Why is Yale so Emotional? -By Sheva Locke, Head of VBS Day School

Why is Yale so Emotional?

This summer, five VBS Day School administrators and teachers traveled to Yale University to find out why Yale is so emotional. They attended a special conference at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence to learn about a cutting edge research based program called RULER for our school. While at Yale, they learned that emotions matter!  Emotions drive our actions and can determine how we learn, make decisions, build relationships, spark creativity, and affect our health and wellness. Yale also emphasized that by focusing on emotions you can create a more effective and compassionate society. A recent study from the Center for Creative Leadership also showed that people that have the greatest success were those that had high emotional intelligence. They were able to handle change, work as a team and had strong interpersonal skills.

The VBS Harold M. Schulweis Day School has always had as part of its mission a strong emphasis for our students on building character and empowering our students to make a difference in the world through social action.  Since the focus of educating the whole child; mind, body, heart, and soul is of such high importance, we wanted to partner with Yale to learn how we could best support the social emotional growth of our students on a daily basis. So, we launched the RULER Program first beginning with our faculty in preparation for our students who will begin school next week.

Ruler is an acronym for Recognizing, Understanding, Labeling, Expressing, and Regulating emotions. The program builds on our school’s Community Brit Rainbow of Respect, the Rainbow of Shalom. The Ruler program has four anchor tools beginning with creating a safe and caring classroom and school environment. Students and faculty create a shalom charter that does not focus on rules but on how they want to “feel” in the class and school and what actions they need to take to achieve those goals. Another anchor tool is the mood meter that provides children with opportunities to identify, label, and address their emotions throughout the day.  The meta moment is a tool that teaches how to pause before acting and “be your best self”. The shalom blueprint tool is a problem solving process that helps children work through situations by focusing on how their emotions affect their actions and ways to restore shalom in their relationships.

As the Ruler anchor tools are introduced and practiced in the school, the focus on emotions will shape the school climate and create more self -awareness for the entire faculty, students, and families. Parent workshops will be offered during the year to bridge the learning from school to the home with the opportunity to create a family charter and ways to explore emotions together.

This focus on social emotional learning is important for it should not be assumed that most people will naturally show empathy and compassion toward others. Studies have shown that these traits can be learned and nurtured. Dr. Dan Siegel, Director of the Mindful Awareness Center at UCLA, has done extensive research on social emotional learning and the brain. He states, “It is a powerful lens through which we can understand our inner self. It is a way to get ourselves out of auto-pilot of ingrained behaviors and habitual responses. How we focus our attention shapes the structure of the brain. Neuroscience has also shown that we can grow these new connections throughout our lives, not just childhood.”

Our school’s namesake and teacher Rabbi Harold Schulweis once shared a powerful story about how human beings tend to see “the other”. These were his words of wisdom that he imparted to the Day School students before they went into the community to help others in need. The story was about a man who was living in the desert. One day he leaves his tent and hears a clap of thunder. He sees what appears to be a large cloud. He goes closer to the cloud when he recognizes that the cloud is a lion. He takes his musket ready to kill the lion and gets a little closer and sees it is not a cloud or a lion, it is a human being, and that is amazing… and then he realizes that it is his brother. Rabbi Schulweis went on to emphasize that this story teaches us that, as we grow closer to each other we realize the person we are talking to is our brother.

May this New Year 5778 bring the opportunity for each of us to have moments of mindful insights into the importance of emotions. May we learn to guide these emotions to kindle more self-confidence, self-care, and positive relationships with others, bringing more kindness and compassion to our world.

Emotions do matter in our pursuit of Shalom!

Sheva Locke
Head of Valley Beth Shalom Harold M. Schulweis Day School