Emotional and social development are key topics affecting today all sectors of our personal and professional lives. "Emotional competence" is defined as the functional capacity wherein a human can reach their goals after an emotion-eliciting encounter (The Development of Emotional Competence.
Carolyn Saarni. The Guilford Press,  NYC,  1999). Dr. Saarni defined emotion as a building block of self-efficacy. She described the use of emotions as a set of skills achieved which then lead to the development of emotional competence. Attainment of the skills of emotional competence is crucial to self-efficacy. 

This training will analyse the different perspectives on the main topic of "emotional competence" and lists emotional competence skills like the 8 defined by Dr Saarni and more recent ones:

Awareness of one’s own emotions,

Ability to discern and understand other’s emotions,

Ability to use the vocabulary of emotion and expression,

Capacity for empathic involvement,

Ability to differentiate subjective emotional experience from external emotion expression,

Adaptive coping with aversive emotions and distressing circumstances,

Awareness of emotional communication within relationships, and

Capacity for emotional self-efficacy.

In the frame of a training for professionals, teachers and educators in general a training on emotional competences starts from basic concepts which are quite obvious like "Emotional competence describes the ability a person has to express his or her own emotions with complete freedom, and it is derived from emotional intelligence, which is the ability to identify emotions. Competence is the level of skill with which someone interacts constructively with other people", developing a deeper common understanding focused on staff development. Educators train themselves in order to improve their personal and professional competences and address their learning to "learners". 

Social competence
Another individual aspect of emotional competence is the social competence, which refers to empathy towards others. It encompasses the skills we need to be successful in a work atmosphere and in relationships. It is very important to use effective communication and to know how to manage conflicts.

Teacher education, emotional competences and development education: why it matters and how to teach it. 
Teaching young people skills such as active listening, self-awareness and empathy can equip them to succeed both academically and socially.

From a side this training helps educators in general to discuss and learn more, touching partly a literature belonging to "psychology"; from the other side, it fosters the common understanding of a new needed common method based on the development of the "emotional competence" skills in learners/students with whom they daily work. While psychology has perhaps been slow to recognise the importance of such emotional capacities, recent work has  sought  to  address this  lacuna.    Perhaps  the  best-known  representation  of  this  trend  is  the work  on  Multiple  Intelligences  (Gardner  1983;  1993)  and  on  Emotional Intelligence  (Goleman,  1996;  Mayer  et  al.  2000,  Bar-On,  2002).  

In educating nowadays - in a wider European perspective - we know the EU guidelines on the new "Key competences for the lifelong learning" (Recommendation May 2018) and other guidelines based showing the need of developing other key facets like:

Active listening,

A vocabulary for feelings, 

Developing self-awareness, 

Showing empathy as being ‘with’ others, 

Managing emotions and self-regulation.

This training will help educators to learn and improve their teaching method, firstly reflecting and improving their knowledge on this topics widening perspectives and opening their actual work to new cooperations with other colleagues and international educators. 

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