#blog: Seven Small Changes to Support Your Mental Health This School Year
| By Kathryn Kennedy |
Originally published with Gale.
It’s almost time to head back to school. How did that happen?! Where did the time go?! I know we ask that question every year, but seriously, summer sometimes feels like an epic time warp! Am I right?! Nevertheless, I hope you thoroughly enjoyed the summer not only with your family and friends but also with yourself.
As we start the school year, you may feel a bit of excitement and perhaps some trepidation stirring inside of you about what the year is going to bring. You’re not alone. That’s totally natural, especially given the unpredictability we’ve all experienced over the past few years. We’ve endured a lot and continue to do so, and healing and supporting ourselves takes time and continuous intentional effort. Healing prolonged stress and trauma does not happen overnight; it’s an ongoing journey, not a final destination.
Before we start back to school, what if we laid some foundational supports for ourselves? I know, I know … oftentimes, once the school year starts, our best-laid plans derail quickly! But what if we start small, using seven strategies that can be foundational for sustaining your mental health and well-being throughout this school year and beyond? And—BONUS—you might already be doing some of these! Here they are in no particular order.
1. Clear your plate.
We as educators, as you know, have a lot on our plates all of the time. What if we take some time before heading back to school to intentionally look at what we have on our plates? Is there anything you can let go of, either personal or professional? Is there anything that you can ask your school leader to take off your plate? Is there anything that’s not absolutely necessary? If so, take it off your plate to make room for things that will help you sustain your mental health and well-being. And make this intentional plate-clearing process a practice every month (if not more often) throughout the year. Look at it as a time to reflect and reevaluate your plate to see if there’s anything that can be cleared.2. Play every day.
Back in 2019, collaborative research from The Genius of Play and Fundamentally Children found that 75% of children were not getting enough play.1 If that’s the case, can you imagine the percentage of adults? According to Dr. Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play,2 “Play that is based on our inner needs and desires is the only path to finding lasting satisfaction in our relationships and professional work.” There are many benefits of play: it boosts creativity and problem-solving abilities; reduces stress; builds resilience, improves relationships; nurtures community; and much more. Given all of the benefits, it’s important for us to bring play back into our lives. So how do you get started doing just that? The activities that we find fun are unique to each of us. The National Institute for Play encourages adults to:Identify what is playful for you.
Everyone is different, so find what works for you!Develop lifelong play habits.
Habits typically take 40 days to become routine in our lives, so try to incorporate play at least once a day for 40 days to see what sticks!Recognize how you feel when there’s not enough play.
Practicing intentional check-ins to see how we’re feeling is important, and doing specific check-ins on how we feel when we play and not can help us see the benefits of play in our everyday lives.Model healthy play habits in your communities.
Establishing a sense of play and modeling it for others, including the other adults and little ones in your professional and personal lives, can help make play an integral part of our day-to-day lives.
3. Define and establish your safe spaces.
According to trauma and somatic psychology research, to heal ourselves and support our well-being, we need to have a felt sense of safety.3 This means safety in mind, body, and all other critical aspects of our being and lives. As you begin the school year, think about these various elements of your safety and identify ways you can support yourself to feel safe. Just as our students need to Maslow before Bloom, so do we as adults. And safety, inside and outside of ourselves, is priority number one!4. Build and bolster trusting relationships.
Once we have established a felt sense of safety, we can build and bolster relationships with others we trust. Trusting relationships provide us opportunities for co-regulation. Co-regulation is a way for your nervous system to work with another being’s (human, animal, plant, or otherwise) system to calm and ground. The more relationships we have that support co-regulation, the better.5. Create and cultivate your supportive communities.
Taking relationships one step further to create and cultivate a supportive community allows for more opportunities to support overall well-being. Each community or network you are part of provides specific support for each component of your well-being. Take some time to reflect on the communities you’re a part of and how they support you, as well as how you support them (giving back is just as important as getting support from others). Are there any communities that you think you’d like to add or even create to provide yourself better support?6. Learn something new.
