Social and emotional skills are more important now than ever. As educators, we can find ways to better identify and manage our own emotions, which in turn, can help our students identify and manage theirs. In this introductory week, we’ll unpack how emotions can help and hinder attention, decision making, relationships, health, and performance.

In this section, you'll focus on how to identify your own emotions, which is an essential first step to building emotional intelligence skills. You'll explore how to recognize, understand, and accurately label emotions using the Mood Meter. This section builds a foundation for the rest of the course, where you'll learn how to manage your emotions and help students to manage theirs.

In this section, you'll apply what you've learned about identifying your emotions to the practice of managing your emotions. You'll explore and reflect on a series of "action strategies" to help you manage your emotions in healthy, productive ways.

While the previous section focused on "action strategies" to support healthy emotion management, this section focuses on "thought strategies." You'll consider research-based ways to shift the way you think to shift the way you feel, and consider how you can incorporate these strategies into your daily life.

This section focuses on applying strategies for approaching your own and others' emotions in scientific and culturally responsive ways. You'll have the opportunity to describe the biases involved in identifying and managing emotions, as well as to reflect on the potential impact of your own biases on your interactions with others.

While the first half of the course focused on identifying your own emotions, this section focuses on strategies for improving your awareness of others' emotions (especially the emotions of your students). You'll explore the barriers to understanding others' emotions and ways to improve this skill as an emotion scientist.

This section takes your skills in identifying others' emotions a step further, providing research-based steps to help others manage their emotions. You will be introduced to the concept of emotion co-regulation, as well as a five-step process to support students in moments of high stress.

This final section brings together everything so far in the course. You'll look at your action plans from each section of the course and make a commitment to lasting change.