Emotion Focused Skills Training (EFST®) in Schools is a simple, practical program that helps teachers and school staff understand and work with emotions (students’, parents’, and colleagues’ emotions . . . as well as their own) in the everyday moments where feelings run high.
Teachers and school staff are highly trained as educators. And yet every day, alongside delivering lessons and working with colleagues and families, they navigate a second, quieter curriculum: emotion, motivation, behaviour, and relationships. A frustrated student, a worried parent, a tense staff-room conversation, these moments shape learning just as much as any lesson plan does.
Brain science helps explain why this matters so much. Emotions are the primary drivers of human behaviour. When a strong feeling is present, whether it shows up loudly or stays quiet and hidden, a student’s behaviour, motivation, and ability to think clearly are no longer open to ordinary reasoning. Put simply, you can’t reason a child out of a feeling they haven’t yet been helped through. For a teacher, a student who “won’t listen to reason” in these moments adds real stress and frustration to an already demanding and important job.
For example, after the COVID-19 pandemic, many students returned to the classroom carrying anxiety, grief, and disrupted routines. Big emotions arrived at school in ways no lesson plan could anticipate, and teachers often found themselves needing to steady a room before any learning could begin. EFST® was created for exactly these moments; the ordinary ones and the extraordinary ones alike.
Through a few clear, repeatable steps, EFST® gives educators simple tools to:
EFST® in Schools delivers a set of skills that can be learned quickly and used right away. These skills improve teacher and school-staff well-being, student well-being, and the overall culture of the school.
