All About Emotional Intelligence from Six Seconds - Teaching Emotional Literacy with Rainbow Kids, an interview with Author Barbara

Teaching Emotional Literacy with Rainbow Kids, an interview with Author Barbara

Barbara Porro, author of Talk It Out; Conflict Resolution for the Elementary Classroom, has a timely new curriculum designed to teach emotional literacy and conflict resolution. Six Seconds’ Education Project Manager, Kate Bedford, interviewed Porro and discussed the challenges of teaching emotional intelligence in today’s classrooms.

Necessity is the mother of invention. For Barbara Porro, necessity and creative problem solving were the mothers of her newest book, Teaching Conflict Resolution with the Rainbow Kids Program. As a first grade teacher facing high-energy students ripe with conflict, Porro searched for a technique to increase her students’ self-awareness and help students manage their conflicts. At first nothing worked. “What I discovered about first graders is when I have them in a circle talking about how we are going to treat each other, and how we are going to be together, they always give right answers. But on the playground, the right answers seem to disappear like vapor.” Since early elementary students are concrete thinkers, Porro realized she needed a way to make abstract concepts, like emotions, consequential thinking, and impulse management, concrete. She wanted to give them a foothold in the skills of emotional intelligence. It was through this need, and years of experimentation in her classroom, that the Rainbow Kids were born.

The Rainbow Kids Programis a curriculum based on an imaginary land where children’s experiences of emotions are displayed by the weather around them. Porro uses this metaphor of weather to demonstrate students’ emotions and conflicts. A child feels “sunny” after getting a compliment and then can be taught that spreading sunshine makes them feel even “sunnier.” Children may feel “cloudy” when they get into an argument, but they are given techniques to “clear the clouds away” and resolve the conflict. “Small children are very emotionally volatile. They need tools to positively express their emotions and develop better social relationships in school and childhood.” By using such a simple metaphor, young children can grasp the abstract concept of emotions and begin to integrate emotional awareness into their behavior.

Since one of the goals of emotional literacy is to help students expand their emotional vocabulary beyond their usual mad, sad, glad, and bad, I asked Porro if reducing all emotions to the simple dichotomy of sunny and rainy limited, rather than expanded, children’s emotional vocabulary. She responded, “Initially it is very handy for children who have emotion-related vocabulary limited to mad, sad, glad, and bad to be able to label things sunny and cloudy. Since developmentally they see the world in black and white at this age, without a shade of gray, the metaphor fits into their world view.” The hope is once children have mastered the metaphor of sunny and cloudy, they can use their enhanced awareness of emotions to build a broader vocabulary. Maurice Elias, Ph.D., co-author of Emotionally Intelligent Parenting, argues that, “There are more emotions we can feel than we can label. Emotions are fundamentally neither cognitive nor verbal, so as soon as try to name them we begin to be cognitive instead.” Porro hopes that the sunny/cloudy metaphor in The Rainbow Kids Program will help young children bridge the gap between the emotional experience of feelings and the cognitive skills needed to describe their feelings. As she puts it, “It lets them get a handle on their emotions.”

As a classroom teacher using The Rainbow Kids Program Porro saw tremendous transformation in her students and classroom culture. “The Rainbow Kids gave my students a vision of how we can live together in a caring community.” The curriculum models a community where emotions are recognized and respected, and conflicts are resolved through discussion. Porro points out that it is easy for children to be nice when everyone is feeling positive. Community and positive interaction is harder when there is a full spectrum of human emotions, both positive and negative. Cloudy feelings and conflict are not ignored in The Rainbow Kids Program; they are acknowledged and addressed.

I asked Porro if working with and teaching conflict resolution had changed her personal approach to conflict. “When I am personally in a conflict, I automatically go into my human response. It is not until I get fairly far into that reaction that I say to myself, ‘Oh, this is a conflict.’ Then I can literally go and play the part of the tape in my head that will inform me what to do.” She explains, “I can’t change the way I am wired, but I catch myself sooner. After I catch myself, I can make a conscious choice about how to respond.” This ability to slow down a conflict and manage the response is one of the main skills The Rainbow Kids Program teaches elementary school students.

Rainbow Kids does not focus on conflict resolution alone. It is designed to teach emotional literacy and navigating emotions as well as conflict resolution. I asked Porro to explain why, if Rainbow Kids’ goals are so broad, conflict resolution is the only skill mentioned in the title? The answer was disturbing. The publisher believes that books with ‘social and emotional learning’ in the title will not sell. Since schools have been focusing so strongly on conflict management, however, those titles are selling. So Porro was forced to limit her title in response to market demand. This is unfortunate because The Rainbow Kids Program is much more than conflict resolution, and all of us at Six Seconds would like to see social and emotional learning become a priority in schools.

What would Barbara Porro do if she had a magic wand and could change the current educational system? She would move the pendulum from a focus on testing towards a more child-focused system. “I would like to move the pendulum to a wide middle ground where we as adults in the community understand that it is our job to educate the whole child intellectually, socially, emotionally, ethically, and spiritually. I’d want this commitment at every level, from politicians all the way to brand new parents. If we got just that, we would be able to figure out the rest.”

Posted on October 29, 2002 by kate

Don't have an account yet? You can create one. As a registered user you have some advantages like theme manager, comments configuration and post comments with your name.