The RULER Approach

We have made creativity feel like a trait students either have or do not have, when so much of what we call creative is really the ability to survive the ugly middle of making something.

The first version is messy, the feedback stings, the doubt gets louder, and suddenly “I’m not creative” becomes the safest story to tell.

RULER Institute Online helps educators build the emotion skills students need for that exact moment, when persistence matters more than the spark that started the idea. (Link in bio/stories to sign up)

As educators prepare for the year ahead, the question is not how to demand more creativity from students. It is how to build classrooms where frustration, uncertainty, and imperfect first attempts do not make good ideas disappear too early.

Research spotlight: Zorana Ivcevic Pringle | Author, The Creativity Choice

“Work is the school of adulthood.” 

That’s how Dr. Heidi Brooks closed her keynote at TISEI’s Annual Congress this week, and it resonated. 

A few sessions later, we heard it echoed from the next generation. Students from The High School of Fashion Industries and incoming college freshmen took the stage to talk about emotional intelligence—not as an abstract concept but as a set of skills they’re actively building and teaching others for future resilience. 

Two moments, one throughline: emotional intelligence isn’t something we arrive at. It’s something we practice as students, professionals, and people. The students on that stage aren’t waiting for adulthood to start learning these skills; they’re already enrolled.

         TISEI2026

You can be fully engaged at work but at the end of the day have nothing left for the people you love.

When Jochen Menges raised this today at the 10th annual TISEI Congress at Yale, it exposed how quickly we treat engagement as proof of success. But someone can show up, perform, give their best energy all day, and still go home completely drained.

The next era of emotional intelligence must make room for emotional diversity. Not everyone wants to feel joyful or upbeat at work, and even pleasant emotions can become exhausting when they are expected instead of chosen.

A workplace cannot keep calling that engagement and pretend there is no cost.

Who gets the best of us, and who gets what’s left?

35 years ago, emotional intelligence (EI) was a new concept. Today, it’s a major scientific and professional field. How did we get here? 
This week, EI researchers and practitioners from 27 countries are reflecting on the past and shaping the future of the field through emerging tech, cultural insights, and better measurement.  
“Today, uniquely human capacities represented by emotional intelligence are becoming increasingly important.” - Chris Skinner, President of TISEI
Mindfulnes

Students feel that faster than we think. They walk into the climate adults have practiced, not the one adults hoped would magically appear in September.

So before the year is already asking everyone to improvise, what have the adults actually had time to practice? That is where RULER Institute Online gives school teams a place to begin.

Link in bio/stories.

By the time a feeling becomes a hallway problem, the school is already late.

A blowup usually had a history. So did the shutdown at a desk, the group chat cruelty, and the teacher trying to keep teaching while the room tilts sideways.

That is the chicken-and-egg problem Marc Brackett is naming in his recent essay for Education Week. The needs feel too big, so schools wait, then those needs return louder because the skills were not built when things were still teachable.

The cost does not disappear. It lands on the teacher trying to steady a moment the school could have prepared for.

RULER helps schools begin before crisis becomes the first lesson. Link in stories/bio.

We keep asking students to regulate inside a world adults have barely regulated for them.

A child can learn every feeling word, every strategy, every script. But if the day around them is built on interruption, instant relief, constant comparison, and fewer chances to be bored, awkward, independent, or face-to-face, then we are asking emotional skills to grow in conditions that keep working against them.

That is the uncomfortable part.

At some point, the question cannot only be whether kids have enough self-control. It has to be whether adults have protected enough of childhood for self-control to develop.

Marc Brackett and Jonathan Haidt get into that on Dealing with Feeling.

What phones are doing to attention matters, but so does what adults can still give back through phone-free school days, Mood Meter reflections around tech, play, independence, and more real life.

37 schools make the “SEL is nice, but…” argument harder to keep making.

Because at some point, this stops being a debate about whether emotions belong in school and becomes a question of whether adults are willing to look at what the building is teaching.

That is what makes the scale matter. Students and teachers were followed before RULER implementation, one year in, and two years in, across the things people usually notice too late: voice, relationships, teaching quality, and school satisfaction.

That is the receipt. Emotional climate shapes whether students speak up, trust adults, stay engaged, and keep trying.

Research Spotlight: Rachel Baumsteiger, Jessica Hoffmann, Ruth Castillo Gualda | Doctora en Psicología and Marc Brackett

RULER Institute Online and in-person training help schools build and measure emotional climate. Link in bio/stories