Abstract:

The goal of the education system is to increase cognitive capacity, competencies and skills such as acquiring new knowledge, recalling facts and figures and applying this information to reasoning, understanding and solving problems, and therefore teachers and lecturers traditionally use Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning Domains. The competencies and skills as described by Bloom are measured by standardised intelligence tests. Society takes it for granted that the higher a person’s IQ (Intelligence quotient) tested, the better he will perform at school level.
But what happens after school? While cognitive intelligence may be able to predict quite well how one will perform in school, it predicts very little else in the way of human performance and interaction after school. As such, IQ is a rather weak predictor of performance in interpersonal relations, at work and in coping with a wide variety of challenges that surface in the course of one's life on a daily basis (Wagner, 1997). Some writers makes a strong case that people owe their success in their career to a lot more than IQ. Wagner reviews data and offers convincing cases to show that an IQ above 110-115, fails as a predictor of success in a career. In other words, you need to be smart enough to handle the cognitive complexity of the information you need for a given role or job, be it engineering, law, medicine, or business. But after reaching this threshold of “smart enough,” your intellect makes little difference. Wagner concluded that IQ alone predicts just 6 to 10 percent of career success. It has been argued for over a century, as early as Charles Darwin, that something is missing from the human performance formula that is needed to explain why some people do very well in life while others do not, irrespective of how academically intelligent they may be. One of the first attempts by psychologists to identify additional predictors of performance in other aspects of life was made by Edward Thorndike (1920) when he described "social intelligence" as the ability to perceive one's own and others' internal states, motives and behaviours, and to act towards them appropriately on the basis of that information.
Mayer, Salovey and Caruso (2000:273) states that emotional intelligence includes “the ability to perceive, appraise and express emotion accurately and adaptively; the ability to understand emotion and emotional knowledge; the ability to access and generate feelings where they facilitate cognitive activities and adaptive action; and the ability to regulate emotions in oneself and others” all of these skills are necessary for the teacher to function successfully in the classroom.
The question is; does the modern teacher have the necessary EQ skills?
The researcher is investigating the level of emotional intelligence of 1st year Teacher Education students at the Central University of Technology. The results will be used in order to determine if the need exists for emotional intelligence training during the course of their studies.

Keywords:

EQ, Emotional Intelligence, teacher training.