How do I INSTRUCT emotion for kids?
Dear EQuipped Leaders,
Today we’ve arrived at the final and best (and hardest) way to respond to emotion:
Instruct Emotion!!!
We made it, the pinnacle of Emotional Intelligence mountain! Once you read this blog post, you’ll never have any difficulty responding effectively to your own or someone else’s emotions ever again.
Just kidding! :) Wouldn’t that be great though?
We might not ever fully arrive, but we can be a lot better EQuipped to deal when big emotions arise in us, our children, and our students.
I learned these 5 ways of responding last summer, so I’ve been trying to apply what I’ve learned to my life for a little over a year now. In that time, I’ve noticed that I definitely still ignore, inhibit, and invalidate emotion, my own and others’. However, I’m getting better at realizing it when I do, interrupting that behavior, and trying a substitute behavior.
I’m also getting better at practicing the script format for instructing emotion. I used to roll my eyes at the thought of using a script to talk about emotions, but now I am all about it. Big emotions mean calm, cool thinking has gone out the window, and in those instances, I need a script to keep me from getting dysregulated and mean.
Here is an example of how to instruct emotion in your classroom when a student is angry using a basic script format:
“Teacher: “I need you to stop, please.”
Student [in an angry voice]: “I need you to quit making us do these stupid assignments!”
Teacher: “I’m curious. How do you feel right now?”
Student: “I’m feeling angry that I have to do this stupid assignment.”
Teacher: “Ah, yes. I feel angry too sometimes when I have to do things I don’t like. I think I understand why you feel angry.”
Student: “Well, good, because this sucks.”
Teacher: “It’s okay to feel angry. It’s not okay to express your anger by disrupting others. Next time you feel angry, you can [offer choices from a preset list, preferably something you’ve practiced with the class before like Box Breathing].”
Here are the 4 steps of the script:
Help the student identify the emotion.
Validate the feeling (preferably by offering a time you felt that emotion)
Link the feeling with an unhelpful behavior the student is demonstrating.
Offer a substitute helpful behavior.
To test yourself, see if you can match each step with the example above.
Essentially, you’re teaching students: emotions are neither good or bad. They just are. We all have them (including me, the teacher) and none of them make you a “bad” person.
While all emotions are okay, not all behaviors are okay. Here is a substitute behavior that you can try the next time you feel angry.
So if you can genuinely validate the emotion, separate the emotion from the unhelpful behavior, and redirect the behavior, now we’re talkin’!!! We’re doing really hard, nuanced, important work that could massively change a kid’s ability to function socially.
Talking about emotions like this might feel super awkward at first. But imagine if students learn to understand and respond to their own emotions and the emotions of their peers throughout their PreK-12 school career. Imagine teachers are all trained on how to name, validate, and regulate their own emotions so they can model healthy emotional wellbeing for their students. Imagine an entire school district, where this is the norm for responding to emotion? How different would the school year feel? How much less tension and stress would exist in our classrooms and bodies? How much more learning could actually occur? How much more fun could we have?!?
That’s my WHY for working with Applied EQ. I believe we can build schools like this together.
The more I learn about healthy communication, the more I realize I’ve been communicating as if using an ancient stone tablet and chisel when I could have had a super computer all along. I wasn’t EQuipped.
While I know I’ll always keep learning, it does feel really empowering and hopeful to know that there is a path for responding compassionately to my own and others’ emotions. We can EQuip ourselves and school communities to respond to emotion. We’re taking a step in that direction together right now.
Thank you for being here with me. :)
Stay Soft, Elizabeth elizabeth@appliedeqgroup.com
Elizabeth graduated with a B.A. and M.A. in English from the University of Central Arkansas. She taught English for a decade and got to read and write alongside kids in 7th, 8th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade. The Applied EQ Group played an important role in her own personal EQ Intervention, and she is grateful to be able to spread the love and EQuip, empower, and encourage others. :)
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