Having feelings isn’t a sign of weakness — they mean we’re human, says producer and activist Nikki Webber Allen. Even after being diagnosed with anxiety and depression, Webber Allen felt too ashamed to tell anybody, keeping her condition a secret until a family tragedy revealed how others close to her were also suffering. In this important talk about mental health, she speaks openly about her struggle — and why communities of color must undo the stigma that misreads depression as a weakness and keeps sufferers from getting help.

1. The teacher dreams have revved back up.

Once I dreamed that my appraiser at my first school was my dentist and they pulled out all my teeth with no anesthesia. I’ll let you interpret that one.

2. Your cart moves on its own toward bargain and office supply sections of stores.

Magnetic field, probably.

3. You lie right to your own face to justify your back-to-school purchases.

If I just buy this really nice travel mug, I won’t forget it at school or in the back of my car like I’ve done with 22 other food and beverage containers! If I get matching houndstooth office supplies for my desk, I won’t even need classroom management!

4. You’re already being asked to do stuff.

Sound familiar? “Teachers, please have the following quick tasks done BEFORE Monday’s staff development: Create teacher profiles for yourself on ZinkZonk, BeepSchool, and Swisheroo, read these two articles and have share points ready for each, register for these four PD sessions, and fill out this Google Slide at this link with the attached information about you for new teachers.”

5. Like an Olympian returning to earn their 20^th gold medal, you’re ready to rattle off the universal precautions for handling blood-borne pathogens.

Sometimes I imagine the online program being impressed with my accuracy, like, “Wow, ma’am, we’ve never had three consecutive perfect scores!”

6. You’re doing your own form of preparation before the marathon of this school year.

Teachers prepare differently for the beginning-of-the-year onslaught. Some pack in the relaxation by fitting in one more camping trip or scheduling one last massage. Others try to clear the remaining to-do list items they’ve been putting off, like cleaning out the garage or getting the tires rotated. Some brave souls even plan lessons.

7. Everyone in your home (including you) is ready for you to clear the “teacher corner” out of the living room.

Your cat LOVED it, though.

8. Despite a lot of external forces making teaching a tough gig right now, you can’t wait to meet this year’s group of kids.

(We all know they’re the best part.)

Reference: https://www.weareteachers.com/signs-you-teach-back-to-school-anxiety/?fbclid=IwAR1vTNOOp99_uRjG4TuPaaSGoSBxJwqHAV0RLBIGakBiYGAhYZnTgJJfK0Y

By loading kids with high expectations and micromanaging their lives at every turn, parents aren’t actually helping. At least, that’s how Julie Lythcott-Haims sees it. With passion and wry humor, the former Dean of Freshmen at Stanford makes the case for parents to stop defining their children’s success via grades and test scores. Instead, she says, they should focus on providing the oldest idea of all: unconditional love.

PROMOTE PERSONAL RELEVANCE

Personal relevance engages students’ desire to initiate and sustain effort. Here are three tips to help students relate to their learning.

1. Provide learner clarity. Explain how students will be using facts or procedures as tools for participating in appealing activities during the learning process. Promote pre-unit discussion of how the topic could relate to students’ interests, family life, community, high-interest current events, or history. As part of a reading assignment, you can ask students to give x number of examples of which specific information could be useful to their understanding.

2. Sustain motivation. As a unit progresses, have students write assignments about the usefulness of the material to their lives, their future careers, or the careers of professionals they admire. They can keep an ongoing list and share their thoughts in small groups or with the whole class. 

3. Give prompts for personal relevance. Encourage student-generated personal relevance with prompts such as “This relates to my life because,” “I want to know more about it,” “This reminds me of,” “This is how I’d sketch the information,” etc. 

FACILITATE GOAL-PROGRESS AWARENESS

Goal-progress awareness requires frequent feedback and sustains student effort. Their brains will invest more effort into the task, and as a result, students are more responsive to feedback. This progress awareness builds their ability to recognize that their effort is correlated to their progress and boosts their perseverance.

1. Consult with students. How will they include their personal goals for a unit or assignment, and how they will achieve them? Guide students to evaluate whether these goals are reasonable and manageable. You can also provide rubrics that allow them to assess their progress and check off what they’ve completed.

