Developing Emotional Literacy – Approaches for Staff and Students Developing an Approach in the SEBD School

This chapter describes the work undertaken with staff and students at a school for students with social emotional and behavioural in developing emotional literacy and creating an emotionally literate and solution focused school context. Although this specialist provision provided a nurturing, emotionally literate and inclusive environment, senior staff identified a need to develop the breadth and depth of their approaches both to support the students and staff and to increase the feel of inclusion experienced by students. Building their positive experiences is using an Appreciative Enquiry Approach (Cooperrider, D. L. (2001) Lessons from the field: Applying appreciative inquiry. New York, NY: Thin Book publishing) alongside a series of solution focused tools and strategies staff were able to identify ways forward.