5 Ways to Get to Know Your Students at the Start of the School Year - John Spencer. 12 Ways to Help Students Identify Their Emotions. The ability to identify emotions in ourselves and others, talk about them, and find ways to deal with them in appropriate ways, is an important competency that’s closely connected to academic outcomes, says Maurice Elias, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University.
While there tends to be a greater focus on emotional literacy in elementary school, by the time kids reach middle and high school, they’re “figuring out who they are and how they want to show up in the world,” Phyllis Fagell, a middle school counselor and author of the book Middle School Matters tells Edutopia. It is during these transitional, formative years that students—with still-maturing brains and the emotional swings that come with adolescence—need tools to understand and cope with their complex feelings. “The payoff is that kids will actually be in the right headspace to learn the content,” Fagell argues. Here are 12 strategies, across grade levels, to help students identify and talk about their emotions.