The 3 R's of Emotional Learning

There is increasing attention to the field of social-emotional learning (SEL) that promotes teaching emotional and social skills to students by design and intention. However, in the SEL model, social and emotional learning are often bi-furcated or compartmentalized as unique skill sets. Social-emotional learning suggests that social skills and emotional management are parallel processes. Positive psychology proposes a more fluid view.

Emotional literacy is central and essential to social mastery.

Embedded at the core of positive psychology, and emotional learning, are the three R’s of emotional literacy: Regulation, Reconstruction, and Resilience.

To regulate emotion, students learn the ability to flip a negative emotion to positive emotion like they flip a baseball card. The ability to muster emotionally strong and positive responses involves the reconstruction of negative emotion. Students learn to deconstruct negative feelings so that a positive feeling emerges. When students are able to balance conflicting and competing emotions, they become emotionally stronger: more calm, capable, and resilient.

Emotionally competent and mature students are the ones who make and keep friends easily. Emotional engagement with strength builds capacity for caring and positive relationships, commitment to interpersonal contributions that are inherently satisfying to self and others, and a personal sense of accomplishment that supports the closed cycle of emotional regulation.

Teaching the 3 R's of emotional learning explicitly teaches children how to find the golden mean. Many philosophers have written about the “golden mean.” I describe the phenomena in my recent book:

“The golden mean is the balance of extremes. The golden mean is the equilibrium found in the ecology of science, the harmony of music, the mindfulness of measure, the balance of nature, and the ebb and the flow of life. The golden mean is the symmetry of well- being.”

The golden mean requires the brain-based skill of self-regulation of feelings: the awareness, identification, and moderation of emotion. Students are taught that emotional reaction is a choice and practice making a balanced choice. Positive psychology suggests that in the regulation of emotion, students build and reinforce neuronal pathways of more habitual strengths-based emotional responses such as resilience or the ability to persist in spite of adversity.

In other words, finding the golden mean creates a “golden self” (Aristotle) that uses emotional strength to defer impulse, make and keep friends, work in groups, resolve conflict, and help others. In other words, positive social relationships unfold, and positive social skills are deployed, as a result of expert emotional management.

To help teachers teach the golden mean, in my book I present a Positive Psychology Teaching Taxonomy derived from seven core feelings. Teachers learn to guide students from emotional regulation to engagement with consistent use of emotional strength. The emotional strength is activated to initiate and maintain strength-based relationships, assure meaningful support of self and others, and motivate personal accomplishment. One example:

+Emotion Engagement Relationship Meaning Accomplish

Feel Kind Empathy Forgiveness Tolerance Cooperation

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How do you teach the three R's of emotional learning in your classroom? Do you explicitly teach regulation? Reconstruction? Resiliency? Do you use techniques such as mediation of visualization? Do you create emotional learning centers? Do you role-play or read nonfiction readings with characters who regulate, reconstruct, and act in resilient ways? Do you differentiate emotional and social skills? Do you teach them conjointly? Do social skills flow from emotional skills? Another way to conceptualize the relationship is to consider that interpersonal mastery fosters intrapersonal mastery, and these are both conceived on an emotional continuum of mutual reciprocity.

My book, Positive Psychology in the Elementary School Classroom, is intended to help teachers use affective neuroscience to build positive psychology classrooms.