Emotional Intelligence

Strength of Heart

Definition: Understanding your feelings and using them wisely. Connecting to Social Intelligence also involves noticing how others feel.

"Emotional intelligence is the ability to monitor and use emotions to guide thinking and actions." (Hales, D., 2021)

"We all need skills to recognize and understand our emotions, label and express them, and regulate them to achieve optimum wellbeing and success at home, school, and in the workplace." (Character Lab)

Note: As emotional intelligence is a big part of the social and emotional learning (SEL) movement, this page offers much more information compared to the other Character Strengths pages.

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The Strengths Spotlight Podcast Series: Listen to the Institute of Positive Education descriptors of the strengths that include integration strategies.

What it Looks Like and How to Encourage:

  • I notice how I am feeling and think about why I feel that way.

  • I look at others’ facial expressions and body language to know how they are feeling.

  • I generally understand what causes my feelings.

  • I have a wide and specific vocabulary for talking about my feelings.

  • I am comfortable expressing my feelings, both pleasant and unpleasant ones.

  • I have a lot of different strategies for handling my feelings.

  • Situational analysis (Teachable Moments)

From Character Lab...

Model It. Try hard to understand the emotions of others by listening carefully, paying close attention to people’s faces and bodies, and asking them how they feel. Strive to handle your own emotions in a way that aligns with your best self and your goals.

Celebrate It. Emotions are contagious: When we’re feeling good, we can spread those positive feelings by sharing them with others. If you see the young people in your life experience pride, gratitude, or inspiration, applaud it and encourage them to talk about it: “I love how you helped your friends resolve their argument. Let’s tell the rest of the family about it at dinner.”

Enable It. All emotions matter. Create space for friends and loved ones to feel comfortable exploring and expressing all of their emotions—good and bad: “You seem upset about the game. Talk to me about what’s frustrating you.” Use conflict and challenging situations as opportunities for both you and them to practice and develop emotional skills.

Unpack the Strength¹:

  • What does the strength look like in action?

  • What does this strength feel like in action?

  • When and where can you use it?

  • What is the "shadow side" of this strength?

Teacher Strategies to Personally Strengthen Their Emotional Intelligence:

Character Lab EI Teaching Strategies and Tips: How to offer age-appropriate versions of the strategies? Note: There are dozens and dozens of tips from Character Lab. These choices are filtered for elementary school and practicality to bring this strength into the culture of one's classroom.

Setting Healthy Boundaries

The folks at Positive Psychology offer an excellent overview of information and activities to support their chart that is shown above. This information is intended for adult users of this site. There is also an integration strategy listed below for students in which the Positive Psychology materials can be adapted to the developmental levels of the students. Being assertive is an important aspect of setting healthy boundaries. One definition is being assertive "means recognizing your feelings and making your needs and desires clear to others". (Hales, D., 2021)

From Positive Psychology...

Emotional health activities and improving emotional health through training

Five Components of Emotional intelligence:

  • Self-awareness – the knowledge of what we feel and why we feel so

  • Self-regulation – the ability to express our feelings in the right way

  • Motivation – the internal drive to change the way we feel and express ourselves

  • Empathy – the ability to relate to others’ emotions and see the world from their perspective

  • Social skills – the power to communicate effectively and build strong connections at home or in school

Mood Meter

(Simpler Version)

The RULER Framework for Understanding the Five Skills of Emotional Intelligence (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence). You can pull from the Positive Psychology version and this Mood Meter to develop language around skills and components of emotional intelligence and literacy. Our ultimate goal is to build emotional fluency in our students.

  • Recognizing emotions in oneself and others

  • Understanding the causes and consequences of emotions

  • Labeling emotions with a nuanced vocabulary

  • Expressing emotions in accordance with cultural norms and social context

  • Regulating emotions with helpful strategies

"RULER skills help people of all ages to use their emotions wisely, opening opportunities for us to succeed in school, at work, and in life. These skills are both personal and social, such that a network emerges with positive changes reinforced." (Source)

Mood Meter

Mood Meter

(More developed version)

(Press Command and + to increase size)
Plutchik Wheel of Emotions

Access Interactive Plutchik Wheel of Emotions

(Press Command and + to increase size of image)

CASEL Competencies Within Emotional Intelligence> Full List

Responsible Decision-Making: The ability to make caring and constructive choices about personal behavior and social interactions across diverse situations.

Self-Awareness: The ability to accurately recognize one’s emotions and thoughts and their influence on behavior. This includes accurately assessing one’s strengths and limitations and possessing a well-grounded sense of confidence and optimism.

Self-Management: The ability to regulate one’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviors effectively in different situations. This includes managing stress, controlling impulses, motivating oneself, and setting and working toward achieving personal and academic goals.

