The Emotional Literacy Handbook

A Guide for Schools

James Park, Alice Haddon, Harriet Goodman

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135398170
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Demonstrating how schools can reduce conflict and bullying, this title promotes tolerance and stimulates a positive attitude to teaching and learning by creating an emotionally literate environment.

1

Emotional literacy basics

The rationale for emotional literacy

Schools are complex organisations caught up in a whirlwind of different pressures. Teachers and other staff are called upon to tackle social problems, to deliver government targets and to satisfy parental expectations while holding firm to their core purpose - helping young people to learn and to develop their potential.

These pressures on schools can generate high levels of anxiety in staff and students. The effect of feeling pulled in conflicting directions, and driven towards goals that feel either unachievable or undesirable, may be a sense of discomfort that, over time, undermines well-being, generates disaffection and constricts learning.

Emotional literacy is a strategy for transforming this anxiety, and other difficult emotions, into productive energy.

Practising emotional literacy involves every member of the school community in thinking about how emotions shape their actions and in using emotional understanding to enrich their thinking. This increases individuals' capacity to access emotional states that will enable them to play a part in the evolution of a more harmonious and vibrant learning community.

Emotional literacy has a vital part to play in tackling what are seen as the three great challenges facing our schools today. This is because it can:

1 enable staff and students to find ways of feeling connected to each other, and of using their relationships to process the emotions that might otherwise cause them to lash out in rage or to withdraw in despair;

2 increase learning ‘power’ by giving staff and students the capacity to deal with the emotions that can render them unable to learn, and to access emotional states such as curiosity, resilience and joy that lead to a richer experience of learning;

3 help staff and students to engage in activities that promote both physical and emotional well-being, and to broaden the range of what they can talk about with each other in ways that make it less likely they will abuse drugs and alcohol, bully their peers or engage in other forms of self-destructive activity.

This book shows how schools can promote emotional literacy by paying attention to the quality of relationships within their communities, and by creating diverse opportunities for people to have the sort of conversations that will enable them to appreciate the thoughts and feelings of each other.

In an emotionally literate school, emotions still have the potential to disrupt the processes of teaching and learning. Staff and students will argue with each other, become angry, have negative thoughts and sometimes lose interest in teaching or learning. But when they do, the emotions that drive these situations can be acknowledged, talked about, dealt with and learned from.

Emotional literacy is not a strategy that can be confined to any area of the curriculum or indeed to any particular group in the school. It is most effective when it permeates what goes on in the staffroom, the classroom, the school's corridors and its playgrounds, as well as affecting how the school interacts with the wider community.

For emotional literacy to flourish, those who exert pressure on the school from outside - whether parents or policy-makers - need to be attentive to the emotional consequences of their own actions. This is more likely to happen when they seek to facilitate, guide and inspire rather than control and direct.

The benefits of emotional literacy

The ambitions of an emotionally literate school

In a school that seeks to foster emotional literacy:

Young people

• are given opportunities to explore the emotions they are experiencing in school;

• are engaged in actively building collaborative relationships with their peers;

• have people they can talk to when they are in distress or find themselves caught up in conflicts with others;

• are encouraged to be open with their teachers about how they experience lessons and other aspects of school life.

Teachers and other staff

• have a sense of shared responsibility for supporting, and learning from, each other;

• feel free to use their creativity in teaching their students;

• are encouraged to bringing their personal as well as their professional selves into the classroom;

• have opportunities to explore with colleagues any difficult and confusing experiences they have in their relationships with young people.

Parents

• are welcomed as participants in school life and the education of their children;

• are offered opportunities to share any problems they have in helping their children to learn and develop;

• can air and work to resolve any conflicts they have with the school.

Staff, parents and young people

• are valued for the whole of who they are rather than simply for the contributions they make to particular aspects of school life;

• are given reason to believe that they have a real role to play in shaping how the school is run.

By pursuing these ambitions, the school seeks to ensure that staff and students feel:

Safe - so that they can communicate what they think and feel to others;

Clear - about what they are thinking, feeling and doing;

Accepted - for who they are;

Included - as an integral and important part of the organisation;

Listened to - by people who are seriously interested in their feelings and ideas;

Competent - confident that they are doing well, learning, growing and able to achieve.

Four schools in search of emotional literacy

The four schools described below have gone some way down the road towards emotional literacy. They are not presented as models to be followed, but as examples to stimulate thinking about which elements of what they are doing might, or might not, be relevant to your own setting, and about how you might do something similar, but different, yourself.

