Enhancing Primary School Teachers’ Emotion Coaching and Empathy with the Parenting Webinar “Tuning in to Kids” – a Pilot Study

Children develop emotional competencies at home and at school. Teachers serve as facilitators of their students’ emotional development while also handling a variety of sometimes difficult emotional situations with children, colleagues, and parents. Emotion coaching is a parenting style that empathizes with children’s emotions and models emotion regulation and problem-solving. This study pilots the “Tuning in to Kids” emotion coaching parenting training for special education teachers and other teaching and school professionals.N = 45 participants were trained in a group webinar in six consecutive sessions. The emotional style questionnaire was administered before and after the training and revealed significant improvements in emotion coaching attitudes and empathy, and a significant decrease in emotion dismissing attitudes, with great effect sizes. Qualitative evaluation of the training shows a great relevance and applicability of emotion coaching in daily school life. Relevance and implications of the findings are discussed.