Dear Families,
As you know Marvista is in its second year of implementing the social-emotional curriculum, RULER (Recognizing, Understanding, Labeling, Expressing, and Regulating emotions). Last Friday during early release our RULER implementation team trained our staff on the third anchor tool. This tool is called the Meta-Moment.
The purpose of the Meta-Moment is to give us a space of time between a “trigger” (something that make us angry or anxious) and our response to it. It buys us time in the heat of the moment, to make a better choice than we might were we simply to react.
The steps are:
1. Something happens. This could be a thought, a person’s actions, or even a place or an event. The two emotions that a Meta-Moment addresses are anger and anxiety.
2. The second step is to “sense” something is wrong by tuning in to how our body feels. We recognize a change has occurred in our body, mind, and/or behavior.
3. STOP. We pause and breathe in slowly and deeply to avoid responding in an unhelpful manner.
4. See your best self. This means we imagine in our minds the kind of person we want to be, the way we want others to see us, or perhaps view ourselves with the best possible outcome. The goal is to make this “best self” automatic.
5. Strategize. We all have a toolkit of strategies we prefer to use to regulate our emotions. Some examples include using positive self-talk, picturing yourself in a happy place, deep breathing exercises, or trying to think on the bright side of the situation.
6. Succeed! We feel good about ourselves when we act in a way that aligns with our best self.
It’s important to note that the Meta-Moment process is just to get us through that critical moment so we can later examine longer term solutions or make a more detailed plan.
The RULER team taught this tool as both a strategy adults to master as we speak with one another and with children and for students to use for regulating their emotions with others. It is our job as a team, home and school together, to teach our children strategies to strengthen their impulse control. We live in a society where everything and everybody seems to move so quickly. Children can quickly get overwhelmed, feel anxious, become impatient or get swept up into reacting in a way that makes the problem bigger.
Encouraging children to take a Meta-Moment in no way makes them a push-over. We want them to stand up for themselves and to take a stand on what is right and just. The point is that they do so, in an intentional manner that shows their “best self” rather than reacting in a way that hurts others.
Your child’s teacher will be introducing them to the Meta-Moment in the coming weeks. We hope it will become an integral part of your language at home, just as the Mood Meter has. Please reach out to your child’s teacher if you would like more details on any of the RULER anchor tools we use at school.
I’d like to recognize the lead teachers on the RULER implementation team: Bre Christine, Denise Gardner-Young, Andrew Ritsema, and Lisa Shafer along with Melissa and myself.
Until next time,
Terry Holtgraves