TEDxGoldenGateED - Marc Brackett

as you can tell I'm not from San Francisco I look a little uptight but that's alright so the title of my presentation is educating the whole child and adult with emotional literacy and I thought it would start off with asking you how you're feeling how's everybody doing yeah all right I could use a little bit more energy okay so as you can see up here we call this the mood meter and what I'm going to do now is just teach you a little bit more about emotions on that x-axis we're going to talk about our subjective state right now so subjectively speaking a positive 5 which is the sort of far end of the in the green would be that today is the subjectively the the best experience of your life now we're not going to make those claims yet negative 5 sort of near unpleasantness would be that this is the worst experience sort of you're at the end of your rope it's the you know couldn't be anything worse than being at a presentation like this anybody there ok on the y-axis we have energy thinking about your physiology the top and the red right now if you're high energy would mean that you're just you're ready to explode you want to take over this workshop you like I can do this training in the bottom and the low energy you'd for sort of feel like you're in the deepest tool of despair is anybody there and then we'll put these two axes together to figure out how we're feeling so how many of you are in the yellow filling high energy and pleasant raise your hand ok just some feedback it doesn't really look that way high energy and Pleasant raise your hand all right how many of you in the green feeling sort of your pleasant but your Energy's low okay we've got a lot of people in the green anybody the blue feeling a little low energy unpleasant so that's not no one's there how about the red that would be great for me you're unpleasant with a lot of energy anybody there I'll just make sure I walk the other way what I'd like you to do right now is take a moment and think about where you exactly you are in this tool and I'm going to give you three seconds and I'd like you in those three seconds to come up with the best word that describes your exact experience that you're having right now three two one quick raise of hands just for curiosity how many of you had trouble finding the right word put hands up high look really high be proud to be a literate that's good sorry about that just looking for your keep your hand up keep your hand up please look around the room so isn't it interesting I can ask you how you're feeling so I'm pretty Pleasant how's your energy it's pretty high pretty low but then I ask you to find the right word and for some reason we have difficulty with that and as we now know there are lots of words that describe our feeling States but most of us use just a few we use if you're in the yellow you feel great during the green you're fine during the blue you're sort of in if you're the red you're pissed but you know we know that there is much more to our emotional vocabulary knows four words maybe 2000 words in the English language dictionary to describe our feelings and the question is why don't we use those words more regularly so my job today is to sort of take you through a rollercoaster and ask you one question before I really go into my presentation which is a lot of you were in the green and in the yellow today but how many of you work with educators and students who come to school in the blue and the red yeah we have a lot of students in our schools that are feeling down maybe somewhat depressed how many of you have anxious students in your classrooms yeah and the question is what do we do in a regular basis to make sure that all children and educators have strategies to manage their emotional lives and the work that I do argues that emotions matter and they matter a great deal for four primary things in our laboratory the first is that they affect your attention and learning so if you're bored right now which I hope you're not you're likely not paying attention to my presentation you're you're doing your grocery list or something like that we know emotions affect their decision making how many of you have ever made a bad decision how many of you maybe made a bad decision when you were about 18 years old in college yeah was that a cognitive decision or an emotional based decision we won't go into the details right now and how many have ever had a bad day and you've gone home and you've been ignored anybody had the experience yeah he's in a bad mood let's just go the other way so we know that emotions drive our relationships that our facial expressions for example when we go home or when we're in our classroom dictate how people respond to us and finally when we think about most disorders that are prevalent in today's world like anxiety and depression typically their failures at self-regulation and self-management so the work that I do is not only thinking about how emotions impact these things but really what do we do with our emotions and we have created a model which we call emotional literacy that talks about five critical skills and what we do to manage our emotional lives and the first one is recognizing emotions so I'm looking around at all of you right now I'm trying to gauge your facial expressions are you interested are you pretending to be interested is it a fake or real interest this woman just made a weird face at me I'll take it as a joke we think about the understanding of emotion what is the reason for this emotional state what caused that feeling state and what are the consequences of that state then we think about the labeling of emotions what are the words that we use on a regular basis to describe our emotions and how sophisticated is our emotional vocabulary as we saw earlier