OKAPI, an Emotional Education and Classroom Climate Improvement Program Based on Cooperative Learning: Design, Implementation, and Evaluation

A positive school climate can directly influence the relationships and social interactions among students while also contributing to the development of socio-emotional skills. Simultaneously, the school climate depends on these said skills. Despite this close relationship, emotional education and school climate improvement programmes have traditionally been studied separately. This study describes and evaluates the effectiveness of a new programme, OKAPI (Organisation, Cooperation, Positive Environment, Participation and Emotional Intelligence), for the development of socio-emotional skills and the improvement of classroom climate for primary school students using a cooperative learning methodology. The total sample comprised 86 students aged 9–11 years. A quasi-experimental design with pre-test and post-test measures with a control group was used. The results show that the program’s implementation is effective both for the improvement of the classroom climate and the acquisition of training in the field of emotional intelligence, as well as for the development of cooperative competences. Among the fundamental pillars of the OKAPI programme are its simplicity and transversality, so that teachers are responsible for its application and monitoring; thus, the programme becomes an agent of change in their educational practice.

Emotional Competencies in Primary Education as an Essential Factor for Learning and Well-Being

Numerous contributions corroborate the need to include emotional education and the development of emotional competencies at school to improve students’ school learning and well-being. The present study aims to learn more about the development of emotional competencies in primary school students, taking into account gender differences across different cycles and analyzing the potential link with students’ overall academic performance. Participants were 2389 primary school students (51.2% boys and 48.8% girls), aged from 6 to 12, from 21 public and semi-private schools in Spain. The study is a non-experimental quantitative study, using an ex-post-facto descriptive method. The Emotional Development Questionnaire (CDE 9-13), the Emotional Competencies Observation Scale, and the overall grade point average were applied to the sample. The results show significant differences in favor of girls in the development of most emotional competencies in all three educational cycles. Differences were also observed in academic performance by gender in the primary school cycle, with girls achieving higher grades. At the same time, positive correlations were found between academic performance and emotional competencies. The results confirm the importance of including emotional education in primary education.

Socio-emotional education: paths to inspire studies, research and practices

This article presents findings of a bibliographic research which had as its scope identifying social and emotional skills proposed by different authors from this field. More specifically, it aimed to: classifying social and emotional skills by domains of competencies; detailing the skills related to self-awareness, focusing on the emotional dimension; proposing a lesson plan for promoting self-awareness in the classroom. The findings have shown that: by detailing social and emotional skills per competence, it may contribute to guide pedagogical activities based on theoretical pinpoints; deepening the theoretical foundations of emotions is essential for understanding the process of self-awareness; creating pedagogical sequences coherent and consistent with social and emotional development, requires the exercise of transposing theory into practice, respecting each educator’s singularities according to his/her reality in class.

The method of emotional education in music teaching

Wang Guowei, a famous scholar and thinker in our country, thinks that “aesthetic education harmonizes people's feelings in the process of emotional music education, so as to achieve the perfect domain”, “aesthetic education is also emotional education”. Therefore, in the process of music education, emotional education plays an important role in middle school music teaching, and it is also the highest and most beautiful realm in the process of music education in music teaching. Music teachers should be good at using appropriate teaching methods and means. In the process of music education, they should lead students into the emotional world, knock on their hearts with the beauty of music, and touch their heartstrings. Only when students' hearts are close to music in the process of music education, can they truly experience the charm of music and realize the true meaning of music in the process of music education. Only in this way can music classes be effectively implemented The purpose of classroom emotion teaching.