A case of emotional intelligence for teachers’ professional development: Emotions and connections are ubiquitous in second life

Abstract

Success in teaching requires teachers’ strong social and emotional competences to effectively manage and develop students’ emotional development in every day practice. Having identified the important role of these competencies in schools, virtual learning environments (VLEs) and specifically environments like Second Life (SL) could be selected in order to enhance teachers’ and students’ social and emotional intelligence. Teachers could reflect, practice and improve their use of social and emotional competences in the classrooms by using Teachers’ Professional Development programs (TPD), thereby making further improvements to their teaching. These training programs could support teachers by using suitable frameworks aligned with social and emotional learning (SEL). In this paper, we highlight the significance of TPD programs by presenting a SEL workshop on SL in order to better understand and enhance Emotional Intelligent (EI) for teachers’ competencies. This study reveals that after having received training in a Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) workshop on Second Life (SL), teachers ‘effectiveness in recognizing the EI components is highly increased.