we could use some work in that area and then we think about expressing emotion how many of you have rules about how you express your emotions how many of you don't know what I'm talking about we all have rules some of us are very comfortable sharing our emotions as matter of fact my brother before he text messaging me said do not share anything about our family he's watching me right now and is going to kill me after this presentation what he doesn't realize that my whole presentation is really about my family anyway and then we talk about regulating emotions the strategies we use to manage emotions how many of you would like to have more strategies to manage your emotional life how many of you like more strategies to help you manage other people's lives alright so that's what we call rulers we have our approach that we call the ruler approach and what our research does is we look at how these skills impact different outcomes the first is student outcomes and we know that students who score high and our measures of emotional intelligence and emotional literacy they have better quality relationships they're less anxious and depressed they perform better academically think about it how many of you like to be around the angry disgruntled dysregulated student you know we just don't like it they're not comfortable to be around when we think about what drives academic performance and standardized test performance you know we're always thinking about the cognition piece but maybe your ability to manage your anxiety during that test would be an important predictor as might affect of my own life you know I work at an Ivy League university now but growing up in New Jersey my mom passed away when I was just about taking the GREs and I remember sitting in that room taking the GREs and being incapable not capable of taking the test and just looking at paragraphs than being delirious and saying to myself you know I just can't take this test right now but for some reason it wasn't an adult in my environment that said you know hey take a break you know what here's some strategies to help you manage that maybe wait a year you know you're going through a terrific a terrible loss right now what about teachers here's a student in one of our programs you can see this this is it the bright eyes the cheery face paying attention being astute educators what do we know about emotionally letter educators what we know is that they experience more positive emotions they have better relationships they enjoy teaching more there are less stressed in their workplace and we also you can see this teacher right here a kindergarten teacher just full of enthusiasm full of strategies to help motivate his students emotional literate classrooms what do you know about them well in our work we we study not only the individual level variables but we study the classroom climate and what we do is we measure emotional climate of classrooms through observational methods and we use those variables to brick predict student outcomes like engagement like their performance like their behavior grades and lo and behold what we find is that classrooms that are high in emotional climate controlling for the instructional skills controlling for the organizational aspects of that classroom have students who are more engaged and have students who perform better academically and who have students who behave better you can see students in classrooms that are rated high they work collaborative together they're enthused in their work ok so I share with you so far that these skills of emotional literacy seem to predict things like social competence mental and physical health and academic performance but people ask all the time you know where do these skills come from and obviously it's like psych 101 you got biology and you have learning you know nature nurture think about your nature how many of you are somewhat neurotic anybody okay anybody here like a little irritable in the morning yeah I'm just like I wake up irritable I went to yoga this morning I was so irritable in that class and I was trying to regulate and I was just like I just got to get out of here it's terrible so we have our genetics we have our temperament and you know I've been in therapy for ten years not any longer written these books on social-emotional learning and I still wake up a little irritable I still wake up worried I I worry about why I worry and I even worry about why I worry about why I worry anybody else like that it's awful and then we have our environment we have nurture we have all the people that have trained us from their own development because they've had lots of education about this work and how to manage our emotional lives you know I grew up in a family I had good parents but they didn't know a lot about emotions or about emotion management that's for sure I remember very vividly being at home and you know I was a recalcitrant kind of kid would talk back to his mother my mother gets here oh wait see her father gets home and then I would be in my room waiting for my father to get home and all of a sudden you know my hear my mother dance his belly you're not going to believe the way Mark spoke to me today you know that was like you know take a deep breath and all of a sudden I hear my father coming up the stairs and he opened my bedroom door I thought I told you never to speak to your mother again you learned how to read facial expressions at a very young age when that happens and then my mother who was a warrior would come into the room and say something like don't talk to him that way that's not the way to handle this and then they would go in the hall when they get an argument it was amazing and then typically my mother after that my father would be annoyed with me he'd be none of my mother he'd go downstairs