Model emotional literacy

teaching practice

Save

For student year

Preschool to Year 2

Helps students to

identify and respond to emotions

regulate emotions

Helps teachers to

support emotional development

respond to emotions

Summary

You play a key role in helping your students to develop emotional literacy, which is the ability to identify, understand and respond to one’s emotions. Some students, including those on the autism spectrum, often struggle to recognise and understand their own emotions and the emotions of others. This can lead to larger behaviour concerns within your classroom. By supporting your whole class in developing emotional literacy, you can allow discussion about emotions and establish a deeper understanding. Emotional literacy is essential for all children to understand that the emotion they feel is neither good or bad, and to understand how to process emotions in a healthy way. This creates empathy and kindness within your classroom.

How the practice works

Watch this video to learn more about this practice.

Duration: 4:00

Australian Professional Standards for Teachers related to this practice

1.6 - strategies to support the full participation of students with disability

4.1 - support student participation

For further information, see Australian Professional Standards for Teachers AITSL page

Join the inclusionED community

View this content in full by creating an account.

Continue

Already have an account? Log in

Preparing to teach

The ability to identify, understand, and label emotions develops over time and it is critical that adults actively foster it. Plan to foster students’:

emotional vocabulary
identification of the full range of emotions experienced
communication of emotional experiences to others (parents, peers and teachers)
recognition of situations that evoke these emotions.

By also labelling feelings in appropriate situations, you:

expose students to a rich vocabulary for expressing feelings
teach your students about empathy for others
assist students to understand ways to express their emotions.

It also allows your students to understand where the emotion comes from, recognise it, and learn how to self-regulate before a strong reaction occurs.

It works better if:

you consider student communication skills; emotions are abstract concepts so use visual supports (graphics or video) where possible
you start by teaching universal primary emotions (e.g., happy, sad, angry) to establish a base understanding before continuing to secondary emotions (e.g., jealous, embarrassed)
you use different strategies to teach about emotion (e.g., visual, oral, movement)
strategies for managing challenging feelings are taught while the student is calm.

It doesn’t work if:

strategies are taught during times of distress; we all have trouble learning when we are very stressed or upset
your student has interoception needs and may struggle to recognise body clues when they are feeling emotion
your explanation of the feeling and associated events is too complicated or the student is not able to understand the emotion being taught.

Related Practices

This practice is from the core research project