2. Remind students how to get help when blocked. When they become discouraged or have setbacks, prompt them to start with their list of tasks (prioritizing point values or percentages of graded components, determining how to manage their time) as well as other helpful resources (peer editing, suggested websites) in order to get back on track.

3. Have students create progress journals. Students can make predictions about things they expect to notice as they strive toward their goals. It’s important to do this throughout the project so that students can see evidence of their goal progress. For example, have them write subgoals that they’ll need to achieve on the way, periodically assess, and use to modify their plans and actions accordingly. 

4. Check in intentionally. Hold conferences with students, and write notes in their progress journals to reinforce their efforts. Remind students that being aware of progress helps sustain effort despite setbacks or mistakes.

5. Provide preview rubrics of what will be evaluated in the project/unit test. Knowing what they’ll be evaluated on can promote confidence. To help students avoid feeling overwhelmed by what might seem outside of their skill levels, invite them to focus on one or two rubric areas at time, and offer guidance to boost those skills.

6. Complete effort-to-progress graphs. A variety of effort-to-progress graphsare available online. When students fill these in as they record evidence of their incremental goal progress, they can see the impact of their effort on their progress.

7. Give self-corrected practice tests. Use these tests as opportunities for students to evaluate their level of accurate understanding and either revise or reinforce relevant knowledge. Students can see their status and evaluate changes (what to focus on, strategies such as rewriting notes, taking multiple self-corrected practice tests) that impacted their success.

SUPPORT STUDENTS’ METACOGNITION

Metacognition helps secondary students develop an understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. Essentially, thinking about how they think allows them to recognize evidence of their own progress and boosts their awareness of the actions that brought them success. This promotes efficiency and empowers students to be their own tutors and guides in school and life.

1. Guide students in self-evaluation. Have them examine their successful and unsuccessful learning experiences. Ask students, “When you got stuck on homework or a text, what did you do to get unstuck? Write it down.” A student might comment, “When I took better notes in class, I found that I understood the homework better and got more of it right.” After assessments, students can consider what worked well and what they would try again.

Invite them to consider the following questions as they reflect:

• How well did I plan and organize my time?
• What improvement did I first notice?
• What did I try that I’d do again?
• What would I do differently next time?
• What will I look for in future projects as things that seem to be potential goal blockers? What can I do when I get stuck?

2. Encourage students to change plans when necessary. During a project or long-term assignment, give students class time to make observations and consider how to revise their strategies and planning, throughout the assignment. Before starting the assignment unit, have students record in their progress journal what they hope to achieve and compare that with their metacognition of the goals they achieve.

EXPLAIN NEUROPLASTICITY FOR STUDENT EMPOWERMENT

Students are empowered when they understand how they can change their brainsand achieve goals, by activating the related neural circuits that promote memory and self-management. This knowledge makes them more motivated to sustain effort.

Enhancing students’ interest, curiosity, positive expectations, and awareness of goal-achieving strategies will make a difference in sustaining their motivated effort during the school years and for ongoing opportunities awaiting them in the future.

Reference:https://www.edutopia.org/article/guiding-students-sustain-effort-school?fbclid=IwAR1cG45OzGn_D6z0IDFZ3cUcawBSPEOzNIv2buokXHWK0HIVIKO8dElpP5s

Teachers can create emotionally safe spaces in their classrooms while also recognizing when students need mental health help from outside sources.

4 WAYS TO PROMOTE A SENSE OF BELONGING IN THE CLASSROOM

1. Promote a sense of empowerment to develop social and emotional literacy.  Providing structure, consistency, predictability, and choices is crucial for promoting students’ sense of empowerment and control. Such practices could include creating visual schedules, engaging in greeting and goodbye rituals, creating repetitive mantras for overcoming challenges, using collaborative problem-solving methods, and focusing on process over product.

During the school day, teachers can help students build social and emotional literacy through books, visuals, and SEL activities. We recommend books like The Feelings Book for younger children, How Are You Peeling? and Visiting Feelings for elementary-age children, and Big Life Journal for older children. Feelings charts from Conscious Discipline are helpful for younger children; more complex feelings charts help older students identify their feelings.

