Enhancing Emotional Intelligence (EQ) to Embrace Teach Less, Learn More Initiatives

Introduction

Society may be deemed as being on the cusp of the third and fourth industrial revolution. While industries have begun to revolve and remain pivotal in the advancement of scientific applications that churn out innovative technological breakthroughs, the same cannot be said about education today and in the past. The advent of the internet and social media has allowed learning to become borderless, more experience-based and more fun. Many institutions of teaching and learning have seen this shift towards a new paradigm but remain beleaguered as to the approach to be taken for the benefit of teaching and learning. At Taylor’s Lakeside Campus, the idea to teach less yet learn more was mooted a few years ago, and technology combined with the best features of face-to-face interaction was the specific method used to facilitate an effective teaching and learning environment that empowered learners in their learning while preparing them for the challenges of the 21st century. While much effort was placed on various initiatives to transform the teaching and learning environment, an equal level of effort, if not more, must be placed to ensure that learners entering the realms of higher education are well prepared to embrace the challenges in store for them in the near future. Learners have to be more proactive and must be able to adapt to the various learning styles that are practised within a single curriculum and enhance their attainment of soft skills in order to excel in the multiple fields of study, and more importantly to cope with the ever-changing demands and challenges that the future holds for them. This chapter provides a brief review of how Teach Less Learn More (TLLM) initiatives were extensively employed to teach Emotional Intelligence (EQ) to learners at Taylor’s University Lakeside Campus. TLLM initiatives used include Project-Based Learning, Johari Window, My Emotions Today, Forgiveness Mailbox and the ROBORACE. The adoption of TLLM initiatives to teach EQ within an engineering curriculum was aimed at coupling affective and psychomotor related abilities to the cognitive abilities within all assessment’s components of a specific module within the Foundation in Engineering program. TLLM also provided learners with more holistic learning as learners not only learnt during their lecture sessions but also during the journey taken in fulfilling the assessment components of the module.