Emotional competence: a prerequisite for effective teaching

Abstract

Teaching is among other things an emotional endeavour. Being emotionally competent has tacitly become a prerequisite for the teaching profession, thus raising the question of teachers’ actual emotional competence as well as manners of acquiring these skills. This paper aims to discuss how emotions relate to the teaching profession and also provides results of a small scale study conducted on a sample of 144 teachers from secondary schools in the City of Rijeka regarding the teachers’ assessment of their emotional competence. The results of the study point to overall high assessments of teachers’ emotional competence which is an encouraging result but could also point to the idea Hargreaves (2000) introduced, which entails the notion that expressing positive emotions and being emotionally competent has become a moral commitment and a professional standard for the teachers which makes them feel obliged to live up to those standards.