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Emotional intelligence and mentoringin pre‐service teacher education: aliterature reviewKate Hawkey aa University of Bristol , UKPublished online: 23 Aug 2006.
To cite this article: Kate Hawkey (2006) Emotional intelligence and mentoring in pre‐serviceteacher education: a literature review, Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning, 14:2,137-147, DOI: 10.1080/13611260500493485
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Mentoring & TutoringVol. 14, No. 2, May 2006, pp. 137–147
ISSN 1361-1267 (print)/ISSN 1469-9745 (online)/06/020137–11© 2006 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/13611260500493485
Emotional intelligence and mentoring in pre-service teacher education: a literature reviewKate Hawkey*University of Bristol, UKTaylor and Francis LtdCMET_A_149331.sgm10.1080/13611260500493485Mentoring and Tutoring1361-1267 (print)/1469-9745 (online)Original Article2006Taylor & Francis142000000May 2006KateHawkeyLecturer in pre-service teacher educationUniversity of Bristol, Graduate School of Education35 Berkeley SquareBristolBS8 [email protected]
In this article, the emerging discourse of emotional intelligence is discussed in relation to mentoringin pre-service teacher education. Possible reasons for the neglect of emotion and affect in pre-serviceteacher education, and in education more broadly, are discussed. The emerging focus on emotionin these fields is also examined in light of existing policy critiques. The dangers and pitfalls of usingan emotional lens to look at the activity of mentoring are identified. The article focuses on policyand practice in relation to mentoring in pre-service teacher education in Britain, although the issuesit raises are pertinent in the wider international field.
There is currently an upsurge of interest in all matters emotional and affective ineducation. First popularised by Daniel Goleman (1995; Hartley, 2003), emotionalintelligence is set to become a mainstream curricular concern for teachers at all levels,including pre-service teacher education. In Britain, the Department for Educationand Skills (DfES) has commissioned a study to identify ‘how children’s emotionaland social competence and wellbeing could most effectively be developed’ (Weare &Gray, 2003, p. 5) and this has been followed by the introduction of a pilot programmeto teach social, emotional and behavioural skills (SEBS) to children in schools (DfES,2003). The recent government programme, Every child matters (DfES, 2004), alsoplaces emotional wellbeing as a central concern.
The development of social, emotional and behavioural skills is seen as part of prep-aration for the knowledge society, where ‘collaboration, communication, creativity,community’ are afforded high value (Heppell, quoted in Schofield, 2003). In termsof the benefits to pupils, there are claims that developing children’s SEBS can havebeneficial effects in terms of greater educational and work success, improvements in
*Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol, 35 Berkeley Square, Bristol BS8 1JA, UK.Email: [email protected]
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behaviour, increased inclusion, improved learning and greater social cohesion (DfES,2003). The commissioned study also devoted attention to promoting teachers’ owncompetence and wellbeing, reporting that practitioners cannot transmit emotionaland social competence and wellbeing effectively if their own emotional and socialneeds are not met (Weare & Gray, 2003). The study also found evidence that ‘only asmall minority of teachers appear to be in favour of work to promote emotionalwellbeing and that the majority are reluctant to get involved, in part because they arenot trained in how to do it’ (Weare & Gray, 2003, p. 74). The study recommendedthat the DfES investigate the possibility of developing work on teachers’ emotionaland social competence and wellbeing, both for schools and for teacher educationestablishments (Weare & Gray, 2003).
Such recommendations suggest that teacher education, as well as schools, will needto address emotion in education in more explicit ways than previously. With schoolsholding considerable responsibility for the training of teachers in Britain, this articlefocuses on the role of the school-based mentor who works with the pre-service traineeteacher. If emotional intelligence is to take root in schools it is pertinent to considerhow trainees, the teachers of tomorrow’s schools, are prepared for this element oftheir work. This discussion considers emotional intelligence in relation to bothschool-based mentors in pre-service teacher education as well as the trainees them-selves.