and my mother would come back and say so you know something mark I saved you this time whoa okay so you wonder why I'm giving a presentation on emotional literacy anyway my point behind my work is that there's no guarantee you have great genetics there's no guarantee that you're going to be nurtured in an environment where you get taught these skills and what I argue is why not make sure that every child gets a formal education on emotion why not integrate it from kindergarten through high school or better off from womb to tomb and ensure that everyone has this kind of education and think about your own life you know what was your emotional education like what did you learn where did you come from a suppresser family did your parents coach you on emotions or we did what we know we don't have it and I live in New England so nobody has any feelings it's amazing I walk in the hallways and I was like yeah like wait hi good morning yeah my work began with students I was interested in developing a program with my uncle Marvin who was a maverick educator and he and I together wrote a book many years ago to teach middle school middle school students how to manage their emotions and understand and discuss their emotions and we went around like Willy Loman would go around knocking on principals doors begging them to use our programs and unfortunately we failed horrific Lee and we failed because we didn't realize that many educators just weren't comfortable with the material they didn't feel like it was their place to start teaching about emotion I remember vividly being in England actually as the prestigious school in Canterbury this one teacher right about now ten minutes until my presentation help I'm not there yet she said my job is not to talk to my students about my phalanx so it's like 3800 miles away from my house and thinking you know what am I going to do here is 9 o'clock we're gonna be you till 3 so I said does anybody feel any different and this young guy is really big guy six-foot I was a little nervous he raised his hand he said you know sir can I make a comment I said definitely he said well I was a student in this high school and she was my teacher anyway we went on in our work to make sure that we trained educators that we developed programs so that educators themselves could develop their emotion skills so that they felt valued and important themselves not just here's a curriculum for your students but here's something for you but we realized very quickly that leaders of schools needed to be involved in this work too because they'd be on their BlackBerry's during our training they wouldn't show up to some of our trainings and we realized that unless the leaders of the schools are modeling these skills themselves that we would fail because leaders are the ones who make decisions in schools and of course we needed to get family involvement so our model now is everybody with a face it's trained and then we have some good things happening I want to wrap up my day sharing with you a poem that was developed by a boy in England who was at a school that was quite impoverished he was extensively bullied in elementary school and really hated school and didn't do well in school and all and through the efforts that we made in his middle school he wrote a poem describing his experiences and I'll wrap up my presentation by debriefing it in one second please if we can go to the tape you you're overly I know I have been told this hill silly I know I've realized this you look like an alien I know this has been pointed out to me you have big eyes I know I have looked in the mirror you can't be a pilot you're not smart enough it is possible I have considered this if everyone thought you invent it's strange but it's true you point out my many failings and help me to improve as you highlight my many weaknesses you also highlight our strengths myoclonus leads to my client personality my silliness brings laughs of the world our assemblance to movie endings only highlights my intelligence my big eyes betray my feelings and widen my view I may not make it as a pilot by Kirby you see every insult you invent gives me a view into your mind now I have many problems I feel sorry for you why oh why do I feel sorry for you because your mind cannot bake a crate the wall of insults you build limits your mind and feelings so soon if you don't stop you're turning human and have the biggest problem of all loneliness think about so you know Gareth is my hero I didn't grow up in a school where I had the opportunity to talk about my feelings and I had similar life circumstances as he did I'm now I'm older you know I've gone to therapy I've been able to learn about psychology from my own education but in middle school I was not a happy camper and what I'm so proud of is that the schools that we work with now are giving children the opportunity to learn these skills and strategies so if I can ask everyone to just close their eyes and take a deep breath and imagine the world in three years from now imagine the schools where all educators and students are taught these skills or empathy and compassion or the norm what does it look like what does it feel like and I hope you see what I saw and in closing what I want to say as an academic I can't make audacious claims that emotional literacy training will solve all of our nation's and school's problems but what I can say is that through my work with hundreds of schools and and just thousands of teachers and students that it's a great place to start thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 57,087

Keywords: tedx, tedx talks, ted talk, tedx talk, ted, ted x, Brackett, TEDxGoldenGateED, Marc, ted talks

Id: t8UhRBwmvd4

Length: 17min 29sec (1049 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 02 2011