• Pride. Feeling like a valued person because of involvement with an achievement, either one’s own or that of a person or group with whom one strongly identifies.
• Relief. A sense that a distressing condition or situation has changed for the better or gone away.
• Hope. Looking to the future and thinking better things will take place, even if it does not look objectively that this is the case.
Schools, and the people in them, are filled with emotions.
Being able to sort out strong emotions is an essential social-emotional skill and a hallmark of sound character. Strong emotions provide energy and direction to the actions of indi-viduals, groups, and even entire schools or districts. A passion for lifelong learning is, most basically, a passion. A safe and caring school can be a rhetorical statement or a statement of how staff, students, and others entering and remaining in a building should feel the vast majority of the time.
Bringing in or expanding social-emotional and character initiatives in your school involves building everyone’s capac-ity to recognize and appropriately act on emotions. As men-tioned earlier, you can enable change by expanding a school’s strengths and areas of pride, as well as focusing on areas viewed as problematic. Understanding emotions in the context of what is happening in your school allows you to set proper directions for changes to come.
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Transitions: Review and a Look Ahead
Review
• Negative emotions experienced by you, your staff, and your students signal that problems exist.
Recognize Feelings
• Positive emotions experienced by you, your staff, and your students indicate strengths in your school.
• It is important to assess your feelings at different locations in your site and at different points throughout the change process.
• By understanding the meaning of certain emotions, you can better respond to your staff ’s concerns and move the change process ahead.
Bridge
Without doubt, the change process requires a high degree of emotional sensitivity on the part of anyone intending to prepare a school to improve its social-emotional efforts. Being able to use your feelings and those of others as indicators of personal or inter-personal issues includes deciphering discrepancies between what people seem to be saying and what they are displaying. Emotion researchers agree that the feelings people show in their nonverbal behavior—tone of voice, body posture, and facial expressions in particular—are harder to monitor and tend to be more “genuine”
than spoken words.You will need the skill of discerning what is hap-pening with coworkers, staff, and yourself “below the surface” when it comes to working in groups, running meetings, assigning tasks, and organizing to take on social-emotional and character initiatives.
Moving ahead requires you to communicate the directions indi-cated by the various feelings you have identified. That is the next step in the problem-solving process.
Reflections for Action
• What feelings are most likely to serve as catalysts for action in your setting?
• What are the most common positive feelings you experi-ence during the course of your work? When, where, and with whom do you experience these feelings?
• What are the most common negative feelings you experi-ence during the course of your work? When, where, and with whom do you experience these feelings?
Building Learning Communities with Character
• What did you learn from your “feelings” walking tour? How has it helped you link feelings to what they might signal?
• Among the many feelings you detected, both positive and negative, which seem most important as you prepare to bring social-emotional programs into your setting more systematically?
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Recognize Feelings
P
resent circumstances in your school must be faced real-istically. This involves putting feelings into words as problem statements. Placing a concern, issue, or a problematic situation into explicit terms makes it much more likely that effective and focused action will follow. It does not preclude “gut reactions”; rather, it helps refine what you are reacting to. This is also the middle step—after under-standing feelings—in preparing for action planning by setting realistic and feasible goals. Remember, avoid placing blame when identifying problems; regardless of their cause, you must address them effectively and constructively.After many years of conducting social-emotional and character initiatives, implementers found upset feelings often are linked to particular sets of problems. See if any of these
Identify Problems:
Look at the Current Situation
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feelings resonate with the ones you noted as part of the exer-cises from the previous chapter.
• Frustration—People who are otherwise smart are not doing good work.
• Disappointment—Promising projects fail because of staff or student conflict.
• Worry—Your school lacks character or its climate does not feel safe or inclusive.
• Puzzlement—No unifying feeling makes a team out of the various individuals in your school.
• Sadness—Student or staff morale is low.
• Elation—Shared commitment exists to improve the sense of community in the school.
• Anger—Disagreements about values and directions within the school or school system have surfaced and are pulling it apart.