Traditional neglect
The interaction of feeling and thinking, of affect and cognition, has long been aconcern to philosophers. Traditionally, emotions have been seen as the antithesis ofthe Enlightenment ideals of reason and rationality. As Oatley and Jenkins (1996,p. 38) argue, ‘there is suspicion in Western culture that there is something wrong withemotions’. According to this view, emotions are often thought of as an out-of-controlstate, having a ‘disruptive, dangerous influence on thinking and behaviour’ (Forgas,2000, p. 1). This has lead some theorists to suggest that whenever emotions are‘directly involved in action, they tend to overwhelm or subvert rational mentalprocesses’ (Elster, 1985, p. 379). Emotions, according to this view, are impedimentsto considered judgement and intellectual activity. Emotional expression has also beenlinked with uncivilised, primitive or childish behaviour, even vulgarity and the lowerorders. This characterisation has been contrasted with a more thoughtful, civilised,adult and dispassionate approach based on logic and rationality. Not surprisingly, theacademic world has come to be associated with the latter, to the neglect of the former(Lupton, 1998; Sutton & Wheatley, 2003).
Schools, likewise, have reflected this traditional cultural preference of cautiontowards emotions. A concern with matters emotional has not had great prominencein the cultural discourse of schools in recent years. The introduction of the NationalCurriculum in Britain in 1989 reinforced an existing subject bound curriculum(Department of Education & Science, 1989), and inspection frameworks with similarpriorities further reinforced this. The resulting curriculum in teacher education has
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tended to privilege pedagogical subject knowledge over other concerns; in so doing,the place of emotion within mentoring in pre-service teacher education has beenneglected.
Whilst the traditional academic view has seen a separation of cognition and affect,an alternative view argues that openness to feelings is a useful, even necessary, adjunctto rationality and to effective social thinking (Oatley & Jenkins, 1996; Forgas, 2000).As Denzin suggests:
Emotionality lies at the intersection of the person and society, for all persons are joined totheir societies through the self-feelings and emotions they feel and experience on a dailybasis. This is the reason the study of emotionality must occupy a central place in all thehuman disciplines, for to be human is to be emotional. (Denzin, 1984, p. 10)
Emotion then has been neglected as a field of study within education and teachereducation for some time despite the central role that emotion plays in everyone’slife. The neglect has extended to pre-service teacher education, despite the obviousways in which emotion is a central element in learning to teach both in terms ofthe trainee’s reactions to starting teaching and in terms of the mentor’s manage-ment and support of the trainee through this process (see, for example, Day,1993).
Curiously, psychologists have only relatively recently started to study the interfaceof affect and cognition, although this in itself points to the tenacity of the traditionalview that the two were separate. Razran (1940) is credited (Forgas, 2000) with beingthe first to demonstrate an interaction between affect and cognition with experimentsusing a free lunch or aversive smells to induce good or bad moods. He found that thepositive or negative affect produced had a marked mood-congruent influence onsubsequent social judgements (Forgas, 2000). Later research demonstrated not onlythe impact of affective states on the content of cognition but also on the process ofcognition (Bless, 2000). Such research suggests that, in the context of pre-serviceteacher education, the emotional stresses of starting teaching would serve to inhibitthe cognitive learning that trainees are able to achieve along with their receptivenessto learning through the mentoring process.
Berkowitz, Jaffee and Troccoli (2000) indicate that even small changes in phenom-enological focus may produce dramatic shifts in affective influences on cognition.Forgas (2000, p. 400) concludes that ‘simply directing people’s attention to theirinternal states seems sufficient to reduce or even reverse affect infusion’. Thelanguage here of ‘infusion’ is not atypical; Lupton (1998), for example, talks abouttalks about relationships as being ‘often saturated with emotions’ (p. 165; emphasisadded). The metaphor suggests emotion is something that is ubiquitous, rather thancontained.
