3 Easy Ways to Make Feelings Visible in the Classroom

As educators, we often discuss how to “make thinking visible.” It’s a way to empower students to build self-awareness about cognitive processes—and enable us to assess their learning and respond with appropriate instructional moves. Making feeling visible is equally important. When we incorporate consistent practices for surfacing students’ emotions, we support them in building and maintaining the motivation for academic engagement, growth, and success.

The elementary classroom is the perfect place to launch the lifelong work of building the skills and language of emotional literacy: identifying and articulating emotions, and regulating responses to these feelings. Through this work, students learn about themselves, and we learn about them: who they are, how they feel, and what they need.

Often, the stories we tell ourselves about our students—he’s lazy, she’s disrespectful—aren’t only incomplete, they’re misleading. When we invite students to share their emotions, they help us to rewrite these stories. Suddenly, he’s lazy becomes he’s lacking in confidence. She’s disrespectful becomes she’s embarrassed to read aloud. We can then make informed plans to help students rewrite any harmful stories they may be telling themselves.

To make feeling more visible, we recommend selecting an emotional literacy tool and then using it frequently. Here’s our guidance for selecting a tool, along with tips for how to use the one you choose.

Picking an Emotional Literacy Tool

Emotional literacy tools—like Zones of Regulation, the Mood Meter, or the Feelings Wheel—help to build students’ schema about emotions based on how they are organized.

Zones of Regulation group emotions based on how much energy they bring. Educators of students with emerging literacy skills appreciate this tool for its color-coded simplicity and its inclusion of visual facial cues in addition to printed emotion words.

The Mood Meter arranges emotions into quadrants: high-energy emotions on top; low-energy emotions on the bottom; unpleasant emotions on the left; pleasant ones on the right.

The Feelings Wheel includes increasingly specific, complex feelings as you move from the center of the circle to its edges. Elementary teachers can begin by asking students to use the core emotions at the center of the wheel and build their emotional literacy outward, as they are ready.

We recommend picking one tool to use consistently with students. The more familiar students are with a tool, the more effectively they can use it to assess and articulate their emotions. If you work closely with a grade-level or curricular team, we recommend that you all adopt the same one.

Once you’ve selected an emotional literacy tool, you can leverage it to help every student build the skills they need to recognize, regulate, and communicate their feelings. Here are three tips to help you do that.

Build Emotional Word Banks Together

If you want students to learn the words represented in the emotional literacy tool you use in class, enlist them to help co-construct a word bank. You can distribute a paper copy of a blank Mood Meter and have students fill it out with their words. This collaborative process increases engagement while also increasing understanding as students debate placements—such as whether joyful belongs in the upper right quadrant (pleasant and high-energy) or the lower right quadrant (pleasant and low-energy).

While learning about their emotions, students can deepen their disciplinary understandings, too. Direct them to populate the Mood Meter with a few subject-specific vocabulary terms, such as combustible (science), greater than and less than (math), and benevolent (based on vocabulary from an English language arts reading). If you plan to include facial expressions on your tool, you can take pictures of your students acting out each emotion.

As students learn about themselves, you learn about them. One way to add fun is by inviting kids to add student slang: cooked, suss, mid. You can also empower multilingual learners to include words from the languages that they speak at home. This asset-based approach increases students’ sense of belonging and self-worth while expanding the whole class’s emotional vocabulary. Most middle school students have felt vicarious embarrassment at some point, and learning the Spanish articulation of that emotion—vergüenza ajena—gives the feeling more validity.

Take a Classwide Temperature Check

Emotional literacy tools also enable full-class assessments. Create a giant, blank Mood Meter on the whiteboard, distribute sticky notes, and direct learners to complete the following sentence: “I feel… because….” Then, prompt them to place their sticky notes in the appropriate quadrant. You’ll receive a quick, clear picture of how everyone is feeling. You might find that after lunch, everyone is in the upper right (high-energy, pleasant), or that in the middle of the afternoon, students dip into the lower left (low-energy, unpleasant). You can then talk with the class about strategies to try to ensure that everyone maintains a positive, productive classroom culture throughout the school day.

We like to repeat the temperature check when we suspect emotions might have shifted based on a learning experience. For example, a fifth-grade teacher who uses this method did a temperature check during a lesson on American slavery to allow students to process and honor the emotions that come with learning hard history.

Along with supporting emotional self-awareness and self-management skills, this type of discipline-centered reflection can promote student empathy. Try pausing a class story and asking, “Can someone name an emotion word that describes how the character might be feeling?”

Empower Individuals to Assess Their Emotions

In our book, Leaders of the Class, we argue that student motivation stems from identity (who they are and who they want to be) and emotion (how they feel and how they want to feel). To support students to maintain motivation, we need to help them develop strong academic identities, and we need to allow them to practice identifying how they feel to ensure that they act in a way that reinforces this academic identity. For that reason, we encourage educators to embed individual emotional self-assessments into every part of the academic school day. Ask: How do students feel during independent reading, or circle time, or math stations, or at the end of the day? How can these emotions help them set goals and pick effective strategies to manage their behaviors?

This emotional data will help you, the teacher, set goals and experiment with strategies for supporting students. Pick an emotional literacy tool, and use it often. Your students—and you—will build the skills of emotional self-awareness and expression while strengthening relationships and fostering a positive, productive class culture.