Taking care of and teaching children may be emotionally draining. This is due to the fact that youngsters look to their caregivers for emotional support and stability. When teachers are at their best, they create a supportive environment in the classroom, maintain high levels of engagement, inspire the children they teach, and support the developmental outcomes of children in order to achieve organizational objectives. Therefore a workshop was conducted to help play-group teachers to understand emotional labor and regulate emotional expressions with children as part of their professional work role.

The workshop was conducted for 4 teachers from the playgroup for 45 minutes. Teachers were introduced to the concept of emotions, different kinds of emotions and emotional expressions. They were then taken through the concept of emotional labor and its importance among PG teachers. Additionally, they learnt about several forms of emotional labor, such as genuine expression, deep acting, and surface acting. Few suggestions on how to deal with the effects of surface level and deep level acting were given to the teachers. Teachers were given strategies on how to handle the fallout from their emotional labor. 

There was a small activity conducted in between the session which involved enacting. Later the insights of the activity were discussed pertaining to emotional labor. The session concluded with a few tips tapping on self – care and multiple other factors through which teachers could cope with their bottled up emotions through emotional labor.

The Counseling Team,

Ms. Rakshitha V

Ms. Vaishnavi Chakrapani