PhD candidate Marcela Gallardo is currently completing her Doctoral studies in Education at Monash University, Australia. She has worked in a variety of contexts teaching English as a second language in both Chile and internationally. Her PhD research explores the identification, understanding and knowledge of Emotional Intelligence (EI) skills in pre-service teacher education.
The presented poster "Fourth Year Pre-service Teachers: Expectations About Emotional Intelligence" explored pre-service teachers’ expectations about EI in their study degree. The main goal of the research is to highlight pre-service teachers’ voices about EI, including what they think about it, what they have learnt in their pre-service teacher education course at university, and whether or not they think the knowledge of EI is useful for their future work as a teacher. EI draws on how people react to different situations, how we are able to change our mood toward having better relationships with one another (Corcoran & Tormey, 2012). These aspects can affect learning in many ways, as research has proved that stress can be contagious and is a common issue among teachers (Schonert-Reichl, 2017).
In this mixed method study, one hundred pre-service teachers enrolled in the last year of their Bachelor of Education (Honours) degree in an Australian university were surveyed. With ethical approval from the university, the students were invited to answer a voluntary survey through their online learning platform. Quantitative data was analysed using SPPS IBM (Pallant, 2016) and qualitative data was analysed using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006).
The results of this research indicated that fourth-year pre-service teachers understand the concept of EI but are unaware on how to put it into practice. The results also indicated that an understanding and knowledge of EI is important for fourth-year pre-service teachers and for their future career. However, data showed that students reported the resources and teaching they had received was insufficient and there was a lack of understanding around how they could apply these theories in their future classrooms.