Whole-School Emotional Literacy

Nov 2003-Feb 2004

It was clear from the information provided by the 230 delegates to Antidote’s latest series of three conferences – in London, Manchester and Birmingham – that a growing number of people are involved in working out how to shape more emotionally literate environments for learning.

Participants told us about the working parties they had recently joined or established; the research projects they were bringing to completion; the approaches they were trying out in their schools;, the training courses they had provided to teachers in their authorities as well as the efforts they were making to promote emotional literacy programmes across different counties.

Reasons for coming
While some came looking for help to communicate what emotional literacy meant to those who found the concept difficult, few were still at the stage of finding out for themselves what was meant by the term or why it was considered to be so potentially important. Mostly, they wanted ideas about how they could overcome the obstacles to developing and sustaining an effective emotional literacy strategy within their school or schools.

‘My sense,’ said Elizabeth Morris, principal of the School of Emotional Literacy and a speaker at all three events, ‘is that we are now in a phase where we’re really about getting our sleeves rolled up and getting our hands in there and kneading the dough: working out what works, what bakes well, what doesn’t, what temperature we need, what ingredients we need to put together.’

Personal and organisational
The conferences had been billed as an opportunity to compare two approaches to developing an effective emotional literacy strategy. Was it more effective to send staff on the sort of training offered the School of Emotional Literacy training, which aims to equip individuals with a range of personal and professional skills that they can apply in their organisations? Or should managers adopt Antidote’s approach of working across a school on the development of models that enable staff and students to transform the ways they communicate with each other?

Most concluded that, in reality, these were complementary approaches. Evolving emotional literacy within a school might well involve training for individuals. However, the lessons learned needed work at the organisational level if they were to become consolidated. The potential weakness of training in isolation was illustrated by a delegate from an EAZ in the north-east. She described how the teachers, school nurses and learning mentors taking her training had all committed to hold whole-school well-being meetings. A few months later, however, only two out of ten such meetings were actually being held.

By contrast, Heather Daulphin, deputy head of Hampstead School in west London, described how a commitment to training could be a strategic element in an organisational shift. Hampstead had put twelve members of staff through the certificate programme at the School of EL. This was part of a strategy to boost respect for the tutor’s role across the school, and ensure that ‘pastoral work was seen as an integral part of work to raise achievement.’

What to do about blocks
A number of conference participants talked about the blocks the had encountered to developing an effective emotional literacy strategy. Prominent among these was the hunger for quick fixes. For example, a delegate from Tameside described a conversation with a headteacher who dismissed the Social Emotional and Behavioural Skills Curriculum from the DfES as not providing ‘solutions’ to situations where children were misbehaving. ‘The challenge,’ the delegate commented, ‘is to convince people that, if children are emotionally literate, then you won’t need so many “solutions”.’

Others talked about how the pressure from targets could get in the way of moving things forward. ‘Emotional literacy,’ said an educational psychologist at the Manchester conference, ‘is a process. When you are working in a job where you have been asked to come up with answers and strategies, and you’re looking at objectives and targets, then this is a difficult area to get over.’ He went on to describe how some schools rebuffed offer of help with emotional literacy from his service by saying that ‘they were doing it already’, when clearly they were not.

Several other participants described their frustration with slowness of emotional literacy to take hold. A behaviour consultant in Birmingham spoke of the difficulty she faced in getting staff to recognise ‘just how much the way they react can either calm or inflame a situation’ and to ‘consider alternatives to their teaching methodology.’

Going whole-school
Linked to these concerns were anxieties about how to get schools to take on the whole-school dimension of emotional literacy. ‘There seem,’ said one LEA adviser, ‘to be lots of people doing lots of really good things at quite a low level, hands-on work with children or with certain groups of staff.’ The problem was that ‘we’ve yet to see it work its way through the school and become part of the whole-school system.’

But what did we mean by ‘whole-school’ anyway. Did it involve offering lessons in emotional literacy to every child? Or training in emotional literacy to every teacher. Or opportunities for young people to engage in activities that might promote emotional literacy? Or a combination of all three – like the ‘whole-service’ approach described by Elizabeth Tew when describing Dudley’s Learning Centre. This included emotional literacy games, circle time, assemblies, focus weeks, opportunities for review and guidance, breakfast clubs as well as parent support groups. The answer was yes and more.

Teachers and managers
Several speakers spoke of the need to provide opportunities for school staff to reflect on how they can support young people to become more effective learners can help them construct meaning and make better sense of their experience.