The relevance of such research to teaching and pre-service teacher education is notdifficult to see. Sutton and Wheatley (2003) have compiled a helpful review on theemotional aspects of teachers’ lives. Student misbehaviour, for example, that elicitsnegative emotions in teachers is distracting and diverts attention from instructionalgoals. Take this teacher, for example:
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When students are doing, we’ll call it negative behaviour, it distracts me from what I’mtrying to think through. If I’m trying to explain something and there’s negative behaviour… it breaks my concentration and then I have to refocus myself. (Emmer, 1994, p. 3)
Teachers may be exhorted to ‘never become defensive or lose control of your feelings’(Gathercoal , 1993) but the power of emotions when teaching and the difficulty manyteachers have in regulating their own emotions, especially negative emotions, tendsnot to be discussed (Sutton & Wheatley, 2003). Similarly, high anxiety can impairworking memory and task processing because of intrusive thoughts and worries(Eysenck & Calco, 1992). So a trainee or beginning teacher who is anxious about theirlesson plan and unruly students is less likely to solve the myriad of classroom-basedproblems that occur (Sutton & Wheatley, 2003). Conversely, research participantswho viewed a short film that evoked positive emotions generated more ideas than thosewho saw a clip that evoked negative emotions (Fredrickson, 2001). This suggests thatteachers who experience more positive emotions may generate more and better teach-ing ideas; they may also develop ‘broad minded coping’ skills (Frederickson, 2001,p. 223), which can help them solve more problems. This process can generate a posi-tive upward spiral of teachers increasing competence in their classroom experience(Sutton & Wheatley, 2003). In teacher education, this process would suggest theimportance of the mentor highlighting the positive achievements of the trainee earlyon in order to facilitate and encourage further progress.
In summary, a consideration of emotion and affect and their impact on cognitionhas been traditionally neglected in the context of teaching and pre-service teachereducation. This has begun to change with the recent agenda on emotional intelligenceand a still fairly small research base looking at the interface of affect and cognition.The relevance of this agenda to pre-service teacher education, where there are wellknown emotional stresses involved in starting teaching, is clear.
Competing definitions and claims
Theories and definitions of emotional intelligence abound. Salovey and Mayer (cited inMayer & Cobb, 2000, p. 165), who have worked in this field for many years, currentlydefine emotional intelligence as ‘the capacity to process emotional information accu-rately and efficiently, including the capacity to perceive, assimilate, understand, andmanage emotion’. Beyond the formal definition, Salovey and Mayer (1990) describean emotionally intelligent character as a well-adjusted, genuine, warm, persistent andoptimistic person. In their theory, emotional intelligence involves four broad classes ofabilities, namely perception, integration, understanding, and management ofemotion (Mayer & Cobb, 2000). There is much in this theory which is similar to char-acter education and socioemotional learning (see Mayer & Cobb, 2000, for a discus-sion of these concepts) as well as to Gardner’s (1983) interpersonal and intrapersonalintelligences. In terms of pre-service teacher education, the mentor as well as thetrainee would do well to possess each of these fours classes of ability.
Goleman (1995), who popularised the concept of emotional intelligence, takes abroader definition. Whereas Salovey and Mayer described possible outcomes of
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emotional intelligence to include optimism and motivation, Goleman equated thesecharacter outcomes with the intelligence itself, so that emotional intelligence becomesalmost another term for personality with the result that ‘this subtle shift led emotionalintelligence to become a catch-phrase for anything that involved motivation, emotion,or good character’ (Mayer & Cobb, 2000, p. 170). Links between personality andgood school outcomes were quickly attributed to this broad concept of emotionalintelligence. Gardner is similarly critical of the breadth of Goleman’s definition:
When Goleman speaks about emotional intelligence as if it entails a certain set of recom-mended behaviours-empathy, considerateness, or working towards a more smoothly func-tioning family or community-he leaves the realm of intelligence, in a strictly scholarlysense, and enters the separate spheres of values and social policy. (Gardner, 1999, p. 69)
Within such definitions there is a sense of emotional intelligence being ‘all thingsbright and beautiful’ (Mayer & Cobb, 2000, p. 177), with little consideration giveneither to dealing with the difficult, boring or mundane parts of life, or to a consider-ation of the complexities which contribute to qualities such as optimism (Mayer &Cobb, 2000).
