the child to develop cognitive processes, the quality of which can be described as “social/affective cognition.” 

Materials:

Materials included in this workshop are three instruments from the FIE-Basic tools (Identifying Emotions, From Empathy to Action, and Think and Learn to Prevent Violence).

Cancellation & Refund Policy:

The Feuerstein Institute reserves the right to cancel any courses that fail to meet the minimum participation requirement. Fees for courses canceled by the Institute will be refunded in full. In cases where the participants cancel, there is a €100 processing charge for reimbursement of workshop fees for cancellations made before the registration deadline. There are no refunds for cancellations after the registration deadline.