Ideally, school is a place where young people develop their cognitive and emotional skills within an ever-changing world. The classroom is a microcosm of society where the following mental states are engendered: passions, sharing, friendship, exclusion and - on a deeper level - identification movements, splitting, projection and integration. I held Balint Groups in Milan, Italy, for Elementary and Middle school teachers with the aim of improving rapport with their students. We used film clips as tools to develop contact with emotions: the groups watched them and shared their observations and reflections. This article describes how these groups worked on both transforming the emotions and experiences of counter-transference evoked in teachers by their relationship with students, and opening their minds to new ways of understanding. There is also a comment by the Headteacher of the school I collaborated with, which provides an educational framework connecting the experience described in this article with other recent studies on the same topic. Lastly, the Headteacher’s comments describe the changes that are taking place in the field of Education, clarifying the goals, teaching objectives, students’ achievements and current challenges.
Keywords: Balint Group with teachers, the emotional experience of learning and teaching, cinema, how to read emotions