Emotional skills can be taught: lessons from classrooms
September 29, 2026 · 20 min read
Marc Brackett's RULER program, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang's research on emotion and learning, and Victor Carrión's school mindfulness work show emotional regulation is a teachable skill that improves learning. It argues for building these skills early rather than waiting for problems.
The rules, numbers and steps worth keeping in front of you.
- Marc Brackett's RULER skills: recognize, understand, label, express and regulate emotions.
- Brackett: emotional intelligence is unrelated to personality, so anyone can build it.
- Brackett: disappointment is unmet expectations when things were fair; anger is a sense of injustice.
- Brackett: anxiety is uncertainty about the future; stress is too many demands and not enough resources.
- Mood Meter: yellow is pleasant and high-energy, green pleasant and calm, blue unpleasant and low-energy, red unpleasant and high-energy.
- RULER rule: do not fix people's feelings; feelings are pleasant or unpleasant, not good or bad.
- Brackett: do not read emotion from behavior; his childhood anger was really fear and shame.
- Brackett: only about a third of adults had an emotion mentor growing up.
- Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: students learn whatever their emotions are about, grades or ideas.
- Immordino-Yang: people must feel safe to think together.
- Victor Carrión: have teachers, not yoga instructors, lead sessions two to three times a week.
- Carrión's trial: an average of 73 more minutes of sleep, plus better mood.
- Carrión: practice positive thoughts all the time, not only when stressed.
- Warning: children with significant symptoms need evaluation by a qualified mental health professional.
This is the short form. The full insight has every expert's reasoning, their own words and the sources.