How students feel affects whether and how they can learn. If they’re anxious or fearful they’re not going to be able to take in information. Teachers not only can learn to create a safe environment they can learn to develop emotional intelligence. The students actually gain the skills of managing their emotions, solving conflicts, and interacting with others. And all of that can be taught and learned.

They are accepting an opportunity to try something new in front of their peers. From the point of view of many middle school students, the risk of ridicule alone is very high. The teacher, however, has created an emotionally safe environment in which that risk is so small that it seems there is really no risk at all in trying to conduct or play the rainstick while the rest of the band watches.

Students experience emotions every day. When you create an emotionally safe classroom students will feel free to tell you when they are experiencing a problem, and you will not have to be a mind detective. As you watch students who are having difficulty with a learning task, add “emotions” to your list of issues that may be blocking the student’s progress, and address the issue when you identify it.

We all feel at one time or another that we are being asked to do too much, and dealing with emotions may seem like too much. However, if you consider your ultimate goal – to have students learn, sometimes immediately dealing with a potential conflict will pave the way for learning.

Making the hallways of the entire school as safe as your classroom is a logical next step, but it may be a difficult one. In your classroom you can take the opportunity to work every day building a trusting relationship, and over time you will succeed.

Growing an emotionally safe environment throughout the school requires all school staff to embrace the goal, and then to work toward it. How teachers interact with each other is powerful modeling for students. When students see teachers collaborating and trusting each other, it sets the stage for their own interactions.

It may help to think of creating an emotionally safe environment as a preparation for learning. It’s difficult to teach when the room is physically too cold or too hot, and the same might be said about the emotional “temperature” of the class. It may be best to address it before you begin, so it does not become a recurring obstacle.

Like everything else, it takes time for students to learn how to manage their emotions and for teachers to understand how their emotions impact student learning, but once accomplished, every day’s curriculum objectives can be at the forefront.

Following up periodically and re-teaching emotional management skills is also good practice, like using checkpoints to ensure curriculum concepts are understood, valued and applied.

By taking risks, students gain confidence and the more confidence they have the more they will grow socially and academically. You can encourage students to take risks while teaching them that each risk they take, whether successful or not, can prepare them for a future success. The key is helping them learn from failures. If an effort fails and it’s simply accepted as failure, nothing is gained. If an effort fails and you use the opportunity to help the student analyze what went wrong and try again, that’s a success. It also shows others in the class that it is safe, and even valuable to take the same kind of risks.

We often think that all students must be engaged simultaneously. While the teacher was helping a few students resolve their differences the remainder of the class was involved in group or independent work. We know that social interaction is an important aspect of student learning so setting up small work groups is beneficial. The more they do it, the better they become at it, giving the teacher time to check in on each group to address whatever issue might come up. Resolving conflicts within a group is only one of them, but an important one. It appears that most of Kristin’s class was well-practiced in working within small groups, so when a conflict arose in one she could handle it with no apparent disruption for the rest of the class. This is a good example of how time spent managing student emotions can have long-term educational benefits.