Stepping out of our comfort zone and learning something new can spark creative energy, which in turn provides us a chance to reclaim our power and voice, and heal. Each day, see if there’s something small you can learn that is novel to you to help light up your curiosity!7. Explore and engage in short restoration activities.
We as educators are busy a majority of the time. When possible, take short bits of time to downshift, to rest, to reset, and to restore your mind and body. Perhaps you can check out yoga nidra, restorative yoga, yin yoga, and guided meditations that take anywhere from five to 60 minutes. These restorative activities help to refresh yourself and cultivate renewed energy.This is definitely not an exhaustive list, but I hope these and other small changes can help support you as you jump into this school year and many more years to come!
1. The Genius of Play. (22 Jul 2019). “75 Percent of Children Are Not Getting Enough Playtime, According to New Research.” PR Newswire.
2. National Institute for Play.
3. Levine, P. (1997). Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
Meet the Author
Kathryn Kennedy has cultivated her two primary passions for 20+ years. She serves as founder and executive director of Wellness for Educators and is the founder and principal consultant of Consult4Ed Group. Her recent publication, The Mind-Body Connection for Educators: Intentional Movement for Wellness, is the first in a four-part book series.
#blog: How Schools Can Respond to the Student Mental Health Crisis
by Stephanie McGary
Special thanks to Next Generation Learning Challenges for allowing us to cross-post this blog post :-)
Schools can take these proactive steps now to serve as psychological safe places for both students and educators throughout the year.
In this back-to-school season, our doors are reopening to welcome students who are carrying invisible backpacks full of trauma and stress responses. With all of the traumatic events happening in our world today, the most vulnerable of us—our young people—are experiencing the effects of this reality each and every day.
In President Biden’s last State of The Union Address, he made it clear that youth mental health is a priority for the Biden-Harris Administration stating “we owe them greater access to mental health care at their schools,” but what does that look, sound, and feel like?
Schools are seen as the primary source of providing wrap-around services to students whether they are equipped to do so or not. Attempts have been made to support the mental health of students—including incorporating social-emotional learning, revamping discipline practices, and hiring more clinical staff—but it still feels like it isn’t enough.
While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to helping students who are struggling with their mental health, there are proactive steps schools can take to serve as psychological safe places for both students and educators.
Moving from Self-Regulation to Co-Regulation
For example, many schools and districts believed that social and emotional learning (SEL) would be the answer to behavioral problems by teaching students how to self-regulate, how to become more self-aware, socially-conscious, and make better decisions. But social emotional learning can give false hope, specifically around behavior. Brain development can not be rushed. You can spend all day teaching students how to self-regulate, but—because of where they are developmentally or due to the effects of trauma and stress on the brain—they may have limited access to the part of the brain (the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or DLPFC) responsible for self-regulation. Instead, we should teach young people skills of self-regulation while simultaneously teaching adults the art of co-regulation.
Providing quality professional development and support to educators when a student is unable to access their taught skill of self-regulation can be a game changer.
Addressing Emotional Health and Academics Together
School districts must also think strategically about behavioral support. The student who struggled last year may still be struggling this school year, and we should not wait for their behavior to reveal this need to us again. Now is the time for schools to develop methods to intersect emotional health with academic health.
There are times when academic and behavioral conversations are held separately but research shows us that students who have three or more traumatic experiences have six times the rate of behavioral problems, five times the rate of attendance problems, and three times the rate of academic failure. This means the conversations need to happen together, especially for students who are having challenges in all or one of these three areas. Small shifts can be made to traditional Admission, Review, and Dismissal (ARD) meetings and Behavioral Intervention Plan (BIP) meetings.
Momentous Institute, a community mental health nonprofit where I used to work, collaborated with educational and mental health professionals to create the Strategic Intervention Model (SIM) which can be downloaded for free. The SIM manual can be used on its own to amplify already existing protocols in your school environment.
Partnering with Community Mental Health Services
Schools can not support the mental health of all students alone, nor should they have to do so. Schools can identify community mental health agencies, mentoring programs, and after-school programs that they can partner with throughout the school year to be proactive in addressing school-wide mental health concerns. There is no need to wait until a crisis happens to create a community plan of support.