‘We need to find ways,’ said Geoffrey Court from the Circle Works in east London, ‘was of clearing some space in which people can talk about what matters to them, now, in their working lives. This will be a feeling space, a thinking space, and above all a learning space.’ Such spaces allow people the opportunity to ‘construct meaning, to put the pieces of the jigsaw together for themselves, and to make better sense of their experience.’ It a space in which ‘new perspectives can emerge’, where ‘tricky situations’ can be looked at from new angles’ and ‘new possibilities can emerge.’

Martin Buck, from Lister Community School in east London, talked about the role of the leader in shaping a more emotionally literate school culture through a process of democratisation. ‘We are,’ he said, ‘human beings who live in social groups and communicate in social networks. If you want to get people to participate, you need to build a sense of shared vision. You need to be prepared to flatten the structures and open up communication.’ That process was encouraged when the head was able to ‘show fallibility and model outwardly reflective learning.’

Philip Mather, then head of the Heath School in Runcorn, also emphasised the need to give people freedom. ‘If you give people autonomy,’ he said, ‘then they immediately become self-accountable. It’s like a coin with autonomy on one side and accountability on the other. My people come up with ideas all the time.’ He also emphasised the importance of relationships as ‘the key to making any organisation work.’

Another speaker – Alison Grimshaw from Wirral LEA’s Family Works programme – talked about the importance of the school securing the participation of parents in any emotional literacy programme. The inspiration for the project, she said, was the desire to have parents to come into the school to have fun with their children, to have fun with us and to explore ways in which we could work proactively together so that to ensure that children were happy and successful in school.’

Multi-dimensional approaches
As the scale of what emotional literacy was about became apparent, some began to feel a bit daunted. Elizabeth Morris suggested that it was important to let things take the time it takes, and that an effective strategy can grow from small beginnings. Several of her students, she said, had set up quite small projects with clear objectives, then used their success to promote the idea of a bigger project later. She described how one teacher had set up a small self-esteem building programme for her foundation year. The headteacher was not particularly interested, and it was only when a new head came in, three years later, that things began to take off as she had hoped.

But speakers also emphasised the need for a responsive and multi-dimensional approach, if a project was to shift the way teachers or students through of themselves or engaged with others. Annie Hamlaoui, for example, spoke at the London conference about how the Sisters project she had set up in Kent. This tried to raise the shattered self-confidence of teenage girls by giving them ‘a whole host of opportunities and activities which would allow them to explore and challenge where appropriate, their perception of what they were capable of achieving and what they had a right to expect from others. The overall aim was to provide a welcoming environment that offered ‘unconditional friendship, engaging activities, opportunities to learn new skills as well as chances to meet new people and experience the feelgood factor which as the very foundation of building a long-term intrinsic motivation for life and for learning.’

Holding it together
To some it seemed easier to look at the school less as a series of parts needing separate attention that as a whole system to be engaged in shifting towards more emotionally literate ways of operating. The challenge was to find ways of paying attention to how the different parts affected each other. Did the environment of the school and the different opportunities available within it combine to give people opportunities to communicate in a more emotionally literate way?

Viewing the question in this way moved the discussion away from what people should do to promote emotional literacy and towards what they were trying to achieve. It also raised the possibility that this might as much about tweaking systems and activities that were already in place rather than doing anything particularly new.

This was very much the approach that Harriet Goodman and Anne Murray presented as the model for their work with Gallions Primary School and Lister Community School in Newham. They highlighted factors such as the importance of attending to the experience that a class was having. What did it feel like to be with this particular group of people at this time? What had happened to them in the past and how did that influence how they were together, and how they learned? How could they work collaboratively to understand the forces shaping these elements and work through to better ways of living and learning together?

Generating energy
Ultimately, it seemed, the opportunity to think with others about how collectively you can improve the quality of teaching and learning in your school is likely to be the most potent element the development of an effective emotional literacy strategy.

Nathalie Allexant , for example, described how the experience of using Philosophy for Children across Gallions Primary School had contributed to a new climate of mutual learning in the staffroom. ‘Because we’ve all had the training, we all understand the process and we enjoy sharing little anecdotes from different children, particularly those children we have taught in the past, seeing what they are doing with their new class teacher in philosophy. It’s created a real buzz around the school. Those of us how have been trained to level two have formed a little network where we discuss the things were working. We have a philosophy box in our staff room where we can put anything interesting we have found so that others can use it.’