Teaching for Intellectual and Emotional Learning (TIEL) is a model for guiding curriculum development and instructional planning needed to meet new educational standards. Schools in the 21st century must prepare students in new basic skills. These include the ability to sort and sift through information, plan and evaluate, think creatively and flexibly, appreciate diversity, and make ethical decisions.

Standards for K-12 students and standards for teacher preparation programs include many of these new basic skills that require a more complex approach to teaching and learning. Complex teaching and learning involves the purposeful teaching of thinking operations involved in the new basic skills integrated with social-emotional learning. At the same time, complex teaching prepares students in the traditional basic skills of reading, writing, and math.

TIEL provides a framework that helps educators, parents, and students understand the new basic skills. TIEL supports teachers and administrators in implementing complex teaching that leads to complex learning.

TIEL, however, is not a layer to be added onto an already over-burdened school day. Instead, it is a foundation that supports and extends meaningful work already taking place in the classrooms.

TIEL helps teachers become conscious of invisible thinking and emotional processes that are important to teaching and learning, but rarely made explicit. When teachers become conscious of these processes they are able to purposefully integrate them into curriculum and instruction.

TIEL brings balance to curriculum design that supports complex teaching and learning. The TIEL model helps teachers design project-based curriculum that purposefully teaches self-management skills of decision making, planning, and self-evaluation. TIEL helps educators understand these thinking skills and others necessary to complex learning. Using TIEL as a framework for curriculum design helps teachers balance content and process. TIEL helps teachers create learning experiences that span several basic thinking operations. When teachers plan curriculum using the TIEL framework, they create a classroom environment that encourages intellectual, emotional, and character development.

TIEL facilitates communication about teaching and learning. It helps students understand and discuss their learning by giving teachers a language with which to communicate about thinking and qualities of character. When students are consciously aware of and can name the thinking processes they are asked to use, they have a way to link those processes to other subject areas or to experiences in their lives outside of school. Students, who clearly understand how to make decisions, plan, and self-evaluate as they create projects, have ownership in their learning. Using TIEL, students become empowered, motivated, and self-directed. Teachers gain a control over their teaching that they have not previously experienced.

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