Emotional Intelligence Secondary Integration Strategies: These strategies are secondary to the PRIME strategies and at times specific to this Character Strength. Italicized strategies denote secondary strategies attached only to a few strengths. Don't forget to go to the Character Strengths introduction page for the PRIME strategies that work across all of the strengths. Look to frame the learning path for your students as starting with emotional literacy eventually growing into emotional fluency.

  • Active/Attentive Listening - One way to help our students make emotional and social connections with each other is to help them learn how to listen with attention. Design a listening protocol based on the tenets of attentive listening that fits the age of your students. Use this article and this one as a starting place with your design work to teach and embed active listening into the culture of your classroom. Look to integrate active listening into your Turn and Talk activities.

  • Atlas of Emotions - The atlas is an interactive tool that builds your emotional vocabulary. One strategy is to explore this tool using your projector to show your students the five universal emotions (anger, disgust, enjoyment, fear, and sadness). When you select an emotion you are taken to a graph showing the intensity of variations on the emotion. A second strategy is to share the Timeline visual which shows cause and effect when we are triggered to then experience each of the five main emotions and how we might respond. Another pathway to follow is the Response visual which takes the graph of emotion and shows possible responses. You can select each response for a description of what it looks like in action. It is definitely worth taking some time to explore this resource to come up with ways to use it!

  • Character Day - Find ways to participate and elaborate on the activities offered for this annual event.

  • Digital Wellness and Citizenship - Work with the wellness coach and the tech integration coach to design lessons on these two topics. The wellness coach brings knowledge of digital wellness, while the tech integration coach covers citizenship in the digital realm with students. One activity is to have the class brainstorm a list of all the hardware and software they use. Each student divides a worksheet into three columns, or you provide one. Across the top are the column headers of "Technology," - "Actions," - "Emotions." Students work individually to list software or hardware to describe how they use it in the second column. The third column is where they describe the emotions that arise when using each type of technology. You can add a group work aspect of having students compare findings or move to the next phase of the activity. Ask the following questions for students to respond to on the back of the worksheet: When are you feeling uncomfortable emotions when using technology? When are there times when your use of technology leads others to have emotional responses? What are some examples? This activity aims to raise self-awareness of how using technology affects the users' and others' emotional states.

  • Do You Feel Me? - Watch videos of elementary students sharing stories. Your students then guess the emotion(s) the presenter felt.

  • Drawing and Feelings - Sitting down to draw as an outlet to calm down when experiencing intense emotions and as a way to express feelings are just two ways that drawing can help students process their feelings.

  • Emotion Check-Ins - Possibly add check-ins to your morning meeting. Here is one technique of many. Six Seconds offers a few helpful strategies and a feeling chart to help students name and acknowledge their feelings. As your students grow their emotional vocabulary and understanding, you could eventually move on to the Putchik Wheel of emotions with gets into intensity, exemplars, and opposite emotions. Design your own survey.

  • Emotion Coaching - Use the steps of emotion coaching when students "flip their lids".

  • Emotions to Behaviors - Plan some lessons on the topic of how emotions can lead to certain behaviors. Here is a short listing of positive emotions and possible behaviors as an example. You can also bring in uncomfortable emotions as well. But remember that uncomfortable emotions can have their place in human experience and can have constructive behaviors. Fear is one example that can lead to caution in potentially dangerous situations.

  • Emotional/Feelings Thermometer - Download or create your own emotional thermometer to post in your room for the students to choose an emotion and their degree of feeling it. Here is a helpful lesson.

  • Empathy as a Daily Habit - Offer ongoing activities such as random acts of kindness, "tuning into others", the use of "I feel" messages, and active listening (teach and model) to make empathy a part of your class culture.

  • Focus Five - Focus 5 is a set of exercises that provides students and teachers with skills to minimize distraction and develop a greater sense of focus and awareness. The exercises range in length from one to five minutes. Download the cards.

  • Games - Playworks provides a wonderful list of group games to help students grow their strengths of emotional intelligence, self-control, and social intelligence.

  • Healthy Boundaries - Look to read through the 7 Types of Boundaries materials on this page to design a series of lessons to introduce the concept of boundaries to your students. The next step is to build their understanding of each of the seven domains. There probably is a cross-over with your child safety curriculum so look to connect there as well. It is one thing for our students to understand and set their boundaries, it is another to coach them in how to communicate them to others. Once the curriculum is taught, you can look to embed it into the culture of your classroom through a series of activities drawing on the PRIME strategies listed on this site.

  • Lesson Databases - Find lessons at the Heart-Mind Online resource site provided by the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education. Find lessons at the Greater Good in Education resource site provided by the Greater Good Science Center (University of California - Berkeley).

