5.5 Emotional Regulation

  • The need to create autonomy supportive environments is essential in enabling students to regulate effectively.  Key factors include student self-efficacy (their belief in their ability to do well), their previous experiences of success, their goals, and feelings of connectivity with others.

  • Strategies need to support students in managing their ‘self’, ‘self in context’, and the requirements of the discipline (See Evans, Waring, & Christodoulou, 2017).

  • In addressing different elements of emotional regulation, key areas of activity include:

Key concepts: autonomy, agency, empowerment, relational and boundary-crossing skills; reflexivity, resilience, flexibility

 

ACTIVITIES

 The exercise outlined below can be used with students and educators.

 How good are my emotional regulation strategies?
To identify the strategies you most commonly use to manage your emotions, rank the following strategies from 1 to 10. As you rank them, write down some of the situations in which you use them: for example, when you’re stressed, when there’s a deadline looming, or when you are angry.

Here is the key: 1 = dominant strategy and 10 = least used strategy

Why does this matter?

Our emotions help us to navigate every aspect of our lives, so we need to how and when to trust them. We also need to know when to adapt them: for example, to regulate them down when we are over excited, or to regulate them up when we need to get motivated.

Bennet and Evans (2018). How good are your emotional regulation strategies (developed from Waring & Evans 2015)

What now?

Use Kolb and Fry’s (1975) experiential circle to reflect critically on the following questions.

1.      Experiencing (when I last experienced or avoided this)

2.      Observing and experiencing (what I did and felt in the past)

3.      Forming abstract concepts (what this makes me think about now)

4.      Testing in or anticipating new situations (what I will try next time)

·         To what extent do you take on board feedback and/or try to do something about it?

·         How long does it take you to work through how you feel and to become objective?

What networks of support do you use to support you in understanding what you need to do?

Finally, make a commitment to test your new strategies and to reflect on them once you do.

 

Working with students to address attitudes to feedback