Students need emotional intelligence skills — ASAP. What can educators do to help?
Practical guidance for teachers inspired by Marc Brackett’s Permission to Feel.
I don’t remember how I learned about Marc Brackett’s Permission to Feel, but if it was how I find out most things these days, it was probably through Instagram.
About five weeks into my remote teaching journey, I started setting aside the last few minutes of class for students to “check-in.” Typically, I’d begin by posting the simple question, “How are you feeling?” into our class chat.
Students responded to this optional prompt both privately and publicly. Whether they answered with memes, gifs, sentences, or paragraphs, here are some of the most common (and memorable) words they shared:
worried
sad
okay
bored
stupefied
confused
meh
All normal teenage emotions, but ones exacerbated by the pandemic and ensuing lockdown (which my students had been enduring for over six months at that point). While I wasn’t surprised by their feelings, as I had been experiencing similar ones, I was surprised by the following:
- Students’ willingness to talk about their emotions, especially with their peers (many of whom they had not yet met face-to-face). Although their responses were surface-level at first, students’ ability to share their feelings (especially “negative” ones), required a level of vulnerability that I didn’t think we’d be able to cultivate so early in the school year.
- Students’ limited emotional vocabulary, a phenomenon that I would soon learn to label (thanks to Brackett) as alexithymia. Although students were starting to open up about their emotions, their words to describe these feelings remained relatively simple: good, fine, bad, tired — even I don’t know— were typical responses to “How are you feeling?” questions.
- Students’ gratitude. Mrs. Thune, I’m pretty content today, but I want to thank you for asking. It feels like you really care about us. What started with a simple question provided students with an opportunity not only to reflect on and share their emotions but also to start building meaningful relationships with their teacher (and eventually, each other).
These results left me with a pressing question: How do I better support my students’ social-emotional health? In pursuit of the answer, I decided to start with the resources I already had: the most notable of which was Permission to Feel.
Brackett, the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, presents his research on emotional intelligence in user-friendly language designed to maximize understanding and application in the real world (especially, he argues, in the classroom). Essentially, Brackett contends that emotional intelligence is (1) a skill that can be developed and (2) should be introduced to students as early as preschool.
These insights, coupled with knowledge of my students’ social-emotional needs, inspired me to incorporate emotional intelligence skills into my curricula. In both my AP English Language and Junior English classes, my students and I…
- Discussed our personal experience (or lack of personal experience) with emotional expression and regulation. Because of the potentially sensitive nature of this topic, I started the conversation by talking about my own struggles as a teenager in an environment that prioritized achievement over mental health and how I was using Brackett’s strategies to improve my emotional intelligence as an adult. Knowing that their teacher was developing emotional intelligence skills alongside them not only helped my students “buy-in” to this concept, but also build trust with me and their classmates.
- Read about and watched Brackett’s explanation of emotional intelligence and the RULER method. Because students have the natural tendency to be skeptical, enabling them to evaluate the data behind Brackett’s work helped to alleviate some of their concerns about diving into this topic and generate questions about its utility.
- Applied our emotional intelligence skills in daily and weekly reflections and even questions about class texts (for example, Using Brackett’s Mood Meter, describe your reaction to the narrative’s resolution.) Students even began sharing anecdotes about their use of emotional intelligence skills outside the classroom — with parents, friends, teachers, coaches, bosses, coworkers — which only served to further increase their engagement in the topic as well as the class.
Some educators may not think they have time to “fit” emotional intelligence skills into their already jam-packed curricula. Our workload, which a twenty-year-old report described as “already excessive” and “stress-inducing,” was only increased by the demands of the pandemic.
While emotional intelligence can be framed as something to “do” (the approach I took in terms of explicitly designing emotional intelligence activities), it can also be purposefully incorporated into what students are already experiencing in the classroom.
Learning about mood, tone, diction, or imagery? Use the Mood Meter to find precise and descriptive language. Reflecting on a difficult math test? Use the RULER (recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing, and regulating) method to process areas of strength and improvement. Brackett and the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence have even adapted RULER into a systems-wide approach that’s being implemented in school districts across the United States.
Ultimately, the focus on emotional intelligence in schools can no longer be dismissed as another foray into “feel-goodery” ; in fact, this evidence-based practice is more important than ever as teachers and students not only heal, but grow from the social-emotional challenges they experienced during the pandemic.
As educators, it’s time we gave ourselves “permission” to do all that we can to improve our students’ mental health — which starts by helping our students build their emotional intelligence skills.
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