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Developing School Counselors’ Emotional Intelligence

Study explores the impact of supplementing a traditional graduate school counseling curriculum with social emotional learning lessons using the Six Seconds Emotional Intelligence (EQ) model, competencies, and assessment tools.

Overview

Situation: This study investigated whether including emotional intelligence training for school counseling graduate students impacted the graduate students’ overall EQ.

Solution: Program participants took the Six Seconds Emotional Intelligence Assessment before and after specific emotional intelligence training – then measured the changes compared to a control group.

Results: The participants’ overall emotional intelligence scores increased 22.7%, compared to less than 1% for the control group.

“The emotional intelligence competencies really helped me to look deeper not only at myself but it helped me to look deeper into all aspects of my life and work.”

– School Counseling Graduate Student Intern

Situation

School counselors assist students with academic, personal/social, and career development, and engage in leadership and advocacy efforts for school reform. Counselors who increase their own emotional intelligence competencies may be better able to assist students with academics, relationships, and positive youth development. The inclusion of EQ into pre-service programs in higher education is an important precursor to integrating EQ into K-12 education. The researchers’ hypothesis was that school counselor trainees, intentionally trained in EQ, would both show gains in their own EQ competencies and report self-efficacy in their teaching of social emotional learning lessons to their K-12 students.

Solution

This study explored the impact of supplementing the traditional graduate school counseling curriculum with social emotional learning lessons using the Six Seconds Emotional Intelligence (EQ) model, competencies, and assessment tools. The counselor educators compared two groups of school counseling students during their internship semester, one of whom received training in emotional intelligence competencies, leadership, and advocacy and the other who received leadership and advocacy training without the framework of the EQ curriculum. Then the researchers used pre- and post- test results to measure progress and compare the two groups.

Results

The participants’ overall emotional intelligence scores increased 22.7%, compared to less than 1% for the control group, and the participants’ scores increased for every specific EQ competency.

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OVERALL EQ

The participants’ overall emotional intelligence scores increased 22.7%, compared to less than 1% for the control group.

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EQ SKILLS

Participants’ scores increased on all 8 emotional intelligence competencies.

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PATTERN RECOGNITION

Participants scored 25% higher upon completion of the program with Recognizing Patterns.

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Products & Services Delivered

SEL Curriculum

Self-Science – one of the world’s first social emotional learning (SEL) programs (recommended in Daniel Goleman’s 1995 book as one of the pioneers in EQ education), Self-Science is a developmental, experiential process for building social emotional skills. Read more about Self-Science.

Develop EQ Experts

To build capacity to develop and implement their programs, members of the team completed certification training from Six Seconds to build expertise on EQ tools and methods. Read more about Six Seconds SEL Specialist Certification.

EQ Skills

SEI – Six Seconds’ Emotional Intelligence Assessment is a validated psychometric tool for measuring emotional intelligence, used with over 250k people worldwide.