Tuckswood Community First School

Tuckswood First sits in the centre of a working-class estate outside Norwich. The social and economic problems of the surrounding area suggest that this might be a difficult environment in which to give children their first experience of education (from reception to Year 3), yet the school buzzes with learning energy.

The source of this energy lies in the way Tuckswood focuses on encouraging children to be ‘reflective, creative and critical thinkers’. This ambition runs like a thread through everything that happens in the school. In the classroom, the school council and elsewhere, children are encouraged to ‘develop the ability to play an active role in their community and have a reasoned voice, being able to make a positive difference to the world they live in’.

What this means in practice is that every significant challenge that faces staff or students - intellectual, behavioural, social or emotional - can be turned into a set of questions to be actively explored with other members of the community.

Say, for example, a six-year-old boy has called someone names in the playground. His teacher might gather his fellow students to think together about the boundaries of reasonable behaviour, why people feel tempted to cross them and what they should do collectively to prevent people hurting each other. Out of this process a policy can emerge that the young people who devised it understand and want to see enforced. Nobody has been shamed or blamed, but a real commitment to better behaviour has been planted.

The same principle of encouraging children to say what they think and to work out their own solutions to problems is applied in lessons. One teacher, for example, followed a science lesson on the bi-hemispheric structure of the brain and the role of neurons by asking children to brainstorm their own questions. ‘How did the neurons and dendrites get inside your head?’ and ‘Who made our brains?’ were among the suggestions put forward. The question the children chose to focus on, ‘Do neurons ever die?’, led to a lively discussion of tentative answers and further questions. What they came up with would not necessarily win them points in one of the many public exams awaiting them, but there is no doubt they were engaging their brains in an active and exciting exploration of fundamental scientific issues.

At Tuckswood, children's capacity to work together on such deep and interesting questions is cultivated through weekly philosophy lessons in every classroom. Using an approach called Philosophy for Children (P4C), children are encouraged to explore ideas, to ask questions about all areas of their lives inside and outside the school, to think, talk and really be listened to, away from curriculum pressures.

Through this questioning approach, the children address questions about what it means to live together and to work together. They explore each other's ideas, engage with the differences between them, learn how to help and support each other. ‘Philosophy,’ the school's web site says, ‘teaches children to respect the ideas and opinions of others and to listen and build on those ideas, to be collaborative and to stand up for what they believe in.’

The same approach is used to address issues that come up between staff. When Sue Eagle took over as head teacher eight years ago, staff were feeling dangerously demoralised. She set aside time for them to discuss what motivated them in coming to work, and what would make their teaching feel more exciting. Out of this exploration they developed a statement of the values they wanted to promote in their work with children. Enthusiasm for learning, persistence in learning and curiosity in learning were the ones that came up alongside the importance of working with integrity.

Sue Eagle says that Tuckswood does not ‘do emotional literacy’ but that ‘we are on the journey to becoming an emotionally literate organisation because of the way the curriculum is organised and the values we live by’. There is no curriculum time allocated specifically to learning about emotions, but this learning happens naturally during philosophy sessions and drama. The focus on questioning and collaboration means that emotions and relationships are continuously brought under the spotlight.

www.creative-corner.co.uk/schools/tuckswood

---

Buckingham Middle School

Many students who attend Buckingham Middle School at Shoreham-by-Sea in Sussex come from a local housing estate where relationships between families are sometimes fractious.

There was a time when these conflicts spilled out into the school. In trying to keep things under control, staff found themselves having to deal with some very challenging beha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Case studies
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Emotional literacy basics
• Chapter 2 Elements
• Chapter 3 Contexts
• Chapter 4 Strategies
• Chapter 5 Conclusion - education for an emotionally literate society
• Appendix 1 Organisations offering processes for developing emotional language
• Appendix 2 Organisations promoting or offering training in circle time
• Appendix 3 Organisations that promote or provide training in peer support
• Appendix 4 Organisations that provide training in philosophy for children
• Appendix 5 Organisations that provide therapeutic group work or relevant training
• Appendix 6 Organisations with an interest in emotionally literate ways of learning
• Appendix 7 Organisations promoting democracy, citizenship and values education in schools
• Appendix 8 Organisations that provide emotional literacy training for teachers and others
• Appendix 9 Groups providing support for parents and families
• Appendix 10 Specialist distributors of books and resources relating to emotional literacy
• Appendix 11 Networks and groups for young people' emotional well-being and learning
• Appendix 12 Useful web-based resources
• References
• Index