Dr. Anabel L. Jensen is an American educator and author best known for her work with curriculum utilizing emotional intelligence. A former director of the Nueva Learning Center in the 1980s and 1990s, she became president of Six Seconds in 1997 and CEO of Synapse School in 2009. She currently is a professor at Notre Dame de Namur University.
Dr. Anabel Lee Jensen | |
---|---|
Occupation | Educator, Businesswoman, Author |
Citizenship | United States |
Education | Brigham Young University |
Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley |
Subject | Emotional intelligence, Education |
Anabel Lee Jensen, born to two US Army officers who were of Danish descent, began attending Brigham Young University in 1961, and graduated in 1966 with a BA in psychology and a Masters of Education.[1] She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1976,[2] where she majored in child development and minored in statistics.[3]
From 1983 to 1997, she was Executive Director[4] of the Nueva Learning Center in California,[5][6] where she helped develop the "Self-Science" curriculum featured in Daniel Goleman's 1995 book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ,[7][8] which helped bring EQ into the mainstream.[4]
In 1997, former Nueva School administrators and teachers Jensen, Karen McCown, Joshua Freedman and Marsha Rideout left the school to found the Six Seconds EQ Network, a non-profit focused on education about EQ.[4] As founding President, she has helped write training programs and psychometric assessments for the organization, including Six Seconds Emotional Intelligence Assessment (SEI) and the Youth Version (SEI-YV).[2]
She co-founded the elementary and middle school Synapse School with Karen Stone-McCown in 2009. As of 2013[update] she is a full professor at the Notre Dame de Namur University in California, where she teaches psychology[9] to graduate students and is Department Chair of the school's College of Education.[3] She is also a principal advisor to the Gifted Support Center[10] and an advisor for Unite Education.[2]
In 2015, Jensen was named one of the top 100 Women of Influence for 2015 by the Silicon Valley Business Journal for her work in the field of emotional intelligence.[11] She has been interviewed frequently in digital and print publications such as Quartz (2015)[12] and bizjournals.com (2015).[13]
Jensen has authored articles for outlets such as Priorities Magazine and the Discovery Channel,[2] including the 1986 article Greater than the parts: Shared decision making about the Nueva School, in the Roeper Review.[5] The second edition of Self-Science was published in 1998, with Jensen contributing.[4] She published Joy and Loss: The Emotional Lives of Gifted Children with Joshua Freedman in 1999,[14] and the book Emotional Development and Emotional Intelligence: Educational Implications was written based on Jensen providing curriculum access to the writer.[15] In 2010, she published Feeling Smart: Competencies Recommendations and Exercises.[7] She has been a keynote speaker at national conferences on various topics.[2]