4 Ways to Leverage Emotions for Learning

Nearly every educator will tell you that teaching is an inherently emotional career. Students and teachers navigate challenges, celebrate victories, and form unique bonds and complex relationships during their time together in the classroom. Research shows that teachers’ and students’ emotions can play off of each another, a process termed classroom emotional transmission.

This has implications for all involved; students’ emotions can impact their teachers’ stress and well-being, and teachers’ emotions can similarly impact students’ engagement and, eventually, learning. While this exchange goes both ways, the teacher is uniquely poised as a key point of social reference; when children are deciding how to feel in their environment, they often look to a “more knowledgeable other” for social information.

As the “more knowledgeable other” in the classroom, the teacher has the power to use their emotions intentionally to set the tone for successful engagement. Despite this important position as students’ main social reference, few teachers receive formal training on how to consider their and their students’ emotions in their teaching.

I offer some approaches below that kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers can take to help create an emotionally responsive classroom where all individuals’ emotions are honored and validated, emotional trust and security are prioritized, and all individuals can strengthen their emotion regulation skills.

Center emotions in classroom norms and expectations

A shared commitment to community standards is an essential part of a well-functioning classroom. This can be extended to classroom emotions so that both the teacher and students feel safe and have opportunities to practice emotion regulation. Classroom norms surrounding emotions could be structured around the following themes.

All emotions are OK. This one can be tough to embrace—negative emotions are uncomfortable, and sometimes even positive emotions can disrupt a classroom. The idea here is that to productively work with and through our emotions, we need to accept them ourselves and also have them validated by others.

Fostering classroom-level acceptance of emotions by including emotions in community standards sets the foundation for an emotionally responsive classroom. You can include this or something similar in the classroom norms and expectations that you set with students in the first days of the school year, continuing to uphold it when responding to students’ (and your own!) emotions on an everyday basis.

This could be as simple as stating to a student who is experiencing overwhelming feelings, “I know you’re having some big feelings right now. Remember our classroom norm about emotions? Having big feelings is OK in this classroom.”

Emotions are different from behaviors. It’s important to make a clear distinction between emotions and behaviors. In an emotionally safe space, all emotions are accepted and validated. However, it is possible for emotions to lead to behaviors that detract from learning in the classroom, and it’s important to be mindful of this key difference. For example, you can address disruptive student behaviors that may arise because of negative student emotions while at the same time validating the emotions themselves.

The example above serves to validate the students’ emotions and reassure the students that in this classroom, they are safe to experience big feelings. The next step would be to make a distinction between feelings and behaviors and to offer the student an alternative to the behavior they’re exhibiting that will help them regulate their emotions: “It’s OK to have big feelings, but it’s not OK to yell or hit. Instead, I want you to go to the quiet corner and take 10 deep breaths. Then, when you’re calm, we can have a talk about what happened.”

Regulation takes practice. Learning how to regulate our emotions is a lifelong endeavor, and children are just beginning this process. Setting the understanding that no one in the classroom is going to be perfect at all times in their emotion regulation (including the teacher) and placing this understanding at the foundation of classroom management gives everyone space to make mistakes and learn.

Expanding again on the above scenario, if the student wasn’t able to regulate themself on the first try and ended up throwing an object, the teacher could give them another strategy for calming down, while acknowledging that sometimes it takes multiple tries: “It looks like what we tried last time didn’t quite work—let’s try a new way to calm down before we work on finding a solution. This time, I want you to put your headphones on and spend five minutes reading to yourself in the quiet corner. I’ll come check on you after five minutes to see if you’re feeling calmer.”

Use emotions with intention

We frequently experience our emotions passively; they just sort of come up in response to the things around us. It can be beneficial, however, to regard our emotions with active awareness and to seek deeper understanding why certain emotions arise.

The potential for the teacher as the leader of the classroom to use their emotions for the benefit of everyone is unparalleled; the teacher’s emotional expressions, and consciousness of and control over these expressions, can truly be a teaching superpower.

A colleague had the perfect analogy for this: Teachers can either be the “emotional thermometer” in the classroom by passively reacting to what is happening, or they can be the “emotional thermostat”—the one who intentionally sets and adjusts the emotional tone in the classroom. By using techniques such as mindfulness and cognitive behavioral strategies such as identifying your emotions, teachers not only can become the emotional thermostat, but also can serve as a model to students for emotional regulation.

Identify patterns

It’s worthwhile to spend some time identifying the emotional patterns that emerge in the classroom regarding emotions. For example, you might notice that students tend to have more negative emotions in the last hour of the day or that they tend to have more positive emotions during small group work.

You might even notice that you yourself experience some patterns—for example, you may struggle with emotions while teaching mathematics in particular. Identifying these patterns is a critical first step toward accomplishing the next point.

Be Proactive Rather than reactive

Once you’ve identified patterns, you can take a proactive approach to managing these while teaching. The goal here is to get ahead of potential emotionally charged situations and set yourself and your students up for success. This can mean anticipating an upcoming negative event and trying to proactively prevent or mitigate it, but importantly, this can also mean anticipating a positive event and trying to magnify and extend it to support students’ engagement.

For example, you might consider restructuring your schedule if possible so that those consistently positive small group lessons take place later, and the students can engage in quick mindful check-ins themselves before each mathematics lesson to set the tone for a positive lesson.

This isn’t to say that reacting isn’t also valuable—of course it is important to apply effective classroom management strategies in the face of disruption. A proactive approach can go a long way in creating an environment in which students are more likely to experience positive emotions and, as a result, increased engagement.