2. Encourage expression. Expressive tools help students process their experiences through the emotional centers of the brain, which are often less “defended” than the logic and reasoning centers. Doing so also offers children the opportunity to communicate in ways that are more natural for them and don’t depend only on verbal explanations. Providing enjoyable expressive tools will not only motivate children to engage in expressing their inner world and feelings but also promote the release of dopamine, allowing them to explore and communicate their authentic experiences and perceptions. This is the key to paving the way toward self-acceptance, which is a prerequisite to acceptance of others.

Teachers can offer a range of expressive tools. Some students prefer open-ended drawing or drawing from prompts such as those in the Anti-Coloring Book. These virtual tools are also ways to explore student expression:

• A comic creator like Pixton allows students to create a customized avatar (students can choose from different cultural and ethnic representations, gender nonbinary options, and different mobility assistive and assistive technology devices). Pixton provides templates for SEL lesson ideas, such as “Coping with Anxiety” and “Asking for Help,” where students can role-play with their avatars.
• A collage creator like Shape Collage allows students not only to upload their own pictures to share a story but also to design the collage in any shape of their interest. Teachers can give prompts like “create a collage of your strengths,” “sources of support in your life,” or “what are your hopes in friendships.”
• A puzzle maker like I’m a Puzzle or a matching game creator like Match the Memory allows students students to present different parts of their identity, their life, or their experiences by creating simple, fun games.

Playful mindfulness and meditation, music, movement, and yoga are other effective methods of furthering students’ connection to their own body and feelings to help them develop deeper insight into themselves and others.

3. Reframing behaviors. Disruptive behaviors such as calling out, not completing work, teasing peers, and acts of defiance and aggression are often misinterpreted as intentionally attention seeking or “making bad choices.” As Mona Delahooke explains, when adults fail to recognize that many behaviors represent the nervous system’s response to stress, we expend effort on techniques designed to correct the behaviors, such as compliance-based systems and reward-and-consequence systems.

However, as Ross Greene says, “Kids do well if they can.” Teachers can reframe disruptive behaviors: Instead of viewing problematic behaviors as a conscious, intentional choice, teachers can understand them as a student’s communication of needs. Teachers might find that a child has developmental, physical, medical, sensory, learning, or mental health needs; has a stressful home environment; is struggling with peer relationships; or has difficulty building a trusting relationship with the teacher and school environment. In order to gain insight into what needs might be at the root of the behavior, provide students with a variety of expressive tools to explore and communicate their internal and external experiences. Doing so can help you gain a stronger sense of understanding and connection with students without committing extensive time or taking on the role of a mental health provider.

While using such an approach might not be effective in a moment of high emotional escalation, it is a highly effective, proactive approach that will often decrease the need for reactive responses.

4. Recognize warning signs of mental health needs. Teachers should, of course, also have tools that can be effectively utilized during an escalated behavior and prioritize safety above all. MentalHealth.gov, a service from the U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services and Education, provides resources for educators coping with mental health challenges in their classrooms. They identify warning signs that may indicate that a student needs support, including the following:

• Acting sad or withdrawn for more than two weeks
• Sudden overwhelming fear for no reason, sometimes with a racing heart or fast breathing
• Extreme difficulty concentrating or staying still that puts the student in physical danger or causes problems in the classroom
• Severe mood swings that cause problems in relationships.

If you notice one or more signs on this list, seek the guidance of a school counselor or refer the student to a mental health professional.

The role of teacher has greatly expanded over the last few decades, and certainly within the last few years. To be able to identify and support students’ mental health needs, you need resources, tools, and professional training in SEL and best practices for classroom implementation. Using more proactive approaches, gaining a better understanding of each student’s needs, could possibly prevent some escalations from occurring in the first place. Above all, teachers deserve acknowledgment of this critical role that they are playing.

Reference: https://www.edutopia.org/article/4-ways-teachers-can-support-students-emotional-well-being?fbclid=IwAR3wZqvPb5p5GLaSF1_U3tnG4_yCCP_g7NVkZ7YmKftrTzovdPdpmOjP4c8