  • Literacy to Fluency Around Emotions - Think in terms of how you work to develop emotional literacy skills and see if there are any applications for emotional literacy and self-understanding in your daily lessons. One strategy is to have a word wall of emotions with an emotion of the week to learn in-depth to then possibly add to your daily class meetings to discuss further. Here is a listing of positive emotions connecting to the P in PERMAH. Adapt this lesson to the developmental level of your students. Note that our goal is to move from basic literacy to full-on fluency in student understanding of their emotions.

  • Mindfulness Activities (Also included in Self-Control Character Strength strategies) - Design activities that help your students identify their physical and emotional states while practicing being present. Here is a video to introduce mindfulness to your students. Help students be present and aware of how they feel when interacting with others. Here is a lesson page with a few ideas. Positive Psychology provides research and a long list of activities to try in your classroom. Smiling Mind provides PDF downloads of lesson ideas for the different age ranges of our elementary school students. Scroll down to the bottom of the page for the links to the PDFs. They also offer ideas on how to design learning spaces to support mindfulness and wellbeing. And don't forget to give their mindfulness app a try.

    Build in a few times during the day for students to stop, be mindful, and think about their emotions. You can announce the moments or possibly use a chime at set intervals or sound off randomly. Here is a digital chime. Choose from the many meditations for children at Insight Timer to take a longer mindful moment with your students.

    Research supports the mind and body benefits of intentional breathing. You might already work with your students to do breathwork. Examples are belly or 4-7-8 breathing which supports their mindfulness practice. Here is a full listing of breathing techniques that you can incorporate into the wellness practices of your class.

    ReachOut.com (focus on MS and HS students) provides a few apps that can help students manage their feelings of anxiety and worry. Take a look at their main app ReachOut Worry Time. They have more apps at the bottom of the page. Also, look to A Little Guide to Mindfulness PDF for some mindfulness strategies. VIA provides a mindful/meditative strategy for each Character Strength.

  • Mood Meter App - Depending on the age of your students, look to use paper and markers to create a class mood meter and/or individual ones for personal use. Older students can create more of an app version using digital tools. The class version can be used for the labeling of emotions, scenario role plays, emotional check-ins, etc. Here is more information on the app.

  • Positive Self-Talk - Review and adapt the list of activities designed for adults and children to first teach the concept to then design lessons to grow positive self-talk in your students.

  • Practicing Emotional Intelligence - The article "How To Practice Emotional Intelligence" offers ten tips for adults that you can adapt to your classroom.

  • Random Acts of Kindness - Help your students understand the impact of doing kind acts towards others. A helpful place to get resources is the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation (RAK). Start by setting up an account to download the free lessons organized by grade level or access them from this folder. Review other resources such as their kindness ideas database. This website is loaded with ways to highlight and nurture kindness in our students. Here is a list of 45 possible random acts of kindness.

  • Regulation Strategies - Adult-initiated Emotion Coaching | Offer the FCW questions of "What am I feeling? (use Mood Meter) What choices do I have? What do I want? | Breath Counting (e.g., breathe in count 4 then exhale count 6) Breath Shifting (e.g., one hand on our chest and the other hand on our abdomen noticing how the rise and fall with each inhale and exhale.)

  • Sketchnoting to Paint the Strength Picture - Guide your students to make visible their self-understanding of how they currently engage with each strength. A secondary activity is to have your students sketch out new ways they can exercise each strength. We know that going from thinking about ideas and making them visible often leads to taking action with the ideas. The first step to this strategy is to teach your students about sketchnoting. You will find applications of this tool across all areas of your curriculum. :) Students can take pictures of their sketches to upload to SeeSaw to then explain their thinking.

  • Six Thinking Hats - No specific strategy is offered here other than to unpack the thinking hats to see how your students in using them can better understand themselves and their interactions with others. Collaboration, creativity, decision-making, emotional intellect, intellectual humility, mental models, and perspective-taking are just a few of the internal processes that can be supported by guiding students to use the thinking hats. Here is an article about one teacher's learning in teaching the thinking hats to her students.

  • Superhero Creation - Challenge your students to create a superhero who maximizes this strength. One approach is to have your students draw a picture of the character with a biography that describes how the superhero uses the strength in his/her life. You can provide categories such as physical, intellectual (thinking), emotional, and social as to how the superhero demonstrates the strength. This activity could take the form of playing cards that students then create games around.

  • Weekly Time for Dedication to Others - Integrate the ritual of having each student share a short dedication to someone in their life during your community meetings. You can have dedication time once a week for everyone to share or assign a few students each week to have their sharing time during your daily community meeting. This article gives details on how this activity helps students open up to each other, builds trust, and engages the strengths of gratitude, and emotional and social intelligence.

