Schools are emotional places, and secondary schools can be particularly so. The fact that teenagers can find it difficult to regulate how they feel and act has been evidenced by numerous studies, and detailed extensively by Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore in her book Inventing Ourselves.

To help teachers support students in managing their emotions, there has been a wave of strategies in recent years aimed at getting young people of all ages to be attuned to their feelings. The Seal approach (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning), brought in by the Labour government in 2005, is still popular in many schools, and mindfulness is increasingly finding its way into classrooms as a way to support children’s wellbeing.

But does any of this actually work? And is it even teachers’ job to try?

Absolutely, says Dr Louise Gilbert, a research fellow at Norland College and formerly a research associate at Bath Spa University. Together with colleagues at Bath Spa, she has developed a programme to train teachers in emotion coaching.

It is based on a popular parenting technique developed by US psychologist Dr John Gottman. Following a series of studies in the 1990s, Gottman concluded that the key to good parenting was understanding the emotional source of challenging behaviour, through steps including being aware of the child’s emotions and helping to label them with words. Gilbert and her colleague, Dr Janet Rose, wondered how Gottman’s work might transfer to an education setting.

“When you’re a teacher, emotions are part of your day and managing them is integral, whether you’re aware of it or not,” says Gilbert. “Traditionally, there was a belief that emotions were the domain of the parents. But children are in education for a long time; it’s now compulsory until they’re 18.

“Teachers want children to reach their full learning potential but, if the child is unsettled, she can’t engage her learning brain. I think there’s now a realisation that you need to have emotional regulation sorted in order to achieve the academic side.”

Four simple steps

Broadly, Gilbert explains, there are four steps to emotion coaching. First, you need to recognise a child’s feelings and empathise with them. Second, validate and label those feelings before, third, setting limits on the child’s behaviour if necessary. Finally, problem-solve with the child, helping them to understand what they could do differently next time.

“It is effectively communication, and it’s a technique that’s universal,” she says. “We all go through the same physiological mechanism when we feel strong emotions, such as anger or fear, but how we respond might be different.

“When a child is in a heightened state of emotional alert, such as fear, he goes into ‘fight or flight’ survival mode. Access to the more cognitive parts of the brain - the prefrontal cortex - gets cut off. If something is going to attack you, you need to survive.

“When children are born, that is the most developed part of the brain, and it’s through attachments and care - primarily from parents but also through educators - that a child’s brain matures and responds to their environment and experiences. It’s this plasticity of the brain that gives us such hope of being able to develop more effective emotional regulation.”

The training is not just pre-emptive, it can be reactive, too. “One thing that triggers calming down is someone empathetically talking about the child’s emotions,” Gilbert explains. “Rather than saying, ‘I can see you’re being silly’, it’s about saying, ‘I can see that you’re upset and something’s made you angry’. What you’re doing is seeing the emotion the child is feeling. You’re not commenting on the behaviour - but that doesn’t mean the behaviour isn’t addressed.”

Acceptance and de-escalation

Gilbert believes it is important for children learn that emotions are normal and acceptable, but she stresses that this does not make all behaviours OK.

“It’s about empowering students to build up their emotional toolkit so, rather than throwing the book across the classroom in frustration, they might eventually learn to put their hand up when they feel angry,” she says. “It’s giving them an option of how to behave. If you have consistency of practitioners throughout the school taking the same approach, that becomes the norm.”

Gilbert and her colleagues have found through their research that emotion coaching helps teachers to feel better equipped to deal with, and to de-escalate, stressful situations. Teachers also report improved relationships with students. They are less likely to be dismissive of children’s emotions and behaviour, and, as a result, staff wellbeing is improved. Crucially, there are also upsides for the pupils, with teacher call-outs and exclusions being “significantly reduced”.

How it works in practice

Indeed, in a 2015 study involving a secondary school of 1,350 pupils in a disadvantaged, rural area of England, Gilbert found the mean number of exclusions for the academic year before emotion coaching training was 30.82. Post-training, that figure went down to 21.55.

So, what exactly does the process look like in a school context? How do teachers know when to put the techniques into practice?

It’s about looking out for signs that a student is struggling and intervening in order to offer support, Gilbert says. She provides a specific example: “A boy on the autistic spectrum was having a tough time at school. The boy said when he went to the playground, he felt like there was a volcano in his stomach and that he was seeing red. He was immediately going into fight or flight mode, so the other children were avoiding him and the situation would escalate.

“He started working with someone who had done emotion coaching training. The practitioner told him, ‘When you see red, come and find me and we’ll go and sit somewhere quietly.’ What happened - and it’s not an overnight panacea - was that he knew that if he went to this person, that she understood, would listen and be empathetic. As he calmed down, he was able to start to think about it.

“Eventually, his behaviour became less unusual and other children were playing with him more.”

But in what are challenging times for teachers, when pressures are heaped on, do they really have time to attune to every child’s emotional outbursts?

“Not all teachers I’ve worked with were convinced by it,” Gilbert says. “One practitioner told me that teachers are there to teach subjects, others said they weren’t sure about [the method’s] appropriateness. But for others, they were using emotion coaching not just when there was mayhem but as a general approach.”

She adds: “One of the big things we do in the teacher training is we talk about meta-emotion philosophy. That is your reactions and responses to emotions themselves, in yourself and others. How do you feel about anger? Sadness? Do you think it’s normal? Acceptable? Because that will influence how you respond to a child showing these emotions.

“Practitioners can be scared of emotions - they may not feel it’s part of their role, they may feel overwhelmed.”

Training is crucial to overcome these fears, Gilbert says. She would like to see every school have an emotion coaching lead, who could provide initial training and, crucially, ensure that training was sustained.

However, she is aware that emotion coaching is not a magic bullet that’s going to eradicate all challenging behaviour.

“It’s not going to sort out every problem with every child,” she says. “You still need nurture groups, one-to-ones and educational psychologists for children with severe difficulties. But if you’re a teacher with everyday issues, emotion coaching can work.”

Ultimately, Gilbert says she hasn’t seen anything in her research to indicate that emotion coaching is detrimental, and she is adamant that emotions really do matter to learning outcomes.

Christina Quaine is a freelance journalist

Meet the academic

Louise Gilbert is a research fellow at Norland College in Bath. Previously, she was research associate at Bath Spa University. She is also a former secondary school teacher, nurse and health promotion officer.

Gilbert has a special interest in child development and research, and is co-author with Janet Rose and Val Richards of the 2015 book Health and Wellbeing in Early Childhood (published by Sage). She has contributed to a range of international journals and conferences.

Further reading

Colley, D and Cooper, P eds (2018) Attachment and Emotional Development in the Classroom: theory and practice (Jessica Kingsley Publishers)

Rose, J, Gilbert, L and McGuire-Snieckus, R (2015) “Emotion Coaching, a strategy for promoting behavioural self-regulation in children/young people in schools: a pilot study”, The European Journal of Social and Behavioural Sciences, 13/2: 1766-90