Helping Our Students Understand Discouragement

Atlas of Emotions

We’ve been talking about resilience, perseverance, and disappointment this past month. Such important concepts and feelings – always worth discussion! Well, this time around, I’d like to add discouragement 😞 to the mix. Do you know the Atlas of Emotions? It is a fabulous resource for anyone working in or interested in learning more about emotions! Paul Ekman, PhD, his daughter Eve Ekman, PhD, and the Dalai Lama have been working on it for quite a few years. Love the visuals, love exploring it with my students.

Maybe you’ve had a chance to try some of the activities I outlined last time. Now, you can layer in what we can glean from the Atlas of Emotions, particularly looking at what is called the “actions of sadness”😢:

Start by talking about what these words mean. Ruminate is not a common word for upper elementary, middle, or high school students, but it is certainly something many of our students do. That makes it worth discussing. These actions of sadness are options – ways to handle difficult feelings. We may each lean more toward one over another. Exploring 🔎 and experimenting 🔬with other options helps us grow in our emotional development.

Let’s revisit the screen shot from last time from Soar, by Alyce Tzue:

Now we can broaden our discussion to examine how the characters are dealing with their feeling of discouragement and disappointment. They each withdraw. Perhaps ruminate. What do your students think is going through their minds? Make a list. 📋 Are those thoughts we all often have?

There are so many wonderful examples of disappointment in animated videos! One of my favorite finds is One Small Step, by TAIKO Studios. Look at these fabulous representations ⤵️:

My students love making compilations – and they reinforce the fact that emotions don’t look only one way! Making montages like this make it so much easier for our students to talk about what they themselves are feeling…

Soar, by Alyce Tzue, Egghung by Justanimate, Game Changer by Avi Mano, Up, by Pixar Animation

I hope this deep dive is giving you some ideas for these last weeks of therapy, when, let’s face it, we can start feeling like we are dragging to the finish line 🏁 (discouraged anyone?) No worries, I will cheer things up next time! 😉