7 Mindset Tools for Teachers
Support for Teachers and Parents/Guardians
© Margaret Boersma 2021
· Do you feel like you’re doing everything you can in a climate of constant change but yet you experience stress and overwhelm?
· Is your own personal self-care constantly pushed to the side?
· Does everything feel unattainable right now…balance, self-care, removing the stress?
We have all been affected by the disruption of Covid 19. Some students have experienced trauma while others have not. There is a large range of emotions, and as teachers, we need to equip ourselves.
Note: Although this blog was written with teachers and students in mind, it directly applies to parents as well.
Here are seven ways to empower yourself and your students.
1. Nurture your relationships
Intentionally create a bond with others. Adults to adults, adults to students. One of the best things we can do is make sure every student has an adult to connect with each day. This could be an educational assistant, caretaker, office staff or teacher. Especially children who are traumatized need one caring adult to touch base every day.
Creating caring connections and trust with your learners centres on helping students to know that they matter — that their uniqueness is celebrated, and voice is heard. Students learn best when they feel safe, valued and certain that they belong. — Page 2, The First 10 Days (and Beyond) from School Mental Health Ontario
At any point in the school year, you are able to enrich the soil so your students can grow. Build connections and create a caring community where every individual is nurtured.
Here are a number of learning games that teach resilience, collaboration, problem-solving and negotiation. Most games can be modified for physical distancing. It can also be fun to have a class set of pool noodles and incorporate them into the games to train spatial awareness.
2. Expect a range of emotions with both students and adults
Both students and adults can appear well but actually be experiencing emotions such as deep sadness, helplessness, numbness, overwhelm, isolation, disconnection or an inability to trust. We might have mood swings, be unable to concentrate, withdraw from others, be extremely tired, irritable, angry or anxious. As teachers, we must be watching for these symptoms in our students and staff. They may need professional help.
3. Be generous in your listening
Restate what you hear and the feelings you see displayed. This is calming and critical to bring someone’s emotional temperature down. We all have our own perspectives. Sometimes we need someone to get curious enough to really see something from our perspective. Here is a poster and information sheet entitled Our Perspective is Our Truth. Following the script provided, one can de-escalate someone who is activated by seeing things from their point of view.
4. Do not try to solve a problem when emotions are escalated
Asking Sam, “Why did you hit Tommy?” does not work. Instead, when they are calm, ask, “What were you thinking just before you hit Tommy?” This allows you to collaboratively figure out the trigger behind the behaviour and then create a plan the next time they think in the same way.
If you try to engage Sam in problem-solving while he is still in an activated state, he won’t be able to reason. Reasoning involves the frontal cortex of the brain but when activated, the amygdala is totally engaged and the frontal cortex is inactive. The amygdala is in charge of our survival. We know when it is engaged when the behaviour is fight, flight or freeze. Examples of fight include aggressive behaviour physically or verbally. Flight could look like running out, changing the subject or withdrawing and freeze can look like silence or numbness.
To support Sam is this instance, having him breathe deeply with you and letting the air out slowly a few times works to calm the system and helps him access his frontal cortex.
5. Practice cognitive flexibility
Covering curriculum is not your number one priority during the pandemic. When students are dealing with heightened emotions, they can’t learn. First, spend time building community. Shift quickly when a need is expressed. Don’t ignore small misbehaviours. Instead, use the opportunity to do a mini-lesson on appropriate ways to express our feelings while showing respect for others.
If a student is triggered or activated, they need a quick release. Deep breathing works. You can also encourage the student to draw their feelings using markers on a big piece of paper. Often the result is a paper with a lot of large scratches, but they feel much better afterward.
6. Reframing is an essential skill
Reframing helps us grasp a positive context by choosing to have a more upbeat perspective that could be equally true.
Positive reframing involves thinking about a negative or challenging situation in a more positive way. This could involve thinking about a benefit or upside to a negative situation that you had not considered. Alternatively, it can involve identifying a lesson to be learned from a difficult situation. Finding something to be grateful for in a challenging situation is a type of positive reappraisal. For example, after a break-up, you could think about the opportunities to meet new people, the things you learned from the relationship, and the gratitude you feel for the time you spent with the person.
How do we Support Students who Lose Control? is a blog is about teaching students to reframe a situation.
7. Teach specific lessons to build emotional vocabulary and manage emotions
We must model and teach our students to “use their words” to express emotion rather than being physically demonstrative. We must also model and teach our students to manage their emotions by having them practice helpful strategies such as deep breathing to calm down. Students can learn to see things from another perspective as well as calm someone else down.
How do we teach those skills? Since our innate way of learning includes pretending, dancing, music and drawing, we can teach these skills through the arts. I have created a FREE set of five student video lessons teaching self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship management and responsible decision-making. The series is called Deep Learning at Home. Lesson extensions can include making puppets, visual arts, creative dance, spoken word, songwriting and drama. Each lesson has an affirmation, so students easily remember the theme while applying it personally. The Deep Learning at Home series stimulates great family and/or class discussions.
AUTHOR
Margaret Boersma, OCT, is an instructional coach, teaching artist, speaker and educational consultant. Her varied career in teaching, combined with her social/emotional learning (SEL) expertise, allows her to assimilate the affective domain (people skills) with academic curriculum goals. She works with school districts and schools in Canada, the U.S, The Netherlands and New Zealand/Australia.
Website
Reference
2020, School Mental Health Ontario, Mentally Healthy Return to School Toolkit, pg 2, accessed 1 January 2021, <https://smho-smso.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/The-First-10-Days.pdf>
2021, Stress and Development Lab, Harvard University, ‘Positive Reframing and Examining the Evidence,’ <https://sdlab.fas.harvard.edu/cognitive-reappraisal/positive-reframing-and-examining-evidence>
Source
Published on Medium.com by UNESCO MGIEP
UNESCO (United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization)
MGIEP (Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education of Peace and Sustainable Development)