Schools are a part of communities, and in order for us to tackle the youth mental health crisis, we have to plan ahead and work together. Both our students and educators need us and deserve better.
About the Author
Stephanie McGary
Licensed Professional Counselor-Supervisor and Registered Play Therapist
Stephanie McGary is a licensed professional counselor-supervisor and registered play therapist who finds joy in advocating and training around the mental, social, and emotional wellness of children, youth, and educators. A Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project, Stephanie is currently the director of clinical programming at Communities in Schools of Dallas Region and the owner of Tots N' Teachers Counseling and Consultation where she focuses on the mental health and wellness of children and educators.
#blog: 7 Small Changes to Support Your Mental Health This School Year
by Dr. Kathryn Kennedy
Special thanks to Next Generation Learning Challenges for allowing us to cross-post this blog post :-)
Teachers can sustain their mental health and well-being throughout the school year with these seven small but foundational research-based strategies.
It’s almost time to head back to school. How did that happen?! Where did the time go?! I know we ask that question every year, but seriously, summer sometimes feels like an epic time warp! Am I right?! Nevertheless, I hope you thoroughly enjoyed the summer not only with your family and friends but also with yourself.
As we start the school year, you may feel a bit of excitement and perhaps some trepidation stirring inside of you about what the year is going to bring. You’re not alone. That’s totally natural, especially given the unpredictability we’ve all experienced over the past few years. We’ve endured a lot and continue to do so, and healing and supporting ourselves takes time and continuous intentional effort. Healing prolonged stress and trauma does not happen overnight; it’s an ongoing journey, not a final destination.
Before we start back to school, what if we laid some foundational supports for ourselves? I know, I know … oftentimes, once the school year starts, our best-laid plans derail quickly! But what if we start small, using seven strategies that can be foundational for sustaining your mental health and well-being throughout this school year and beyond? And—BONUS—you might already be doing some of these! Here they are in no particular order.
1. Clear Your Plate
We as educators, as you know, have a lot on our plates all of the time. What if we take some time before heading back to school to intentionally look at what we have on our plates? Is there anything you can let go of, either personal or professional? Is there anything that you can ask your school leader to take off your plate? Is there anything that’s not absolutely necessary? If so, take it off your plate to make room for things that will help you sustain your mental health and well-being. And make this intentional plate-clearing process a practice every month (if not more often) throughout the year. Look at it as a time to reflect and reevaluate your plate to see if there’s anything that can be cleared.
2. Play Every Day
Back in 2019, collaborative research from The Genius of Play and Fundamentally Children found that 75 percent of children were not getting enough play. If that’s the case, can you imagine the percentage of adults? According to Dr. Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, “Play that is based on our inner needs and desires is the only path to finding lasting satisfaction in our relationships and professional work.”
There are many benefits of play: it boosts creativity and problem-solving abilities; reduces stress; builds resilience, improves relationships; nurtures community; and much more. Given all of the benefits, it’s important for us to bring play back into our lives. So how do you get started doing just that? The activities that we find fun are unique to each of us. The National Institute for Play encourages adults to:
Identify what is playful for you. Everyone is different, so find what works for you!
Develop lifelong play habits. Habits typically take 40 days to become routine in our lives, so try to incorporate play at least once a day for 40 days to see what sticks!
Recognize how you feel when there’s not enough play. Practicing intentional check-ins to see how you’re feeling is important, and doing specific check-ins on how you feel when you play and not can help you see the benefits of play in your everyday lives.
Model healthy play habits in your communities. Establishing a sense of play and modeling it for others, including the other adults and little ones in your professional and personal lives, can help make play an integral part of your day-to-day life.
3. Define and Establish Your Safe Spaces
According to trauma and somatic psychology research, to heal ourselves and support our well-being, we need to have a felt sense of safety. This means safety in mind, body, and all other critical aspects of our being and lives. As you begin the school year, think about these various elements of your safety and identify ways you can support yourself to feel safe. Just as our students need to Maslow before Bloom, so do we as adults. And safety, inside and outside of ourselves, is priority number one!