Within education, however, there was quick acceptance of the idea that emotionalintelligence was needed to learn and behave well, and some policy experts went furtherand made claims that emotional intelligence predicted success. Goleman (1995, p. 34)claimed that emotional intelligence was ‘as powerful, and at time more powerful, thanIQ’ in predicting success in life, while Scherer (1997, p. 5) echoed this in assertingthat ‘emotional intelligence, more than IQ, … is the most reliable predictor of successin life and in school’. Such claims, however, may be overblown being based on whatis still a very young area of study. Epstein (1998, p. 19), for example, consideringwhether traits such as motivation or empathy contribute to a unitary function thatcontributes to success, comments, ‘nothing like this has yet been attempted, and …all we have is unsupported speculation about the existence of an undefined conceptreferred to as emotional intelligence’. Whilst it may be inappropriate to talk about theready acquisition of emotional intelligence, it is clear that teaching emotional knowl-edge or socioemotional learning (Mayer & Cobb, 2000, p. 177) is entirely possible.What is less clear, through the paucity of studies on outcomes, is whether such learninghas positive impact on success or behaviour. What this means, in the context of pre-service teacher education, is that learning about the impact of the emotions on learningmay well be a useful area for researchers, mentors and trainees to focus on, contributingto raised self-awareness of both mentor and trainee. It is not clear, however, whetherthis will have any impact on the thinking or behaviour of either mentor or trainee.
The reasons why claims over the importance of emotional intelligence have gainedcurrency so swiftly are examined in the next section.
Wider policy context
Government policy in Britain over the past 15 years or so has weakened the linkbetween teacher education and the universities, essentially rendering schools full
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partners in the training of teachers. In so doing, less emphasis has been placed ontheory in teacher education and more on ‘learning by doing’. Alongside this, greatercontrols over university departments of education, where the majority of teachersgain their teaching qualification, have been introduced. In the current arrangementsOfsted, the body that inspects schools, now also inspects pre-service teacher educa-tion courses and the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) has responsibility for thesupply and quality of teachers. The TTA (TTA/DfES, 1998), consistent with widerconcerns about standards and accountability, introduced national standards forQualified Teacher Status (QTS) in 1998. All such changes can be read as compro-mising the original ‘trust’ associated with the delegation of the award of QTS touniversities. Trust, however, has not been delegated to the supposedly newlyempowered teacher mentors in schools; instead they simply carry more of theresponsibility for ensuring trainees meet the standards for QTS. In this sensementoring in pre-service teacher education can be seen as a management tool(Young, 1998).
Bottery (2003) has updated and developed Young’s critique and ideas on trust. Hisarticle does not address pre-service teacher education or mentoring specifically butfocuses instead on ‘learning communities’; the relevance to mentoring, however, isapparent. Bottery’s research leads him to argue that the endless stream of directivesand targets which currently ‘smother’ schools, has been an attempt to create ‘error-free, risk-less organisations where trust is unnecessary because everything is socontrolled and micro-managed’ (p. 196). This has resulted, however, in ‘a low-trustculture of unhappiness’ (p. 187). The consequences for the workforce in schools arepredictable: ‘anger, lowered self-esteem, powerlessness, and deep distrust of thosenot trusting them’ (p. 199) alongside lower morale, ‘self-doubt (at having to replacecarefully acquired professional judgements with externally imposed targets’), ‘anxi-ety’ (at having to constantly attain targets), and ‘guilt’ (at being unable to achieveincreasingly difficult targets) (p. 201). Such a culture has its origins in politicaldirectives but schools respond with strategic compliance focusing attention on suchexternal demands often at the cost of internal needs. In this way individuals withinschools find themselves both ‘agent’ and ‘subject’ in the creation of such cultures ofunhappiness (Ball, 2001).
School cultures of unhappiness not only generate crises of teacher morale, recruit-ment and retention, they also generate particular problems for mentors in their rela-tions with trainees. Ever aware of the importance of exam results, mentors ‘protect’exam classes from exposure to trainees, for example, and innovation by trainees maybe frowned upon as being too risky (Beck & Kosnik, 2000). In such atmospheresmentors feel responsible for the outcomes of the trainees’ lessons and, in so doing, the‘stakes are raised’ and the emotional content to the relationship can become highlycharged. Of course, there have always been tensions within mentoring relationships,largely arising from the tension in the mentor role between supporting and assessingtrainees (Jacques, 1992; Williams et al., 1992). Recent policy initiatives, however,may well have further exacerbated the potential for difficulty within the mentoringrelationship.
