Teaching and Learning Strategies for Promoting Students’ Emotional Intelligence and Life Skills: The Case of Four Primary Schools in Kigoma, Tanzania

Abstract

Emotional intelligence and life skills for children have appeared to be important educational endeavor in the recent decades in Tanzania and globally. As such, the contemporary life requires adoption of teaching and learning strategies that help empowering young students with competences to understand themselves, others and their environment so as to be able to engage effectively in solving life realities facing them. Teaching in the classroom that ends up in students acquiring emotional intelligence and life skills depends on the teachers’ perceived curriculum. Hence, the objectives of this study were to explore the teachers’ views on the need for emotional intelligence and teaching and learning strategies with the potential of promoting young students’ emotional intelligence and life skills. The study involved thirty-two (32) teachers including four head teachers, four discipline teachers and twenty-four subject teachers using semi-structured interviews, focus group discussion and documentary review methods of the qualitative research tradition. Data were analyzed using the Miles and Huberman’s (1994) framework involving data reduction, data display and conclusion drawing and verification. The results established that those teachers noted the importance of those affective aspects but reported confusions resulting from educational superintendents’ emphasis on academic performance. Further, participants pinpointed teaching and learning strategies for promoting emotional intelligence and life skills to include activity-based lessons and practices. The study provides some recommendations aiming at altering the educational focus particularly at the time when the globalized world calls for holistic education to enable young people take their positions and thrive as world citizens.