4. Build and Bolster Trusting Relationships
Once we have established a felt sense of safety, we can build and bolster relationships with others we trust. Trusting relationships provide us opportunities for co-regulation. Co-regulation is a way for your nervous system to work with another being’s (human, animal, plant, or otherwise) system to calm and ground. The more relationships we have that support co-regulation, the better.
5. Create and Cultivate Your Supportive Communities
Taking relationships one step further to create and cultivate a supportive community allows for more opportunities to support overall well-being. Each community or network you are part of provides specific support for each component of your well-being. Take some time to reflect on the communities you’re a part of and how they support you, as well as how you support them (giving back is just as important as getting support from others). Are there any communities that you think you’d like to add or even create to provide yourself better support?
6. Learn Something New
Stepping out of our comfort zone and learning something new can spark creative energy, which in turn provides us a chance to reclaim our power and voice, and heal. Each day, see if there’s something small you can learn that is novel to you to help light up your curiosity!
7. Explore and Engage in Short Restoration Activities
We as educators are busy a majority of the time. When possible, take short bits of time to downshift, to rest, to reset, and to restore your mind and body. Perhaps you can check out yoga nidra, restorative yoga, yin yoga, and guided meditations that take anywhere from five to 60 minutes. These restorative activities help to refresh yourself and cultivate renewed energy.
This is definitely not an exhaustive list, but I hope these and other small changes can help support you as you jump into this school year and many more years to come!
Dr. Kathryn Kennedy (she/her/hers): With one foot in digital and online learning and the other in mental health and wellness, Kathryn has been cultivating two primary passions for over 20 years. She serves as founder and principal consultant of Consult4ED Group and founder and executive director of Wellness for Educators. She is author of the forthcoming book The Mind-Body Connection for Educators: Intentional Movement for Wellness (expected publication date: March 28, 2023), which serves as the first in a four-part book series.She lives in Ithaca, New York. You can follow her on Twitter at @Kathryn__EDU and @well4edu.
#blog: Building the Bridge through Courageous Conversations: An Interview with Shomari Jones and Paul Sutton
by Shomari Jones, Bellevue School District, and Paul Sutton, Pacific Lutheran University
Cross post from the NGLC blog.
Educational equity leaders (and podcast hosts) Shomari Jones and Paul Sutton examine courageous conversations, what they are, why they are important, and how to have them.
Could you introduce yourselves?
Shomari: Sure! I'm Shomari Jones. I am the director of equity and strategic engagement for the Bellevue School District [Washington].
Paul: I'm Paul Sutton. I'm associate professor of education at Pacific Lutheran University [Washington].
How did you meet and start working with each other?
Paul: I've been working with Shomari for several years now. We work on various projects together, but mostly, the thing that we do together is this podcast, this little project that we started. Coming out of COVID, we started having conversations with each other just about stuff that we are noticing and just issues that were surfacing, and so we decided to start recording it. That turned into this podcast that we have called Coffee with a Little Bit of Cream, which is Shomari and I talking about all things related to equity and education; we bring on guests, and it's fun.
Could you talk about your work around engaging in courageous conversations? What are they?
Shomari: Courageous conversations are opportunities for us to engage with each other, seeking opportunities and ways to learn and grow within ourselves and within relation to one another. We start with this compass.
Credit: Creative Conversations about Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools and Beyond by Glenn E. Singleton
The compass in and of itself is just a tool that we utilize to express that sometimes when we come to the table, we're coming to the table from a different space than the person who we may be engaging with. And we really boiled this down to four spaces in which you traditionally come from. You don't have to only come from one specific space. You can have a couple of different spaces that you react to immediately. But most often we gravitate to one. So for example, I tend—specifically, when engaging in conversations that are complicated—I tend to show up a lot of times in my emotional space. After some practicing, Paul, I’m actually seeing that I no longer hardcore die in the emotional space. It's interesting to see how I've progressed through my continual practice. Instead of landing in emotions, we want to evaluate and assess where you are in each one of these categories so that you can be centered. Because centered is a way that we will most achieve opportunities to build bridges and build relationships with other individuals.