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An assessment of such cultures might well suggest a timely need to address mattersemotional in schools. Indeed, McNess, Broadfoot and Osborn (2003) have arguedthat the overriding contemporary concern with effectiveness has compromised anyconcern with the affective dimension, while others have suggested that in widersociety where people feel as if they are subject to a high degree of social regulation,free expression of emotions holds great appeal since it may be seen as a way of tran-scending such constraints (Lupton, 1998, p. 169). Mayer and Cobb (2000) haveargued that the rush by policy makers to embrace emotional intelligence is part ofsuccessive waves of interest aimed at educating different parts of the mind that haveoccurred since the 1950s. Each of these waves of interest represent shifts in culturalpreferences or zeitgeist; for example, the rising confidence in science and engineeringin the 1960s saw a focus on the person as a machine, while the focus on emotionalintelligence can be seen as a reaction to growing international competition since the1980s, with the concomitant focus on accountability and nationwide testing withinschools (Mayer & Cobb, 2000).
Giving prominence to an emotional agenda in school and teacher education wouldseem to have resonance with wider contemporary cultural norms and priorities. Thetrend towards revealing one’s emotions and celebrating such revelation, for example,is evident in contemporary Western society and this may be a part of another trendtowards greater informality and diversity in emotional and moral codes. Suchresonance, however, can be beguiling and has many potential pitfalls. Hartley (2003),within the current climate of obsession with targets and standards, sees the instru-mentalisation of the creative and expressive as the most likely result. It will ‘bemanaged and monitored formally as sets of competences and outcomes’; he evenspeculates whether in Britain ‘the “emotional hour” will come to complement the‘literacy hour’” (Hartley, 2003, p. 17). Indeed, Weare and Gray’s (2003) reportcommissioned by the DfES recommends that the DfES investigate the ‘possibility ofdeveloping work on teachers’ emotional and social competence and wellbeing, withinthe Ofsted inspection framework and criteria, both for schools and teacher educationestablishments’ (2003, p. 76; emphasis added). It will be interesting to see what thismight include extending perhaps to an emotional audit (Hartley, 2003). Regeneratingeducation with an emotional slant can certainly have much appeal as, for example,Brighouse’s (2002) appeal for ‘passionate leadership’ or Hargreaves’ (1997) call for‘rethinking educational change with heart and mind’. At a deeper level there is a needto be wary of ‘seduction’, which ‘may now take the place of repression as the perma-nent vehicle of systemic control and social integration’ (Bauman, 1998 , p. 889). Inlight of the pressures that both mentor and trainee may feel in the teacher educationcontext, the danger of instrumental approaches towards emotional intelligence is avery real danger.
One final caution in relation to emotional intelligence and mentoring needs to beaddressed. When moves towards greater school-based teacher education were intro-duced, the researcher Wilkins (1993) wrote an important critique looking at how suchdevelopments relate to wider social and cultural trends. She argues that the culturaldynamic of training may have been obscured by the essentially political concerns that
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were most immediately felt at the time, and that the changes in pre-service teachereducation have been influenced by those cultural trends, which together constitute‘postmodernism’. She characterises it in this way:
Such developments can be regarded favourably or with deep misgiving for they promiseeither freedom and autonomy and the recognition of the rights of formerly subservient orminority groups, or alternatively a nihilistic chaotic fragmented world without guidance orgoals. (Wilkins, 1993, p. 40)
All of this, she argues, is in sharp contrast to the preceding modern era, which wascharacterised by rationalism and order. Wilkins applauds the newly recognised statusof mentors ‘as true equal partners in training’ (p. 47) but at the same time recognisesthe development as being fraught with dangers of ‘relativism and fluidity, of socialfragmentation and of instrumentalism’ (p. 46). She concludes that one such dangeris that of ‘pastiche’ and lack of depth. Given the lack of consensus over terms such asemotional intelligence, as well as the paucity of research evidence on outcomes in thisarea, there is every danger that giving more explicit attention to emotional intelligencein mentoring could well result in the dangers of superficiality.
