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Emotional Literacy

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Richard Wilson

Monday 28 August 2006

I had a visit from one of our Educational Psychologists on Friday to discuss what we do in school to support Emotional Literacy amongst our students. As well as the Jenny Moseley inspired circle time we have some additional resources which we have found to be very useful. The company Incentive Plus have many resources which you can see catalogued on thier web site. A set of cards called What would you do if...... and Dilemmas, which promote emotional literacy and are really effective and simple to use. Although the company place an age of 10+ on theuir usage, I have used them as far down as P3 with great effect.

A few years ago we had a pupil in school who was experiencing quite severe emotional and behavioural difficulties. Part of the problem was that the child did not have the vocabulary to express the difficulties being experienced at the time. This made meaningful communication very difficult and led us up several blind alleys before we could make a clear and balanced judgement of the patterns of behaviour being exhibited.

To compound the problem the staff, myself included, did not really have the expertise or indeed the proper vocabulary to explain the behaviours ourselves. I discovered a very helpful document which made everything much clearer and easier to quantify and helped describe different behaviours. It sets behaviour into three areas, learning behaviour, conduct behaviour and emotional behaviour. It then sets out criteria for measuring emotional and behavioural development which can be filled out as a tick sheet. For example Emotional behaviour is defined as empathy, social awareness, happiness, confidence, emotional stability and self-control. These are then further defined and it outlines desirable and undesirable behaviours.

We adopted this document as a staff and it has enabled us to be more accurate and more professional about our judgements. It also provides a common vocabulary and a reference point for meaningful discussion with parents who are understandably concerned about their child's behaviour.

The good news is that this document, Supporting school improvement , is now free to download as a pdf file from the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.

Get it, read it, use it.

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