And so just looking around the compass, oftentimes we either fall into the feeling or the emotional quadrant, the believing or the moral quadrant, the thinking or the intellectual quadrant, and the acting or the relational quadrant. And there's nothing wrong with any of them. We want you to experience all of them, but just note this example from my personal experience:
I was in conflict with the community in which I serve around building a body of work, specifically equity, that I thought was really important to the success of our students. This particular part of the community was not in agreement with what my beliefs are. They were operating from and coming to the conversation in their feelings quadrant. I was operating from and coming to the conversation in my head or in my thinking/intellectual quadrant. And when we engaged in discussion, we were not seeing eye-to-eye. We were planes crossing in the air, without having any opportunity to build relationships or build bridges.
So, what would have been best served for me is to maybe show up in my thinking and take time to think about my beliefs a little bit, then explore my emotional quadrant, and then proceed to my action quadrant. Because if I’m seeking to transform someone else's belief, I need to meet them where they are.
Paul: Courageous conversations really revolve around coming to the table with people who think differently than you, revealing needs, shining light on fears, identifying preconceived beliefs or understandings, and spending time building a pathway to better comprehend each other’s perspectives, creating an atmosphere of patient listening that blends the elements of mercy and truth. I really want to know where you're coming from and why you're coming from there as much as I want you to know where I'm coming from and why I'm coming from there.
The goals of courageous conversations are to:
Gain wisdom to see from a bigger perspective.
Gain understanding that will help establish truth in relationships.
Build bonds and bridges, and a lot of times, cross-sectional with individuals who may not come to the table believing what we believe.
Ultimately, if we continue to share or shirk our responsibility to involve all different perspectives and all different voices, we will not be moving together.
Shomari: These conversations can sometimes be challenging, and they can sometimes be revealing and make us vulnerable, so these three guidelines kind of provide us with some rules or norms about how we can be in that space:
Stay engaged.
Be authentic by sharing honest feelings.
Maintain confidentiality.
Remember these five anchors to take care of yourself during difficult times in courageous conversations:
Quiet your mind.
Notice the sensations, the vibrations. What's going on in your body?
Accept the discomfort.
Stay present.
Safely discharge the energy that remains.
Paul: I hope that folks who are reading this just find some small part of their life to lean in and just give it a go and see what happens. Enjoy the wallowing and enjoy the awkwardness and know that every time you do that, you just get a little bit better at it.
Shomari: Yes, that's awesome, Paul. To gain wisdom to see from a bigger perspective, I involve myself in conversations with others, especially those who I don't see eye to eye with for a multitude of reasons. I was told once that I am not going to be ever capable of changing who you are. You have to change who you are. I can provide you with a perspective. I can take you on a journey alongside me. I can show you the way, but until you make the decision that you are going to be the one who changes for you, it just won't happen. And so to gain wisdom, to see from a bigger perspective—to me, [this] involves me walking and taking a journey with you to a place where we can both come to an understanding and an agreement. And I want to gain some understanding that will establish trust in the relationship; relationships are built on trust. That trust is going to allow me to continue to come back to the conversation with you.
Because of that established relationship, I can pause and not be salty [laughing]. And start off from a space of listening and then engaging, which would help to lead to a quicker bridge to the other side and to gain knowledge so that you can take the next steps, right?
I want to encourage you all who have the opportunity to read this, to reach out to us if you want to practice, to find pathways to try this and practice this at home with your loved ones or with—let's not try it on your boss first. Let's practice a couple of times before you take it off, and then suddenly, you don’t have a job anymore [laughter]. Let's practice in some spaces where you feel the least amount of negative impact as possible so that you can continue to build up that courage to engage in courageous conversations.
About the Authors
Shomari Jones is the director of equity and strategic engagement for the Bellevue School District. He is a co-host of the Coffee with a Little Bit of Cream Podcast.
Paul Sutton is an associate professor of education at Pacific Lutheran University and co-host of the Coffee with a Little Bit of Cream Podcast.