Emotional Literacy: To Be a Different Kind of Smart

By Rob Bocchino

"Timely and useful. Provides clear and practical strategies to help young people and adults achieve successful and satisfying lives by understanding and managing emotions."

Robert Garmston, Professor Emeritus
California State University, Sacramento

"

Emotional Literacy offers a concise and practical application of the social skills needed to be a productive, fulfilled member of society. This must-read is for everyone concerned about the development of the whole child."
Pat Wolfe, Educational Consultant
Napa, California

You can teach skills for emotional literacy

To meet the complexities of today′s world, we need more than intelligence--we need emotional literacy. Emotional literacy means having the skills to understand and manage emotions, to communicate effectively, and to be become an autonomous person. Unfortunately many of us are not emotionally literate enough to help others, let alone ourselves. This book combines strategies and skills with theory and research to identify some of the key skills, maps, and tools needed for emotional literacy.

The author offers jargon-free language, sidebar notes, and handy chapter summaries to help teachers foster the development of emotional literacy. Hands-on classroom examples and strategies support the ideas, and templates illustrate application of the techniques in specific settings. Hints and tips from the field are interwoven in the text.

This book focuses on:

Background and research on emotional literacy Understanding and managing emotions Communication skills and rapport building Developing an internal coach Implications and next steps

This book is an excellent introduction to emotional literacy for teachers, principals, and staff developers, as well as teacher preparation faculty.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803968248
• ISBN13: 9780803968240
• Release Date: August 1999
• Publisher: Corwin Publishers
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 7.1" x 10.0"

Customer Reviews

Rob Bocchino workshops

I have not yet read this book, but I have been fortunate enough to see Rob Bocchino and learn many of his useful techniques, tips, and ideas about how to better meet the needs of students on a deeper and personal level. I guess I'm going to have to go ahead and buy the book as well. His workshops continue to give me hope and direction for how I want to leave my students and how I want them to continue to develop the world around them (educationally and emotionally).

A hodgepodge of useful ideas

"Intelligence is the potential or predisposition; literacy is the constellation of skills, strategies, maps and tools that we learn in order to become truly emotionally fluent." (p. xii,11) Most books on emotional intelligence, relationship and self-help would have covered similar contents without the distinction.Figure 2.1 on p. 16 gives an overview of the foundations of emotional literacy based on three broad areas of competency with sub-headings. A. Understanding and Managing Emotional States (Triune brain, anchoring, reframing, positive intentionality, accessing resource states)--focus of Chs.3 & 4. B. Effective Communication and Intervention Skills (reflective listening, overcoming reactive responses, sensory acuity, effective non-verbal communication, assertion and apology)--Chs. 5-8. C. Developing an Internal Coach (learning from experience, clarity of outcomes, visioning, problem-solving, efficacy)--Chs. 9-11. Although there isn't a single reference to NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming), its influence is obvious. The model of the Triune brain is used as a metaphor for organizing different levels of behavior. Throughout the book you get different kinds of framed boxes of definitions, icons, summaries, quotes and interesting bits of information. Sometimes they become distracting while you are reading the main text.This is not an original work that I'd enthusiastically recommend to teachers. It is better to read Gottman's books that the author also seems to appreciate. However, if you have this book in the library, you can get some practical and useful ideas from it for developing emotional literacy.