Practice literature on mentoring
In contrast to literature on the wider policy context, much of the literature focusingon the practice of mentoring has been positive and upbeat with a ‘rose-tinted aura ofcelebration’ (Colley, 2002, p. 270). The literature is replete with high-minded aims,course ‘how-to’ prescriptions, and a sometimes evangelical insistence that mentoringworks. Such articles also tend to take little account of policy critiques on mentoringalthough reveal much (although often indirectly) about the author’s own ideologicalcommitment within the enterprise. It is understandable that this literature shouldhave appeared, targeted towards classroom practitioners with precious little time tolearn their new role as mentors. The thrust has been a focus on mentor trainingthrough ‘short-burst, “quick fix”’ approaches (Day, 1993, p. 84).
Within many of these articles on the practice of mentoring there is a clear acknowl-edgement of the emotional context of mentoring but little elaboration. One explana-tion for this, which I tentatively suggest here, is that the emotional agenda ordiscourse has had little currency within contemporary school culture until recently.Focusing on emotions also introduces an additional layer of complexity and this is insharp contrast to the emphasis on quick fixes
Other readings of the literature on mentoring practice do recognise this complex-ity. What trainees learn can be idiosyncratic and unpredictable (Hawkey, 1998a)and much of what is learnt is related to the mentoring relationship between mentorand trainee (Elliott, 1995). Wildman, Magliero, Niles and Niles (1992) summarisethe complexity when they write ‘mentoring involves highly personal interactions,conducted under different circumstances in different schools, (so that) the roles ofmentoring cannot be rigidly specified’ (p. 212). Cherniss (2002), likewise, points tothe importance of the individual teacher’s personality and ability to model and
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teach emotional skills effectively irrespective of any particular interventions. Thefour broad classes of abilities that Mayer and Cobb (2000) identify – perception,integration, understanding, and management of emotion – are clearly qualitiesconsistent with good mentoring, even if such identification does little to suggesthow such qualities can be built into pre-service programmes or developed inmentors or trainees.
The tensions and stresses inherent in learning to teach can affect the dynamic ofthe mentoring relationship and this too can have an impact on the trainee’s develop-ment. Jacques (1992, p. 345) points to this impact when she describes mentors andtheir trainees as ‘collaborators in avoiding the issue. A conspiracy of silence reigned’.Tomlinson (1995) elaborates on the issue and offers explanations, drawing on thepsychological notions of denial and projection as strategies deployed when dealingwith such stress. He describes a scenario where a mentor struggling to articulate theirthinking may interpret this as a case of them not knowing what they were doing as ateacher. If a trainee then asks about their teaching the mentor may respond defen-sively, rejecting the value of any theory. Still more complex, the trainee might thentake on such defensiveness and in so doing tend to pressure his or her mentor towardsthe same ‘unrealistic quick fixes and surface dealings they’re scrambling for, andtowards similar defensiveness in the face of such pressure’ (pp. 71–74). Likewise,Hawkey (1998b) reports a case where the pressures that a mentor perceived herselfto be under from colleagues influenced how she worked with the trainee and obscureda clear focus being maintained on the individual trainee’s professional developmentneeds.
In summary then, much of what a trainee learns comes via the mentoring relation-ship in the individual context of the particular school. These relationships areemotionally charged partly due to the supporting/assessing tension in mentoring, andpartly due to the current culture of standards and targets which may exacerbate anydifficulty. The resulting dynamic between mentor and trainee can result in variousblocks and collusions, which mentor and trainee may tacitly agree to. Such defensivereactions, by their very nature, are difficult to recognise or deal with by those whomake them.
Conclusion
Emotion is a key element in mentoring and the experience of beginning teaching. Tothat extent emotion is an element to consider in the effectiveness of mentoring. Clearunderstanding of the place of emotion and its relation to cognition is not yet fullyembedded into current school cultures and research in this area is also relatively new.There is a lack of consensus over the term emotional intelligence; it is not clear theextent to which emotional intelligence is fixed or amenable to change, or the extentto which it might contribute to success or have an impact on behaviour. The potentialpitfalls of superficiality and pastiche need to be taken seriously. The current upsurgeof interest in and enthusiastic embracing of emotional intelligence needs to be seenin its wider cultural context.
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