RULER Wellbeing Framework

Emotional Intelligence Program

The Wellbeing program at Mentone Grammar helps to create an environment where every student in the School Community is known and cared for.

The Program aims to create an atmosphere where every student can achieve their best academically, socially, and emotionally.

To support this, the School embraces the teaching of the RULER program to students from Foundation – Year 9.  Developed at Yale University, this is an emotional intelligence program designed to support a positive and safe school environment.

The RULER approach is designed to improve the quality of classroom interaction through professional development and classroom curricula that infuse emotional literacy instruction into teaching-learning interactions.

The approach is implemented across two key strategies: The Anchors of Emotional Intelligence; and The Feeling Words Curriculum.

RULER Explained

Understanding the acronym and the key principles of RULER:

  • Recognising emotions in self and others
  • Understanding the causes and consequences of emotions
  • Labeling emotions accurately
  • Expressing emotions appropriately
  • Regulating emotions effectively

The Anchors of Emotional Intelligence

This strategy is comprised of four primary tools: the Charter, Mood Meter, Meta Moment, and Blueprint. Each is based on scientific research and helps children and adults develop their emotional intelligence skills.

This collaborative document is created by members of the community, outlining how they aspire to treat each other. Together, the community describes how they want to feel at school, the behaviours that foster those feelings, and guidelines for preventing and managing unwanted feelings and conflict.

Learning to identify and label emotions is a critical step toward cultivating emotional intelligence. Using the Mood Meter, students and educators become more mindful of how their emotions change throughout the day and affect their actions. Students learn to expand their emotional vocabulary, replacing basic feeling words like ‘ok’ or ‘fine’ with more sophisticated terms such as ‘alienated’ or ‘tranquil’. By teaching subtle distinctions between similar feelings, the Mood Meter empowers students and educators to recognise the full scope of their emotional lives and address all feelings more effectively.

This strategy helps students and educators handle strong emotions to make better decisions for themselves and their community. The Meta Moment is a brief step back from the situation to pause and think before acting and ask how would my ‘best self' react in this situation? What strategy can I use so that my actions reflect my best self? With practice, ineffective responses can be replaced with productive and empowering responses to challenging situations. Students learn to make better choices, build healthier relationships, and experience greater wellbeing.

How everyone in a school treats each other has a powerful effect on classroom performance and school climate. The Blueprint is about managing conflict effectively, encouraging participants to consider a disagreement from the other person’s perspective, as well as their own. This helps develop empathy by considering each other’s feelings and working collaboratively to identify healthy solutions to conflicts. The Blueprint helps repair relationships and build stronger ones, creating a more positive environment.

The Feeling Words Curriculum

When the right words are not available to students, communication can break down. Students’ feelings become confused, suppressed, or even displaced onto others. The Feeling Words Curriculum empowers students to describe the full range of human emotions.

Students hone their emotional intelligence skills, enhance their writing and critical thinking skills, and develop the creativity, empathy, and advanced perspective-taking abilities they need to make healthy decisions and build mutually supportive relationships.

The above information is drawn from the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence website.