  • Other possibilities - Know My Emotions Superhero marketing design projects, student-created videos highlighting EI stories, class weekly sharing of their efforts to understand their emotions, high school IB students using CAS time to produce age-appropriate videos for ES students answering questions of “What are emotions? How can I understand my emotions and how they affect me? ”, older student buddies and their ES partners meeting from time to time to share stories of feeling and sharing emotions, incorporate into co-curricular activities like field trips, ASAs, assemblies, etc.


PERMAH & Strength Hacks Simple daily strategies for wellness!

  • Brain Breaks - Pause to bring movement and energy into your classroom. Here are a few brain breaks and an assorted listing to add to your collection.

  • Calming Techniques - Share with a partner one strategy you use when you feel upsetting emotions.

  • Cross Strengths - Which Character Strengths most come into play to support this strength?

  • Emotion Sharing - Do a quick brainstorm with a partner to share recent feelings. Choose one feeling each. Work with your partner to write down the events that led to that emotion.

  • "How is your/my PERMAH today?" Find ways to bring this phrase into the culture of your class for daily self-reflection and connection with others.

  • Language - Look to use phrases such as "which strength(s) can I engage, dial-up, exercise, apply... in this situation?".

  • Pause to do some breathing exercises like 4-7-8.

  • Use one of the apps listed below in Teaching Tools to do an emotional check-in.

Grade(s) Specific Teaching Strategies: The following ideas are offered as jumping-off points for teachers to build from and adapt to their needs.

Virtual School Home Wellness Support with SEL - Review the strategies by grade level used by one school.

EC-K>

  • Adapt this emotions wheel activity for your students.

  • Create a feelings book.

  • Lesson Listing - Access several teacher-created lessons and those from other providers.

  • Storybook readings, digital media, and share time by teachers and students to build understanding.

  • Use visuals of toolkits and tools engaging language of creating our "strength toolkits" with strengths as tools.

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  • Adapt this emotions wheel activity for your students.

  • Grades 1-2> Do some storybook readings and use digital media around emotion identification and general self-awareness. Eventually could lead to students writing their own storybooks that involve characters expressing various emotions.

  • Lesson Listing - Access several teacher-created lessons and those from other providers.

  • Use visuals of toolkits and tools engaging language of creating our "strength toolkits" with strengths as tools.

  • Weekly Emotional Intelligence Seesaw Journal post: will need to develop prompt and potential categories for students to draw a picture of and/or take a photo of their emotional self-awareness. They then voice-record their response.

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  • Journal: Google Doc or paper version. The teacher provided prompts and in time work with students to create new prompts. Could be a section of their portfolio.

  • Lesson Listing - Access several teacher-created lessons and those from other providers.

Assessment:

  • Rubrics: At an age-appropriate level work with your students to design a rubric for this strength. Here is a sample rubric for grit written for high school students. Look to do a junior version for this strength. The rubric creator Rubistar can help with this process. Also, keep single-point rubrics in mind as a first step to help your students apply this strength in their lives.

  • Surveys: Commercial providers such as Flourishing at School offer surveys and other digital tools to document student wellness. Students aged 10-17 can take the VIA Youth Survey. Student Thriving Index from Character Lab.

  • Visible Thinking: Harvard's Project Zero researchers provide thinking routines and other approaches to help students make their thinking visible. You see many of the thinking routines listed here under the PRIME, SECONDARY, and THINKING ROUTINES sections of this site. You also have several strategies that have students sketchnoting, mind mapping, journaling, etc. to make their thinking visible for reflection and assessment purposes.

Teaching Tools:

Learning About Emotional Intelligence:

Websites>

Character Lab

Books>

Permission to Feel by Dr. Marc Brackett


Parent Engagement:

  • Ask someone to video record the strength in action and publicize the efforts via social media (#----------) and the school website.

  • Family Tree of Strengths: Provide parents with definitions and what strengths can look like in action. Provide a family tree graphic organizer with space for names and the individual’s main strengths. Offer prompts to guide parents to explain how family members and earlier generations lived specific strengths.

  • Have students take their character cards home to teach their parents about their strengths.

  • Strength-based Parenting - Share with your parents the Dr. Lea Waters website which includes resources and information on her book. Here is an article to help with your understanding of strength-based parenting.

  • Teachers send specific reminders to have family talks about emotional intelligence.

  • Teachers share with parents the idea of weekly sharing with their children examples of their acts of emotional intelligence.

  • Use our various communication pathways to inform parents of their children strengthening their emotional intelligence.

  • VIA Strengths Survey: Send parents information about the strengths and the English language Strengths Survey that they can take. The results can offer a discussion starting point for families.

Character Lab Research References

Character Lab Image Source

CASEL Image

Mood Meter Source

Plutchik Wheel of Emotion

7 Types of Boundaries at Positive Psychology

¹Embedding Character Strengths. Institute of Positive Education. With permission.

Hales, D. (2021). An invitation to health: Taking Charge of Your Health (19th ed.). Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning