TRAINING TEACHERS IN EMOTIONAL EDUCATION: A VISION OF FUTURE SCHOOLTEACHERS

The present study is aimed at knowing the opinion of future teachers about the importance and necessity of academic training in emotional education, which is essential for the optimal performance of their professional teaching work, with the purpose of providing orientations that may lay the foundation for the design of the initial training of teachers in the framework of the European Higher Education Area. The methodology used involved a sample of 265. Information was gathered using the Scale of Importance and Training Needs in Emotional Education, and analysed using correlation techniques, factor analysis, descriptive statistics and mean differences. The KMO >.5 measure and the significance of the Barlett's sphericity test showed that the data were suitable for being subject to factorial analysis. In general terms, the internal consistency of the two main subscales of the EINFEM, observed in the present study, could be considered sufficiently satisfactory. For the global scorings in the subscales importance and necessities, alpha values were obtained equal to .91 and .95 respectively. The results indicate that the participating student group attaches the greatest importance to training in complementary emotional competencies, followed by interpersonal emotional competencies and, finally, intrapersonal emotional competencies. With respect to the training needs, these essentially focus on interpersonal emotional competencies and complementary emotional competencies and, to a lesser extent, on intrapersonal emotional competencies. Additionally, significant differences are found among students according to the educational course in which they are registered.