Unlike many adults, teen students are not hesitant to explore, experiment, and embrace artificial intelligence, with nearly two-thirds admitting to having done so, according to a recent Common Sense Media report.

Although many of them report using it for research purposes, the reality is often quite different, with students embracing it for a range of other reasons, from cheating on school work to creating deepfakes.

Some students have also turned to AI chatbots for companionship, with a few even falling into romantic relationships. Others have even taken AI into their confidence for unvetted mental health support, which has occasionally ended tragically, with chatbots encouraging, and even guiding, student plans for self-harm.

In many of these situations, parents, teachers, and other adults have no idea how deeply a student has become involved with an AI chatbot, or even that they’ve formed an interpersonal relationship with an AI-generated character on a platform such as Character AI or Replika.

“Even if you don't have a child who's using one of those, it’s possible for them to end up in a relationship with chatbots as common as ChatGPT or Gemini,” says Kerry Gallagher, Assistant Principal for Teaching and Learning at St. John’s Preparatory School in Danvers, Massachusetts, and Education Director at the nonprofit ConnectSafely, which is dedicated to online safety, privacy, security and digital wellness.

Understanding Social Penetration

Chatbots are primarily a commercial enterprise designed to be engaging, so it’s not surprising that a student – especially vulnerable during adolescence when they might be struggling socially, feeling lonely, or working through mental health or self-image issues – could fall under one’s sway.

“An AI chatbot will answer or respond with the output in which it refers to itself in the first person,” says Gallagher. “So that shifts the way the user is thinking about what they're interacting with because if the output is ‘I …’ then that feels like a personal conversation. It also refers to the user as ‘you.’”

Add into that how more refined the voices used by chatbots have become, and how easy it is to interact with through earbuds, and it can feel like a student is talking with a real, caring human.

“The voice intonation, the mood, the way it shows kindness and empathy, and the way that comes across–what you’re really talking about is something called social penetration theory, which is an intentional design that's coded into the algorithm,” says Gallagher. “The AI companions are programmed to slowly increase the intensity of small talk in order to draw the user in more and more. We see that in the bottom of the output, ‘Do you want me to do this next or this next?’ It starts asking the kind of adjacent questions that humans would ask as part of their conversation.”

Managing Student-AI Relationships

When it comes to navigating these situations, awareness is always the first step. “Parents should not hear about this and rush to lock down their kids' phones,” says Gallagher. “They just need to be informed about what's available on those phones so that they can be talking to their kids about it.”

In that vein, Gallagher notes that it’s sometimes a challenge to recognize that a student has gotten into an unhealthy relationship with an AI because the signs might be harder to spot since most kids tend to be on their phones constantly. But if they’re in their bedroom alone with the phone and the door closed for hours on end, it might make sense to check.

“Swing by their room to check in, ask what they’re up to in a caring way, and listen with genuine curiosity,” says Gallagher. “No need to barge in, but if it's quiet for a long period of time, what are they doing? If they're talking to friends on FaceTime, you can hear that, right? Do you know the voice of the friend they’re talking with? If not, can you ask to introduce yourself and say hello?”

It can be a challenge for educators to address student-AI relationships, especially if it primarily is happening outside of class time. Nonetheless, Gallagher suggests expanding AI awareness by exploring it yourself.

“It's important for adults to be using AI so that when we talk about it, it’s coming from experience,” she says. “If you're not sure how to start, talk to a colleague who is using it and ask them to show you what they're doing.”

Failing to understand AI companions may invalidate what may already be an important relationship in the student’s life, which is not going to help a child who made a poor decision.

“Part of our job as educators is to hold kids accountable, and also to counsel kids so that they don't make those same mistakes again,” Gallagher says. “If adults only tell kids that AI chatbots aren't real and their relationships aren't real, it could result in children doubling down on those relationships.”

When directly dealing with a student engaged with a chatbot, Gallagher suggests focusing on the reasons behind the relationship.

“I would say, ‘Tell me more about your chatbot. When do you talk to it? What is its name? What are some of the things that you talk about?’” she says. “Because I want to get into why they use the chatbot. What need is it meeting? How can we help the student meet that need in a healthier way?”

Gallagher says understanding the underlying why of what’s happening is key.

“By asking them more about their AI chatbot and their relationship, what we uncover is what needs that relationship with that chatbot is meeting that aren't being met right now, and how we can then share that information about that need with the family or school counselor. If that need of that child is met, they're less likely to feel like they need the chatbot and they're also less likely to feel like they need to do harm to their peers or themselves.”

Boosting AI Literacy

In general, educators should aim toward using AI tools that allow them to supervise what students are doing and so they can monitor for any concerning usage.

Gallagher also advocates for better AI literacy, but as tools have evolved, so should the discussions and activities with students.

“Educators can ask kids to develop their own ideas, their own lists, their own guidelines around when AI use is helpful and when it might be harmful,” she says. “They know more than we think. Even students as young as second or third grade are ready to start the conversation about which tasks require human effort so learning can happen.”

Doing so can help peel back the curtain so students can understand what AI actually is and how it works, and use it in a healthy manner.

“Start as simple as teaching that AI is programmed for pattern recognition and help kids understand, especially at that younger age, what that means,” Gallagher says.

She also recommends talking about understanding prompt engineering and verifying outputs with a human eye.

“I think it's okay to ask AI for advice as long as there's a corroboration of that advice,” she says. “If students ask AI to help brainstorm ideas or for initial feedback on an email that they've drafted, that's all fine. It still needs to be run through a human before it becomes something that is integrated or sent.”

Finally, to help boost critical thinking around AI, educators should consider changing their approach to assignments.

“For example, one of the benchmarks might ask students how they used AI. What was the output? Show the actual output, and then show the next version to demonstrate the important critical student thinking. What did the learner do between those two versions? We can help students practice adding that human filter after the AI is used.”

One Teacher’s Story

A social studies teacher friend of mine told me recently that AI has changed her work in ways she did not expect. She was an early adopter, using AI to strengthen feedback and make grading more efficient. At first, it worked, allowing her to generate feedback that was more specific, individualized, and actionable than a rubric or checklist alone typically allowed in the past. But as that became easier to produce, expectations shifted. Detailed feedback was no longer optional. It had quietly become the norm, less because of administrators and more because AI made it possible, and therefore expected by students and parents.

But easier did not mean lighter. She still had to review, vet, and revise everything. She was still accountable for every word.

“It’s better for kids,” she said. “But I’m more exhausted than before.”

That may be the irony of AI in schools. The very tool promoted as a way to save time can end up expanding the work.

What the Research Is Starting to Show

What this teacher described is not an isolated experience. A recent article in Harvard Business Review argues that AI does not reduce work, but intensifies it. Workers complete tasks more quickly, but instead of reclaiming time, they take on more. The result is greater cognitive load, longer work hours, and expanded responsibilities.

AI increases speed, but it does not necessarily make work feel lighter because expectations rise alongside efficiency. Schools are not outside this pattern. If anything, they amplify it.

When Efficiency Expands the Work

The introduction of AI into school environments often leads to a rapid shift in baseline expectations. As efficiency increases, so does the scope of work; lesson plans require deeper differentiation, communication remains constant, and data analysis becomes both more frequent and granular. This evolution redefines the standard for quality, where previously comprehensive work is now viewed as merely basic.

While higher standards can benefit students, a problem emerges when these increased demands are viewed as resource-neutral. Educators are often forced to manage expanded workloads without additional time or guidance. Rather than simply saving time, efficiency recalibrates what is expected of staff, effectively filling any newly created capacity.

This expansion of workload is evident across several key areas:

• Instructional Planning and Grading: The ease of AI generation leads to greater demands for personalized feedback and highly customized lesson materials.
• Stakeholder Communication: As parents utilize AI to craft increasingly formal and legalistic messages, educators face a growing burden of processing and interpreting these communications. Even with AI assistance in drafting replies, the cognitive effort required to process the original messages remains high.
• Administrative Documentation: The time saved through automation is frequently redirected toward increased documentation and administrative requirements.

The Loss of Natural Limits

Teaching has never been a light profession. Even before AI, educators managed heavy workloads that required constant planning, decision-making, and responsiveness. What existed, however, were natural limits within the work–time between classes, the pace of planning, and the effort required to produce materials created built-in boundaries. Those pauses did not reduce the workload, but helped contain it.

As the same teacher explained, she used to have small pauses between classes. Now AI makes it easier to fill those moments. She might answer an email between periods, draft something during lunch, or use a few free minutes to produce one more item before the next part of the day begins.

What has changed is not the behavior, but the unspoken expectation. Because AI makes more possible in less time, those pauses no longer feel like pauses, but become opportunities to produce more.

This is where the shift becomes most visible. Work moves faster and becomes more dense, with fewer natural stopping points, squeezing out recovery time and reflective space. Cognitive load increases and decision fatigue builds, making burnout more likely.

We often focus on what AI makes possible, but spend less time examining what it requires from the people using it. This is not just a question of adoption, but one of sustainability.

What Leaders Must Do

If AI is going to remain part of school systems, then leadership has to define and shape how it is used. It is not enough to benefit from faster work.

1. Clarify when AI should be used. Not every task should be automated. Leaders must distinguish between efficiency and professional judgment.
2. Set limits on what speed should trigger. Faster output should not automatically lead to more output or higher expectations.
3. Protect time for thinking. Schools need space for reflection and decision-making, not just continuous production.
4. Match rising expectations with real support. Training, time, clarity, and resources must align with what is being asked of staff.
5. Eliminate or streamline existing requirements. If AI enables more detailed feedback or expanded expectations, something else has to give. Leaders should identify tasks that can be reduced or removed, such as redundant documentation, excessive grading requirements, or rethinking how rubrics and checklists are used. Without subtraction, every gain becomes an addition.
6. Keep the human at the center. AI can support practice, but educators remain responsible for accuracy, judgment, and care.

Leaders cannot raise the bar and then leave people to clear it alone.

Closing Thought

AI does not remove work, it removes friction, and with it, some of the limits that once kept work contained, which can lead to better outcomes. Without thoughtful leadership, it can also lead to faster burnout.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of educational technology, we're seeing a new kind of phenomenon: young people are not just using AI companions, they’re forming friendships with them. Recent research from Common Sense Media and The New York Times Hard Fork episode and article about banning Character.AI for those under 18, brought to light just how common this is and what it might mean for the future of human relationships.

According to the report from Common Sense Media, nearly 3 in 4 teens have used AI companions. This raises critical questions for educators and families: What are the developmental implications of these relationships, and how can we guide students to use this technology in safe, meaningful ways?

The Promise and the Peril

When I first discovered AI companions such as Character.AI, I was genuinely excited. Imagine the educational possibilities: students chatting with historical figures, interacting with literary characters in new ways, and using AI as a tutor. As a tech optimist, I saw so much good that could come from this kind of interaction.

But with the good, we also have to face the risks. The Common Sense Media report found that nearly 1 in 3 teens prefer conversations with their AI chatbots over their human friends. That can lead to a kind of disconnect. The report also notes that 1 in 3 teen users felt uncomfortable with something an AI companion said, raising not only questions about emotional dependence but also about the emotional safety and appropriateness of these interactions.

Trouble in Toyland 2025, a recent report by the New York Public Interest Research Group, found that some AI-powered chatbot toys were having sexually explicit conversations with children, underscoring how easily unregulated AI can cross emotional and developmental boundaries.

In response to these concerns, Common Sense Media launched a petition urging Meta to prevent kids from using its AI companion platform. While Meta has announced some changes, such as parental controls and AI behavior tweaks, advocates argue that these fall short of providing meaningful protections for young users.

By contrast, some tech companies are taking more decisive action. As reported by The Verge, ABC News, and elsewhere, Character.AI recently announced that it will ban users under the age of 18 from engaging in open-ended chats with its virtual companions.

When the roles once filled by humans are replaced by technologies that offer more validation, greater availability, and instant convenience, such as AI companions, it raises an important question: Are we witnessing a shift in how young people define connection?

A Path Forward: Safe, Educational Spaces

So, how do we navigate this new reality?

Design Age-Appropriate Experiences

One promising approach is to design AI tools specifically for students, with clear educational boundaries and built-in safeguards. For instance, Khanmigo, Khan Academy’s AI-powered learning assistant, lets students safely chat with historical or literary figures in ways that deepen understanding rather than distract from it. Its features, such as topic filtering, conversation monitoring, and time limits, help ensure that interactions stay age-appropriate, purposeful, and transparent.

Another emerging example is History AI Chat, a tool highlighted by Class Tech Tips that allows students to engage in conversation with historical figures such as Harriet Tubman, Abraham Lincoln, and Benjamin Franklin. Designed to complement classroom instruction, it aligns with educational standards and encourages students to ask questions, analyze primary sources, and explore perspectives in an interactive format.

Tools such as these show that it’s possible to make AI engaging and educational while keeping student safety and integrity at the center.

Teach AI Literacy

Just as we teach media literacy, we need to teach AI literacy with lessons and resources from trusted companies such as Common Sense Media. When educators and parents co-explore these tools with students, whether in a lesson or family discussion, we can model how to use AI constructively rather than in isolation.

As educators, our role is not only to protect students when using technology but also to prepare them to use it effectively. That means helping them develop the skills to use AI wisely, think critically, and engage with care for themselves and others. This goes beyond simply setting age limits. It is about shaping a digital culture in which young people understand the difference between connection and dependence, and in which technology fuels curiosity and empathy, and supports both learning and deeper understanding.

By guiding students in this way, we are not just supporting their learning. We are helping shape a more thoughtful, human-centered future.

Looking back over three decades in education, I recognize a more complicated and politicized landscape for educators. We face challenges that have evolved, yet there are smart ways to navigate this and protect your wellness.

Consider the analogy of the oxygen mask with children: We have to put the mask on ourselves so that we have the strength to put it on our children. The same applies to educators. We have to be mentally ready to help our students or we are no help at all.

These numerous demands and challenges for teachers often lead to increased stress and the potential for burnout. Being aware of this risk, let’s consider key strategies for prioritizing teacher well-being in the upcoming year, for both us and children.

For this, I’ll draw on time-tested strategies and anecdotal experience from well-established resources to provide a reliable and accessible guide.

Why Teacher Wellbeing Is Indispensable

Teachers are on the front lines, spending more time with students than any other adults outside the home, including counselors and therapists. They often encounter children displaying wide-ranging symptoms of trauma, which can be emotionally draining. Most teachers were uncomfortable addressing students' anxiety, grief, and trauma resulting from events such as Covid-19.

Equipping educators with the tools to manage their own wellbeing while creating a safe and supportive learning environment is critical, since their ability to care for students are directly linked. So how do we get there?

The Role of Professional Development in Teacher Wellness

Professional development (PD) is crucial for equipping teachers with the skills to support traumatized students, and it must also address their own wellness.

Effective PD should be:

1. Problem-based and tailored to local needs, rather than broad and generalized.
2. Adaptable and flexible, allowing for teacher input.
3. Practical and timely, providing tools that educators can use immediately.
4. Engaging and collaborative, fostering a sense of ownership among faculty

Formats such as Edcamps (teacher-driven conferences) and Pop-up PD (short, need-specific sessions) are effective models for this. These approaches help adjust teachers' mindset from how students "should be" to an open "this is what we're confronted with" perspective, enabling fluidity in learning support.

7 Practical Strategies for Teacher Self-Care

Let’s provide a roadmap of self-care and wellness protocols for educators, incorporating quick, easy-to-use tools and techniques that, when "stacked" together, can compound their positive effects].

Here are seven actionable strategies for teachers and school communities:

1. The Weekend Challenge: Encourage teachers to disconnect from digital devices for one day each weekend. This simple act can lead to a tremendous sense of liberation, fostering reconnection with family members and promoting greater contentment compared to screen-related activities. This models healthy boundaries and detachment from constant digital bombardment, and when teachers return, they share not missing time offline, in fact appreciating and valuing this time for individual and family fulfillment.

2. Managing Social Media and AI Misinformation: Social media can be a significant source of stress and misinformation for educators. Avoiding engaging directly with online falsehoods sounds simple enough but haven’t we all been hoodwinked at one time or another? (Like the beautiful view of an Italian vista I pointed out to my daughters that they laughed, “That’s AI-generated!”) Instead, empower trusted parents or community members to share simple, factual statements to counter misinformation, hallucinations, and bias on AI. This builds trust, calms anxieties, and shifts the narrative positively, while saving valuable time and energy.

3. Music Therapy: This may seem obvious but remember to integrate music. Music can profoundly impact one's mindset and physiological state. Calming, slower-paced melodies, often referred to as "spa music" or classical, can reduce stress, anxiety, and depression. A notable example is "Weightless," a song designed by sound specialists that has been proven to reduce overall anxiety by nearly two-thirds after five undisturbed minutes of listening. Five minutes is something we can all get our arms around, on a quick break to reorient when needed. Teachers can use earbuds to access these calming sounds privately at a moment's notice.

4. Seek The Satisfaction of Deep Work: Engaging in deep, focused, and uninterrupted work is the opposite of distracting, shallow tasks, and it generates a powerful sense of contentment and productivity. This type of work fosters creativity and can lead to lasting positive residual effects on well-being].

To achieve deep work, educators can:

• Schedule dedicated time for deep work, especially during morning hours when the brain's prefrontal cortex is most active.
• Incorporate movement: Physical activity, such as a five-minute walk, increases blood flow to the brain, enhancing cognitive function and helping to "move the mind.’ Teachers can take short walks during breaks or encourage "walk and talk" discussions with colleagues.

5. Eliminate Comparison: Social media often fuels comparison, leading to feelings of inadequacy. As Theodore Roosevelt once famously stated, "Comparison is the thief of joy.” Limiting toxic social media use and consciously reframing perspective with guiding questions ("What have I learned today?" "What am I grateful for?") can help overcome a "have-not" mentality, and foster appreciation for one's own gifts and progress.

6. Breathing Exercises: In moments of acute stress, controlled breathing techniques such as the 4-7-8 method can quickly and effectively reset the body's physiological response. This simple, self-managed practice slows heart rate, stabilizes blood pressure, and acts as a "natural tranquilizer for the nervous system.

7. Striving for a Flow State: A flow state is an optimal state of consciousness where one feels and performs at their best, characterized by deep focus and absorption in a task, where other aspects of life seem to fade away. It's a state of complete attentional absorption, where a person becomes so involved in an activity that they lose self-consciousness and time perception seems to warp.

Using the strategies above, this state can be accessed by adopting a proactive, multi-pronged approach to teacher wellness. Schools can not only support their dedicated staff but also foster an environment in which both educators and students can truly flourish and achieve their full potential, moving beyond the impact of trauma. The benefits? Not just for the individuals. When a school is provided the conditions for peak wellness, everyone wins, and the entire community excels.

• Optimizing Teacher PD with AI
• Lifelong Learning: Modeling for Students and Faculty

Students are regularly talking to AI chatbots about mental health problems, say Taylor Sidwell and Autumn Whiteman from Hardin Public Schools in Hardin, Montana. That’s why Sidwell, the principal of Hardin Academy, and Whiteman, a counselor at the same school, believe it's so important that school counselors and leaders think about how to facilitate healthy and safe mental health student and AI interactions.

Here are their tips for providing effective AI-assisted mental health support

1. Realize Students Are Already Turning to AI Chatbots

“Word has gotten out on social media that AIs will talk about problems, and so kids have been putting their problems into AI,” Whiteman says, who adds that she’s seen this trend really take off this year. “Students already talk to AI.”

That’s part of the reason, Whiteman believes working with an AI chatbot specifically designed, trained and tested for mental health can be beneficial to schools. It will not only provide students with better answers and support, it can notify school officials if the student says anything that requires an elevated intervention.

Students at Hardin Academy have access to ElizaChat, a chatbot supervised and trained by psychologists, therapists, and clinicians.

2. Learn From How Students Are Using AI

Facilitating student interaction with a mental health AI chatbot can be a valuable first-line intervention for students, Whitehall has found with her student population.

“It's given them a space where they can talk to an AI about stuff that maybe they couldn't talk to with their friends or with their family, that they maybe feel a little bit alone with, and it'll have that space for them to explore that,” Whiteman says.

The content of these conversations stays private, but a chatbot can help a school understand the type of questions and concerns students have. Sidwell says they see a lot of students interacting with AI with questions about school pressures as well as typical high school drama. He notes that when issues are flagged by more than one student, school leaders have the opportunity to look whether there is a larger issue the school needs to address.

3. Get Informed Consent

Whiteman believes students using this type of tool should understand what parts of the conversation might be reported. To accomplish this, she uses the same approach she does with her conversations with students.

“I’m really big on informed consent, and so I definitely let the students know when they're talking with me as a school counselor, they can talk to me and what’s shared with me stays safe with me, unless it's about harming themselves, or harming others, or suicidal ideation, things like that,” she says.

ElizaChat has similar reporting requirements, and Whiteman says that it's important to make sure students are aware of that.

4. Use AI Mental Health Chatbots In Conjunction With Professionals

Sidwell says school leaders should learn to work with AI.

“It's here, it's not leaving,” he says, but educators still need to find proper uses.

Students also need to learn to properly use AI for mental health support. Sidwell's district had an instance in which students were intentionally telling the chatbot things they knew would trigger responses and concern from adults, which is obviously not ideal but can be addressed by educators.

Your school or district also needs to figure out how to get the most out of an AI chatbot in conjunction with traditional counseling.

“I don't think it'll ever replace an in-person counselor by any means, but it's a good starting point,” Sidwell says.

• AI Chatbot Friendships: Potential Harms and Benefits For Students
• AI Won’t Revolutionize Education. Here’s What Will

Taking a test at any point in life can provide a spike in anxiety. A test environment for a student puts a lot of stress on them to perform well, and makes it difficult to properly assess the amount of knowledge they may have about a subject. So how can you help calm students down, give them confidence in their ability, and make it easier to know what they are truly capable of in the classroom?

Here we speak with FETC presenter Richard Mathy, Technology Integration Specialist at Herkimer Central Schools in New York. Mathy discusses how we can help students overcome the anxiety associated with test taking, as well as what signs to look for and the best ways to instill confidence.

Seeing the Signs

Anxiety can be a debilitating feeling for adults, but it can be much more crushing for students in their formative years. Providing ways to deal with anxiety can not only help them become better students, but it can also improve their overall outlook on life, which can have huge impacts on their higher education experience, careers, and beyond.

“The first step is you, as a teacher, understanding what is causing testing anxiety in our students,” says Mathy. “Understanding that tests are tied to performance, as well as other things like low self esteem or past trauma. If you have a starting point of understanding what the root causes are, it helps to diagnose it. You don’t walk into a doctor’s office complaining about a broken finger and they start measuring your feet. They have an idea where the pain point is.”

So knowing what your students are dealing with is key in understanding where their anxiety may start. But how can a teacher explore this understanding further?

“Having an open dialogue with the student,” says Mathy. “We will hear kids say they are going to fail. I always say that the first part of the statement isn’t the important part. The first part is belief. The second part is the important part: why do they think they’re going to fail? What is causing them to say that they are going to fail? Having that open dialogue [allows you to find out].”

Test-taking anxiety in a student may stem from one of three different factors, says Mathy.

“You have the external factors, the preparation, and the internal beliefs,” says Mathy. “When you look at the overlap, [these factors] start to come into focus. You really begin to understand what exactly causes testing anxiety.”

While there may be tools to identify what may be causing a student to struggle, which can lead to them lack confidence or have anxiety, it can’t always solve the overall issue.

“A lot of people love using [classroom tools],” says Mathy. “But they’re really just preparation tools. So if a student has an internal belief that they’re no good at tests, how does a [classroom tool] help that student? If the student is having an external factor, like they didn’t sleep last night, or they’re not eating right at home, you can be as prepared as you want going into that test…a hungry student is a hungry student at the end of the day.”

Building a rapport with your student can help you better understand what they may be dealing with at any point in time. Any number of factors might distract them from realizing their full potential during a high-stress situation.

What Can Teachers Do to Help Students in Stressful Situations?

Test taking is the first of many anxiety-riddled situations students will encounter in their lives. Properly navigating this situation can help prepare them to tackle stress in the future.

“Finding a way to break the cycle when you have an uncontrolled bad habit, a bad event,” says Mathy. “You perceive a lack of control, which causes the generalized helpless behavior. What area are you trying to attack when you have that student? Those uncontrolled bad events are, a lot of times, going to be your external factor. So if we can teach them to overcome that stuff, we can eventually have them to see that their lack of control can actually turn into control.”

Reframing bad events into something you can control can help to reverse the effects of anxiety in a student. As a teacher, guiding them down the road toward achieving this outcome can work wonders for their test-taking abilities.

“If you do one bad thing, of course you’re going to remember that ten times more than if you remember a good thing,” says Mathy. “But let's take a second to actually congratulate ourselves for doing good things on the test.”

Another way Mathy says teachers can help boost student anxiety is through what he refers to as scaffolding tests to help steadily build confidence.

“Create a scaffolding test,” says Mathy. “Most teachers will tell you that they gave a quiz and then a test. The quiz is exactly what’s on the test. They should know it well. If it’s a preparation thing, then yes. If it’s an internal belief or an external [stressor] then they might benefit from a shorter quiz, maybe one with two choices. Once they build up their confidence, maybe throw in a third choice.”

Using scaffolding tests, turning bad situations into good ones, and celebrating success can all be effective methods of helping students combat the anxiety that comes with test taking.

• 4 Ways to Reduce Student Test-Taking Anxiety
• Ways To Reduce Math Anxiety in Students

Students of all ages have begun to regularly interact with chatbots, both inside and outside of school, for a variety of reasons. Just how little is known about the impact of these interactions on young people was brought tragically to light recently after the suicide of a 14-year-old boy in Florida. The boy frequently used Character.AI, a role-playing generative AI tool, and spoke with Game of Thrones-inspired character on the app moments before he fatally shot himself. The boy’s mother has filed a lawsuit against Character.AI alleging the company is responsible for his death, The New York Times reported.

While this is an extreme case, there is potential for unhealthy interactions between chatbots and young people, says Heidi Kar, a clinical psychologist and the Distinguished Scholar for mental health, trauma, and violence initiatives at The Education Development Center (EDC), a nonprofit dedicated to improving global education, among other initiatives.

More and more people are turning to AI chatbots for friendships and even pseudo-romantic relationships. Kar isn’t surprised by why many people in general, including students, are looking for relationships with AI rather than real people since chatbots will tell them what they want to hear rather than offering hard truths. “Relationships in real life with real people, are hard, they're messy, and they don't always feel very good,” Kar says.

Despite this, Kar believes there are ways in which chatbots can help educate students about mental health. That’s why she has teamed up with Simon Richmond, an EDC instructional designer, to help create Mental Health for All, a digital mental health program that utilizes AI to help teach students mental health best practices. The evidence-based program is designed to provide psychology skills training for large populations of youth globally. It combines interactive audio instruction and stories, and integrates AI chatbots and peer-to-peer interaction.

Kar and Richmond share best practices from this initiative and discuss potential problems around AI chatbots and mental health, as well as some ways these might help with mental health.

Challenges With AI and Mental Health

Kar says that educators should be aware of how their students might be engaging in potentially unhealthy relationships with chatbots, but research into human chatbot relationships is limited.

“The comparable research we have to date, in my mind, in the psychology field, goes to the porn industry,” she says. “People who have turned to porn and away from actual relationships to get kind of the sexual satisfaction, have a very hard time coming back into actual relationships. It's the same idea as chatbots. The fake is easy and it can be incredibly satisfying, even if it doesn't have the same physical aspect.”

Richmond says that while designing their mental health program, they made sure to avoid creating AI "yes" people that would just tell those who interact with them what they want to hear.

“There's more opportunities for personal growth when you're interacting with something that gives you hard truths, where there's friction involved,” he says. “Straight gratification does not lead to personal improvement, and so our goal with these AI characters is to provide the empathy and the interactivity and a warm relationship, but to still deliver the skills and the advice that the young people need to hear.”

Potential For AI Chatbots To Help With Mental Health Education

When programmed correctly, Kar and Richmond believe AI chatbots can provide an important outlet for students.

“There's a lot of societies around the world where mental health and emotional awareness is talked about in very different ways,” Richmond says. “So you might have rich human relationships with peers and with adults but with a culture around you that doesn't have a vocabulary to talk about emotions or to talk about different mental health challenges.”

The chatbots in Richmond and Kar's psychology program are based on characters that the students learn about and connect with. The AI is designed to provide exactly this type of outlet for students who otherwise might not be able to have conversations about mental health.

“This is a way of establishing talking to people who have a vocabulary and a set of skills that don't exist in the culture around you,” Richmond says.

Chatbot Potential At The Personal Level

Beyond assisting with a science-driven curriculum, Kar believes there’s untapped potential for using people’s relationships with AI to improve their real-world relationships.

“As opposed to AI characters out there who can create their own relationship with you, what about focusing on that AI character helping you to manage your personal relationships better,” she says.

For example, instead of an AI saying something such as, “I'm sorry. No one understands you, but I understand you,” Kar would like an AI that said things such as, “What do you think would make that better? That fight sounds tough. How are we going to get through that?”

She adds, “There's so much we know that we could program into AI personalities about human interaction and bettering your relationships and conflict resolution and how to deal with anger, but always having that string back to how are we going to address this?”

Ultimately, Kar envisions a conversation such as, “‘You've never had a girlfriend. You really want a girlfriend. What do you think some things are that can get you there?’ As opposed to the ‘I understand you. I'm here for you’ approach.”

• AI-Assisted Characters Help Students Learn From TV, According to Harvard-Led Research
• Character.AI: What Teachers Need to Know

It’s no secret that many schools are not equipped to handle the increasing number of hot days that students and staff experience during the school year due to global climate change. Some 36,000 U.S. schools lack adequate HVAC systems, according to one estimate.

Beyond causing extreme discomfort and negative health impacts, all this heat is decreasing student achievement, say researchers.

Travis Roach, an economics professor at the University of Central Oklahoma, and Joshua Goodman, an education and economics professor at Boston University, have researched the link between heat and student learning separately. Their research, and that of others, reveals a compelling link between more hot days in the school year and poor educational outcomes for students.

Fixing this problem is beyond educators alone and requires more action from policymakers, both say. However, they do offer small steps educators can take right now to mitigate the impact of heat on their students.

The Negative Impact of Hot Schools

To study the impact of heat on schools, Goodman looked at 10 million students who retook the PSATs. Goodman and the study’s co-authors found “that hotter school days in the years before the test was taken reduce scores, with extreme heat being particularly damaging.” The authors were confident in their findings in part because weekend and summer temperatures had little impact on test scores and the presence of air conditioning seemed to mitigate much of the negative effect.

“Heat not only affects learning in the short run but in the long run, too,” Goodman says. “Hot classrooms during the school year make students appear to have less knowledge a year or even more later.”

Also, lower-income students see a bigger negative impact from heat. “[They] tend to be in schools and homes that have fewer resources to mitigate the effects of heat such as AC,” Goodman says.

Finally, the problem is not limited to American schools. “These patterns show up in the U.S. and across the globe, so it's a universal phenomenon,” Goodman says.

In a 2020 study looking at students in grades 3-8, Roach found that each additional day over 100 degrees in the school year decreases student achievement. and the link between heat and decreased success was higher in areas with lower average maximum temperatures.

Roach says that many teachers have seen the impact heat can have on learning without necessarily being aware of it. "I've been in the front of a classroom where it just feels like things aren't quite jiving, they're not going well. And some of that could just be purely environmental,” he says.

What Teachers Can Do

Goodman and Roach both stress that improving school infrastructure is the main way we should address this problem, and that is the responsibility of policymakers who control school budgets, not educators. That said, there are some steps educators can take to mitigate the impact of heat.

“Rearranging annual and daily schedules to attempt to avoid the hottest times of year or times of day may be helpful. Small interventions like electric fans and ice water can be helpful too,” Goodman says.

Roach says teachers should try to be as flexible as their teaching situations permit with important tests. “Maybe if you're planning on having a test on a Wednesday, and it's an especially hot day, but you know it's going to cool off the next day, if you can, have a little flexibility. Your students might do better the next day, for no other reason than it's a little bit cooler that day and their bodies are under a little bit less stress,” he says.

Scheduling breaks for students to cool off can also help, Roach adds. As can teachers simply being aware that heat might be the reason a given lesson isn’t resonating with students.

Finally, teachers can understand that the impact heat may already be having on their classrooms is an important part of the ongoing conversation around climate change. “These climate change impacts are not so far off into the distance anymore,” Roach says. “We're feeling them now, and we're starting to see them show up in outcomes like test scores and learning.”

• People Hate To Think, Says Research. What Does That Mean For Teachers
• Discussing Climate Change with Students and Teachers

Overwhelmingly, teacher education programs prepare new teachers to develop and utilize effective pedagogical strategies, support student well-being, and assess learning with an eye for continuous improvement.

While these are core skills needed for teachers to be effective practitioners, there are other factors, particularly for new teachers, for which they must be prepared. Teachers must be mentally ready with the capacity to handle the colossal undertaking of “all the things” that are related to teaching and learning beyond the primary focus of instruction and assessment.

To that end, here are a few ways that new teachers can mentally prepare for teaching.

1. Prioritize and Plan for Self-Care

When preparing for any airplane travel, you are reminded to take care of your own oxygen mask before trying to assist children and other passengers. The same can be said for teaching, except that the oxygen mask is the focus on your overall mental health and wellness.

Prioritizing and planning for self-care in advance is an excellent way to center mental wellness. When days are tiresome and stressful, you will know that you already have strategies prepared to help cope. Similar to how our students require their physiological, physical, and other needs met (think Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs), teachers need to have their needs met to be mentally ready to be the best version of themselves.

Engaging in mindfulness activities can be helpful as well.

2. Avoid Taking on Too Much, Too Quickly

After several years of preparing to become a teacher, it is exciting to be ready to jump right in and try all the learning activities and technology tools that you have learned about in your own teacher preparation programs. But remember, in addition to your list of action items, the school administrator and/or school district will have other priorities and policies that you must adhere to and focus on handling.

Instead of taking on too much, and too quickly when starting, choose one instructional item and one technology tool that you want to incorporate in your teaching, and gain fluency with it. This way, you will not have to stress about getting everything done at once and trying too many new teaching strategies in the beginning of your teaching journey.

3. Prepare to Pivot

Even the best-laid plans do not always come to fruition. In education specifically, there are so many elements of life that enter the classroom for students and for other teachers that we co-create with, as well as environmental impacts, that can contribute to the need to change well-planned lessons.

When lesson planning and developing activities for each day, have a backup plan and prepare to pivot to something else, if necessary. By mentally preparing yourself to be flexible for when these things do happen, it can make the difference in how you feel during that time and what actions you take to ensure that learning still happens.

4. Connect With Colleagues

Starting with new teacher orientation, make connections with other teachers, both experienced and novice. It can be helpful to also connect with front office and administrative staff members who may be knowledgeable of the interworking of the school. Find time to share what is going well in your first days of teaching and areas that you need support.

By networking and communicating with your colleagues, you will not feel alone and can enjoy being in community with other individuals who have a shared experience. Beyond your school, try to connect with others in the field. This can be done by joining communities of practice in social media spaces, at conferences and training, and as you continue your own teacher education.

5. Utilize Mental Health and Wellness Resources

Along with self-care, knowing what mental health and wellness resources are freely available to you is key. Some of the mental health resources used during the pandemic may still be relevant in your work today. Discover all of the resources available to you through your health insurance plans and through the district human resources office employee benefits. Some districts even have embedded mental health days in the academic calendar, and your district may have similar programming.

These are just five of the many ways to prepare mentally prepare for teaching as a new teacher. If one, some or all of these interest you, try it out and see what works for you.

Related:

• 5 Mindfulness Apps and Websites for K-12
• Supporting Student & Teacher Well-Being

Like many of us, Craig Aarons-Martin had a revelation about his health and his weight during what seemed like a normal day at work as a superintendent for Bridge Boston Charter Schools: “There was just no way this six-foot-three-inch ‘care bear’ could keep up!” he says.

Aarons-Martin, now CEO of CCM Education Group, weighed more than 300 pounds back then, and realized that he needed to change his lifestyle in order to improve his health if he wanted to be able to interact with students. He also decided that he might be successful in this goal if he could get others to join him. Plus, improved mental and physical health across his district could support social-emotional concerns, for students as well as educators, many of whom were suffering from similar mental health challenges.

Ultimately, Aarons-Martin was able to lose more than 100 pounds and boost his entire school community in the process.

Starting Small

Growing up in New Orleans, Aarons-Martin was no stranger to an abundance of good food. “I had gained a significant amount of weight, some of that attributed to some of the depression that I was going through as a queer man who struggled with his identity, but also someone who was trying to figure out how do I become more agile and fit mentally as well as physically for the young people I serve,” he says. “I wanted to be able to run and play ball and do all those things, and I need to have a really good mind-heart-body-spirit connection. And I made a decision that I was going to go on this journey unapologetically and see what happens.”

Aarons-Martin started his process by being open and vulnerable with his staff and students about his own health and goals, and encouraged others to do the same.

“I told them, ‘This is my journey, but I welcome you to take whatever parts of it resonate with you,’” he says. “Each person defines wellness for themselves but what we wanted to do was have a school-wide wellness plan, but it was driven by me.”

From there, he and his staff started off with small, attainable steps, including:

• Creating more opportunities for physical activity
• Mindfulness moments throughout the day
• Creating peaceful paths for students
• Providing movable weight-loss equipment

Aarons-Martin also constantly looked for opportunities to model healthy habits, such as holding meetings while walking around the block.

As they began to have success, Aarons-Martin and his team expanded their efforts to integrate it into the community by participating in events such as organized walks and 5Ks. They also implemented other actions when possible, such as providing healthy snack alternatives.

To help foster and support a sense of community, and also reduce absenteeism, event planning was focused on scheduling can’t-miss events on days when students and families might skip school, such as a Friday before a holiday weekend. In one school community, absenteeism dropped from 12% to 7%.

“We found kids were coming to school because they didn't want to miss the thing, and it was going to be fun and active and deeply engaged,” he says. “And we saw that our discipline numbers, our suspension numbers, went down as well. I went from 25 suspensions in one year down to five. We also used restorative justice.”

5 Tips For Implementing A Top-Down Wellness Approach

For other district leaders looking to implement a similar approach, Aarons-Martins offers this advice:

1. Keep It Simple to Start - Aarons-Martin recommends starting with no more than three new initiatives in a school year. “For school leaders who are trying to figure it out, get clear about what's the one to two things school-wide that you can manage,” he says. “There's going to be sustainability with it if you are going to go the distance, and make it clear why this is important. Because it shouldn't just be personal to you.”

At the beginning, for example, Aarons-Martin simply tried to make sure that every morning that students were outside and active to start the day. “So before they walked into classes, I wanted them to take that lap. I want them to get their bodies oxygenated,” he says. “And then we would all start with a pledge and a reminder of who we are and what we need to do.”

2. Get Buy-In and Build Support - As with any initiative, buy-in from students, faculty, and community is critical. “You need staff members and students who are going to champion it and you have to show them how to execute it,” says Aarons-Martin. “They’re going to steward the work with you so that if you go to a meeting or conferences, they're going to continue the practices because ‘This is what we always do.’”

3. Publicize Small Wins - Highlighting and showcasing the success stories via social media can help to build a sense of momentum, says Aarons-Martin. “I always tried to find the folks who were kind of on the fence and apprehensive, to highlight,” he says. “Like, if I saw they actually had a kid do a mindfulness moment and lead it, even though they didn't believe in it themselves, they still had a student doing it. I know it may feel like, ‘Oh that's kind of hokey,’ but they were trying.”

Social media is also where students are, and when certain stories about the district’s efforts went viral or reached a wider audience, it fueled positivity. “Young people loved the fact that we became a school that we have always said we were when we said we're one of the best schools in Boston,” Aarons-Martins says. “They saw themselves in places outside of the school and people talking about it to the degree that they feel a sense of pride that like, ‘Yep, this our school.’”

4. Don’t Be Afraid to Share Your Challenges - “I was very vulnerable and upfront in front of the community about where I was in my journey,” says Aarons-Martin. “Like, ‘I'm dropping the ball’ and ‘Here’s why I didn't do X.’ And people would say, ‘Hey, Mr. Martin, well, let's get back on the ball again.”

Aarons-Martin adds that sharing failings helped humanize him to students and also provided an opportunity for the community to hold him accountable.

5. Remember, It’s A Team Effort - Aarons-Martin said that while he benefited from many of the initiatives and decisions, he had to maintain a broader focus. “If you're doing something because that's for you, and it's not for the community, then you need to rethink what you're doing and why,” he says. “I wanted to make sure that the people who were choosing the journey with me also found resonance as a school, and as a wider community.”

All of this started with a few small steps.

“I never said, ‘We're gonna have a weight-loss challenge,” says Aarons-Martin. “I just tried to say, ‘Hey, can we be more active for 30 minutes? You know, this week? I can. I can figure that out.’ Ultimately, I want everyone to thrive!”

Related:

• Addressing The Critical Impact of Chronic Absenteeism
• School Wellness Coordinators: What to Know

Chronic absenteeism has become a growing issue on a nationwide scale, one that jumped significantly after the pandemic hit. Michael Hale, Director of College, Career & Citizenship + Innovation Educator at Casco Bay High School in Portland, Maine, says that the percentage of ongoing chronic absenteeism has almost doubled, and with it comes other detrimental effects that can severely derail the futures of afflicted students.

“One thing that is a real concern is that chronic absenteeism is now nationally at 30%,” Hale says “Before now, pre-pandemic, it was roughly 15 to 16%, which already seems high. And I don’t know anybody that’s in education who’s heard that number that hasn’t been floored. We all have different ideas of what the issues are. But collectively, this is a major concern for the county.”

With levels of absenteeism so high, the potential impact it can have on students can be devastating. Challenges stemming from absenteeism can be as common as a lack of readiness for the professional world, but it can also involve serious mental and physical health issues.

So why has chronic absenteeism risen in the past few years, and what can be done to reverse the trend?

Why the Sudden Increase in Chronic Absenteeism? 

While chronic absenteeism has always been an obstacle, the pandemic has shown that there are various ways to help educate students even when they are not present at school. The increased reliance on technology might have had a slight impact on chronic absenteeism, but as Hale describes, the root of the issue is deeper than that. Students might not always thrive in a particular environment when it comes to education, in school, at home or otherwise. However, school is made to help students achieve their educational goals while also catering to their emotional and social development.

Students often are dealing with much more than just test scores and homework. Absenteeism can be attributed to responsibilities that students have to take on to help with their household duties in some instances. Other absences come down to accessibility obstacles, such as a lack of affordable transportation options to and from school.

Aside from sickness, familial emergency, and other necessary instances, some absences can be remedied with the help of the schools involved. And that involves schools and families working together to find solutions.

“At the end of the day, it comes down to the relationships between students, families, and the community that the schools and families have built,” says Hale. “It helps to support students in their educational endeavors, whether it’s making up work, being able to jump back into class and not feeling anxious about coming back to class. A lot of students struggle to transition. But what we’re seeing is that most families and their students are going to be okay. It’s the students that are missing 18, 20 days and more that aren’t necessarily getting the support they need. They’re not going to school for the reasons that really concern us.”

What Can Be Done About Chronic Absenteeism? 

Schools have taken on much more responsibility in raising students and influencing their formative years. However, there are some supports that schools offer that help to supplement a student’s home life. Hale emphasizes that there are definitive steps we can take to help curb the alarming levels of chronic absenteeism, particularly fostering a sense of community.

“It’s slowing things down and building that relationship,” he says. “Being relentless in fostering that relationship over the many years it may take to find success in changing that number around for each student. It’s proven through a lot of research that creating a culture and community within your school that invites attendance and makes you feel like you want to go [to school].”

Hale recommends checking out FutureEd’s attendance playbook for ideas and practical solutions. From this, he cites actions that can be taken from the three tiers of support:

• Tier 1: Intensive Intervention - Includes actions such as providing free lunches and laundry facilities at schools, increased engagement with students and families, school-based health services, and restorative discipline practices.
• Tier 2: Early Intervention - Includes actions such as targeted home visits, mentors and tutors, mental health supports, and targeted youth engagement.
• Tier 3: Universal Prevention - Involves addressing interagency case management, housing insecurity, and truancy.

In addition, districts may need to rethink traditional school structures to accommodate cultural changes.

“In terms of a template [to combat chronic absenteeism] it has to start with the way schools build their infrastructure, their frameworks around that idea, and how well we really know our students,” Hale says.

The level of chronic absenteeism may have increased over the past few years, but educators have more agency over how they impact that increase and how they can turn it around. With greater involvement in student’s lives, a push now can help change the fortunes of young adults personally and professionally into the future.

Related:

• Chronic Absenteeism: Why It’s On The Rise and How to Overcome It
• Building A Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) Framework for Mental Health

It’s that time of year when Spring fever seems to be spreading rapidly from student to student and even makes it way to an educator or two (I’ve definitely suffered from a few bouts over the years). Symptoms include: lack of concentration during classroom discussions; staring longingly out the windows; and a tendency for less effort to be put into assignments. 

While the only known cure is summer break, here are strategies I’ve come up with over the years that help limit the damage spring fever causes in my classes.  

 1. Get Students Outside Anyway You Can 

This might be an obvious solution but it really can help. If you’re teaching in a setting that allows for class to be held outside, go ahead and do it. PowerPoint displays are difficult to share, but having students sit in a circle on the grass can foster better classroom discussions in my experience as a professor. 

This method lends itself well to liberal arts yet can also work for science. One of the most memorable biology labs of my college career occurred when the professor took us on a warm spring’s excursion along a campus walking trail, pointing out some of the flora and fauna we were studying in our textbooks. 

2. Give Students Chances To Be Active 

Especially in climates where it is cold in the winter, it can be hard to sit still and inside during the first warm days in months. That’s why this is a good time of year to unveil your most active classroom activities, and get students standing and doing activities on their own. 

In my classes that means more writing assignments and some scavenger hunt-type explorations of campus. For instance, I might send students outside of the classroom for 20 minutes to do some person-on-the-street reporting with others on campus, and then come back and report what quotes they got. (This, of course, doesn’t work in all educational settings, but you can adjust as needed.)  

3. Let Class Out Early  

Some educators will cringe at this and I debated not including it. But I’m okay going on the record as saying that dismissing a class a few minutes early is perfectly fine, especially on warm, beautiful days. After all, time is a poor way to measure learning, and for the topics I teach -- writing and journalism -- I believe the more important lessons take place outside of the classroom, when students are researching and writing their stories. 

On the other side, as a student, nothing annoyed me more than when I could tell a professor had come to the end of the lecture and was just letting the clock run out with irrelevant asides. 

Of course, early dismissal isn’t plausible in many K-12 settings, and even in college, you want to avoid doing it so often that students expect it.  

4. Reward Certain Students By Eliminating Assignments

This might be another controversial idea but nothing can reduce symptoms of spring fever quite like telling a student they can skip an assignment. This “treatment” should be used sparingly and only with caution. 

For example, I employ it just for students who have earned it by demonstrating proficiency in the subject matter and making them complete a final paper or assignment feels like nothing more than required drudgery. 

A variation of this technique is to tweak an assignment so it is more focused on an area in which a student still needs improvement. For instance, maybe a student of mine in a journalism class has demonstrated they can write good summaries of events but still struggle with one-on-one interviews. Rather than a full story, I might ask them to interview an additional person and discuss that experience with me. 

Students really appreciate this individualized treatment and, in my experience, they learn more as a result. They also get to spend a little more time outside doing something they enjoy, and that's important to provide to our students when we can as well. 

• 4 Star Wars Tech Tools for Teaching
• I Used To Create Long Slideshows. Here's 4 Things I Do Instead

Cyberbullying is a form of bullying that occurs online and/or is perpetrated via technology.

Cyberbullying increased during the pandemic era and has continued to rise, thanks to students spending more time online and the prevalence of AI deepfakes. According to the CDC, 37% of middle schools and 25% of high schools reported at least one cyberbullying incident per week in the U.S. Globally, the WHO released research in 2024 showing that across 44 countries, about 1 in 6 school-aged children experience cyberbullying and 1 in 8 report cyberbullying others.

Cyberbullying can be particularly challenging for educators to prevent as it can’t be seen in school hallways and can occur off school grounds and after school hours. Despite this, cyberbullying still impacts students and can be an in-school problem. Preventing it often involves education, both of potential cyberbullying victims and perpetrators as well as outreach between education staff, parents, and other stakeholders.

Cyberbullying can take place on social media, through videos and texts, or as part of online games. Instances can involve name-calling, the sharing of embarrassing photos, and various forms of public shaming and humiliation.

This brief overview of cyberbullying includes strategies educators can take to prevent it.

What is Cyberbullying?  

Traditional bullying is generally defined as involving an imbalance of physical or emotional power, intent to cause physical or emotional harm, and behavior that is repeated or likely to be repeated. Cyberbullying also fits this definition, but occurs online frequently through social media or other forms of digital communication.

Chad A. Rose, director of Mizzou Ed Bully Prevention Lab at the University of Missouri, has said that unlike traditional bullying, cyberbullying can occur anytime and anyplace.

“We live in a world now where bullying doesn’t begin and end with school bells,” Rose said. “It encompasses a kid’s entire life.”

How Common is Cyberbullying? 

Cyberbullying can be hard for both educators and parents to recognize because they don’t overhear or see it occurring, and it might take place in private text chains or on message boards that adults don’t typically frequent. Students may also be reluctant to admit it is happening.

Even so, there is good evidence cyberbullying is on the rise. In 2019, The CDC found that 16 percent of students experienced cyberbullying. More recently, Security.org’s research found that 20 percent of kids and adolescents between the age of 10 and 18 experienced cyberbullying, and children from households that earned less than $75,000 annually were more than twice as likely to experience cyberbullying.

The WHO also found that globally, cyberbullying has been increasing in recent years. Between 2018 and 2022, the period from which the most recent WHO research is based, the number of children who experienced cyberbullying rose from 12% to 15% for boys and 13% to 16% for girls.

What Role Do AI and Deepfakes Play?

Deepfake AI technology can be used to mock or bully students in the school setting. UNESCO has reported on the deepfake trend in cyberbullying, noting that “students are using deepfake technology to create harassing and sexually explicit content of classmates and teachers, leaving lawmakers struggling to adapt existing cyberbullying laws to the new threat.”

This is a new area of cyberbullying that schools are monitoring and learning how to respond. Educators Stephanie Jones and Kerry Gallagher have written here at Tech & Learning that strategies aiming to prevent AI deepfakes in the school setting should adopt a “victim-centered approach.”

They add, “This means the goal of programming is to ensure students’ voices are heard, they are engaged . . . and they know how to seek support.”

What Are Some Ways To Prevent Cyberbullying?  

To prevent cyberbullying students should be taught digital citizenship and literacy, Rose said. These lessons and activities should emphasize online safety, remind students to think before posting, that posts are permanent, and that there are important implications to that permanence.

Other key steps are for school leaders to prioritize SEL and empathy education and to forge strong relationships with caregivers. That way if cyberbullying does occur, the caregivers of both the victim and the perpetrator can be enlisted to help put an end to it.

While some educators, parents, and caregivers might be inclined to ban technology use as a way to protect students from cyberbullying, Rose said that’s not the answer because technology is part of kids’ lives.

“We used to tell kids if someone is mistreating you, delete the app,” Rose said. “I’ve long said that we can’t just tell them to socially remove themselves.” For example, Rose said you wouldn’t tell a child to stop playing basketball if they were getting bullied on the court.

Instead of banning technology use, educators and caregivers need to teach children how to use technology responsibly and guard themselves against the negative effects of cyberbullying.

Cyberbullying Prevention Resources 

• StopBullying.gov - Practical advice, including warning signs of when a child may be being cyberbullied – or may be cyberbullying others.
• Teachers’ Essential Guide to Cyberbullying Prevention - Common Sense Education’s guide includes cyberbullying FAQs as well as grade-specific lessons and activities.
• Preventing Cyberbullying: Top 10 Tips for Teens - Student-focused advice from the Cyberbullying Research Center.
• Who To Call - The Cybersmile Foundation provides helplines for cyberbullying, mental health, eating disorders, revenge porn, and more.
• Security.org - A well-rounded collection of cyberbullying prevention resources, including podcasts, books, apps, and more.
• Do Something About Bullying - Featuring cyberbullying prevention support campaigns, news, resources, and more.
• Internet Matters - Conversation guides, legal resources, and links to cyberbullying prevention in social media and gaming.
• Stomp Out Bullying - Resources, videos, supports, and more for support in regard to all manner of bullying.
• National Crime Prevention Council - An array of resources including rapid response outreach tools and cyberbullying tip sheets.
• American Federation of Teachers - A plethora of online safety and cyberbullying resources.

Traditional MTSS frameworks for student achievement visualize interventions and programs as a three-tier pyramid with universal supports at the bottom, targeted supports in the middle, and intensive ones at the top/tip. 

During a recent Tech & Learning webinar hosted by Dr. Kecia Ray and sponsored by Otus, education experts talked about turning this model on its side and ensuring that MTSS frameworks are designed to accelerate learning for every student, not just those who are struggling. 

Watch the full webinar here. 

Key Takeaways: Diamond MTSS Design 

The rethinking of MTSS supports as a diamond instead of a pyramid grew out of the data, said Amanda Ironside, director of the MTSS Center for FIRST Educational Resources. 

“What we started to see over the years is that the same data that we're using to identify students that are in need of scaffolds and those intensive interventions also help us with those students that need something different in terms of extensions for above grade level instruction,” she said. “So the model morphs to more of this diamond, where we think about all of the learners within our classroom and the ones that might struggle with the grade level concept, but also the ones that are already there, or are already past it. And now what do we do in terms of intensive intervention for those kids?” 

Ray said this focus on all students can be a missing element of MTSS. “I feel like so many times we forget the extension side of MTSS and we focus so much on the scaffolding and the intervention side,” she added. 

Every Student Deserves to Grow 

The MTSS diamond approach is designed to be more strengths-based than traditional MTSS frameworks. 

“Every learner regardless of their starting level of achievement, deserves to grow, and I think sometimes that can get lost because we put a lot of our resources towards our students who are in need of scaffolds and supports and those intensive interventions,” Ironside said. “But we also have to remember that other side as well, and how how we can ensure that those students are being challenged, that they're learning at the level that they deserve to learn at as well.” 

Supporting Teachers

"No framework, no matter how well-thought-out, can succeed without teacher buy-in. Getting teachers to successfully implement a framework is about providing support and mentorship,” Ironside said. "We have to first make sure that the teachers that we hire and the teachers that are new to our profession are feeling supported, and that they feel like they have someone in their corner.” 

It’s important not to just hand over resources and wish new teachers the best. “We're providing mentors for our new teachers, and even new teachers to a district,” Ironside said. “Even if you've been teaching 15-20 years and you move to a new district, we still need to provide mentorship, and we still need to provide that partnership.” 

 Using Data Effectively 

Implementing an effective diamond-shaped MTSS framework is also about using data effectively.

“Sometimes we're data rich, but we're information poor,” Ironside said. “We have all of this data, right? But sometimes we don't know what to do with all of it and that is often because our framework isn't solid.” 

Kendell Hunter, product marketing manager at Otus, said the trick for school leaders is to use data to make their jobs less complex. “We have a lot of data and we should at this point be able to work smarter, not harder,” she said. 

• Tech & Learning Webinars

Some 17% of adults younger than 30 identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or trans, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey, which echoes recent data collected by the CDC that estimates nearly 2 million Americans aged 13-17 identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender—representing 9.5% of the total youth population. 

As a result, there’s a good chance that at least a few students in any classroom may identify as LGBTQ+. These students are at relatively high risk for becoming the targets of bullies, violence—and even committing suicide. Providing support for these students is critical to their success, academically and beyond.

Providing LGBTQ+ Safe Spaces and Support for Students Who Come Out 

Rodney Crouse, a fifth-grade teacher for Guilford County Schools in North Carolina in his twentieth year of teaching, grew up in nearby Alleghany County, which borders Virginia and the heart of Appalachia. “In my mind, it wasn't that long ago that I came out as a senior in high school and received death threats. When I asked to take my first boyfriend to the prom, they had to have extra police and security at the prom for my safety,” Crouse says. “Fast forward to just two days ago. We had an all-day training at the high school. I walked in and there was a pride flag with the trans triangle hanging in the middle of a classroom, and that was a really emotional experience for me – to go from death threats and people wanting to kill me to some teacher being brave enough to hang a flag in the room to designate that as a safe space . . . that was a huge leap.”

Although public acceptance has grown, LGBTQ+ students still face challenges as families and communities aren’t always supportive. Crouse understands firsthand as his parents were not exactly accepting when he came out to them, with his mother telling him she’d rather have “a dead son than a gay one.” 

“I was very close to being a statistic,” he says. “It was a college professor who stopped me from carrying out my plan. She locked her door and would not let me leave until someone from counseling came down. That was huge for me.”

Although Crouse never formally comes out to his students, he doesn’t hide it, either–he has a picture of him and his husband on his desk as well as a small rainbow streamer, which he says provides subtle clues for those students who may be looking for a safe space or an ally.

“I have more and more students who are either coming out to me or who are children of same-sex families,” says Crouse. “My only agenda is to help them grow as good human beings.”

If a student does come out to you, or if you want to create a supportive LGBTQ+ environment, Crouse offers these tips:

1. Listen without the urge to respond. Crouse says no immediate reaction is okay. “Take a breath because that pause may help you from saying something completely stupid, because I don't think anybody sets out with the intention of doing harm, right?” 

2. Don't feel like you have to change anything about yourself. “If they didn't trust you, they wouldn't be coming to you in the first place,” says Crouse. So he suggests that you let them have that space and be safe. 

3. Stay consistent. Try not to change how you respond or react to a student after they come out because others may pick up on that in a classroom, which could lead to unwanted attention and unintended consequences. 

4. Signal safe spaces. Crouse suggests that teachers who are willing to be an ally put something in their classroom for those students who may be looking for a safe space, whether it's a safe space sticker on a door or window, a small rainbow strip or streamers, anything that would say, “This is a safe space,” and allow students to know that.

5. Don't operate in fear. Don't be worried that you're going to say the wrong thing or use the wrong pronoun or acronym. “It's all about intent,” says Crouse. “If you're following your heart and coming from a good place, those of us in the community, we know. It is not offensive if you say the wrong thing.” Such moments can even open a space for conversation. 

In addition, he cautions those in states that require reporting of such incidents to really consider what they’re doing, and if it’s truly in the best interest of the student to report them. 

Providing Representation with an LGBTQ-Inclusive Curriculum 

“The people who we label and understand today as LGBTQ+ have always existed in every corner of every community and country ethnicity and belief system,” says Deb Fowler, executive director of History UnErased, an education nonprofit. “All of the representations young people have, in pop culture and social media, in many spaces of their online life, is now being paired, paradoxically, with so much hate and horrible rhetoric, that it's just denying their existence, denying their rights.”

Finding ways to provide LGBTQ+ representation can help those students feel accepted. For example, History UnErased offers a curriculum that recognizes LGBTQ+ contributors to culture, science, history, and more, while also dispelling misperceptions, allaying fears, and including everyone in the learning. It has a one-time cost and is designed to be integrated with mainstream courses. “Everything is anchored in primary sources,” says Fowler. “We're not making it up. And it's not about sexual behavior.”

The HU curriculum also is an opportunity to weave the other previously erased voices into a more accurate reflection of U.S. history and the remarkable diversity it represents, says Fowler. 

“This is life-affirming, it is life-changing, and it is life-saving,” she says. “And that is not hyperbole because I witnessed it myself as a former classroom teacher. And I've witnessed it in doing this work working with educators across the country, and what we're hearing from them is that this is an opportunity for young people to see themselves reflected in what all of their classmates are learning.”

• Top LGBTQ+ Sites and Resources to Support Students 
• How to Encourage Transgender Students to Pursue STEM Careers

Mindful Schools is an education body that is dedicated to helping schools become more mindful and heart-centered places through training.

The system has been up and running for almost 15 years, during which more than 50,000 educators have been trained -- with 99% of participants saying they would recommend the courses. Partnering with 500 schools per year, the influence of this SEL-adjacent training is growing faster and further. 

The idea is to help empower educators to teach -- and indeed live -- with tools that allow them to remain sensitive, open, and focused on the wellbeing of everyone. All that should help achieve the institution's goal of creating thriving school communities with belonging, inclusion, and well-being at their hearts.

What is Mindful Schools?

Mindful Schools is a body of trainers who help to teach mindfulness practices to educators with the goal of tackling mental health challenges in schools.

The increase of mental health problems -- including depression, anxiety, trauma, and stress -- have contributed to the need for what Mindful Schools offers. This is done by working with schools to offer bespoke training as well as basic programs to help wider groups.

The company says: "We support our school partners to dismantle inequitable decision-making and structures and to build schoolwide cultures that nurture collective well-being, healing, and liberation."

How does Mindful Schools work?

Mindful Schools offers direct training that aims to deliver support to school staff, administrators, and teachers to address stress, negative habits, and reactivity -- all while helping to grow strengths, heal stresses, and ultimately, become more present.

Mindful Schools offers online courses that make training and follow-up resources available as needed. Live "touch-points" are also available, including events and visits.

All that speaks in the staff results, with 90% reporting lower stress and greater self-compassion, 82% connecting better with students, and 77% feeling more satisfied with their jobs. 

For students, the feedback is also positive, with 89% reporting improved emotional regulation, 83% with improved focus, and 79% experiencing better engagement.

What are the best Mindful Schools features?

Mindful Schools offers a diverse mix with experience with the team comprising of school administrators, social workers, teachers, mindfulness instructors, and BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ affinity group facilitators.

Usefully, you can view videos of the work in action to see what the classes look like and how the resources can serve your school's needs. Check out the video section under resources here. Also, here is an example of a mindfulness exercise and the results as read out by students:

A link to download a PDF version of this exercise to use in class is here, which shows the level of autonomy that can be achieved while still teaching and learning these mindfulness skills.

To get the full experience, there are a number of ways to sign-up for school specific training and more. But more on that in the next section.

How much does Mindful Schools cost?

Mindful Schools offers a number of resources for free, including courses and community practices. But there are also courses that comprise both online and real world training that can be paid for.

• 101: Mindfulness Foundations: Includes a one-hour live session and half-day retreat for $225, run three times a year.
• 201: Mindfulness in the Classroom: This is an eight-week online course with live session and credits available, charged at $595.
• Mindful Communication: This is a live session running over a few days, charged at $295.
• Self-Compassion for Educators: This is a six-week training charged at $295.
• Other workshops and retreats run throughout the year.

Mindful Schools best tips and tricks

Learn before you teach
Take a course as a school staff member before tackling teaching this to others as the experience can be life-changing, which helps inject passion into that teaching.

Start small
If unsure, why not try a smaller shorter course option to see how it works and if this style of teaching could help you, before perhaps trying more?

Integrate into class
Build this type of work into class on a regular basis so your students and yourself have that time and space to look forward to and use to unwind.

• New Teacher Starter Kit
• Best Tools for Teachers

To share your feedback and ideas on this article, consider joining our Tech & Learning online community here

The definition ‘at risk’ is typically assigned to a school or district that has not been able to meet the accountability standards outlined by the state and the U.S. Department of Education. 

However, there is another factor putting our schools at risk that has nothing to do with student performance and everything to do with society at large. As of this publication, there have been 13 school shootings in the U.S. in 2023. That is an average of 4.3 shootings each month this year. If this rate continues, by the end of 2023, the number of school shootings will be 52. 

In my hometown of Nashville, a small private school located in a quiet older neighborhood of Nashville away from the hustle and bustle of downtown experienced the worst tragedy a school can experience. A former student entered the school with the intention to kill. The Head of the School confronted the armed intruder only to meet her death, along with the custodian and a substitute teacher who came to her aid. Three children lost their lives as well. 

A month has passed, and the journals are now being released containing the innermost thoughts of the person who committed this travesty. And the bottom line is she was a troubled soul. 

School Shootings Continue to Rise 

This event adds Nashville to the growing list of cities experiencing school shootings. The Center for Homeland Defense and Security has mapped out school shootings since 1970. 

It is a tragedy looking at these numbers and realizing that we’ve lost more than 368 children and teenagers in our public schools due to school shootings, and over 1,000 have been injured. The very place where students should feel the safest, they are murdered in cold blood. 

No state is immune from these events, and the historical data suggest the situations of the shootings vary tremendously. Regardless of which state you review, what doesn't change is the use of a gun. Many argue that gun control can solve this problem in our country, while others point to the rising mental health challenges. 

Each side has valid points. Although the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution calls for the right to bear arms, it doesn’t say -- nor was the intent of our forefathers -- to bear military-grade assault weapons. The term ‘bear arms’ describes the right to carry weapons for non-military purposes. States such as Michigan, California, Colorado, Wyoming, and Washington have strengthened their gun laws in the past two years. Yet only 10 states have laws restricting assault weapons. Giffords Law Center maintains a scorecard of state gun laws and allows users to compare state legislation.  

School Mental Health Support Stretched Thin 

Gun regulation isn’t the only solution. We really must try to support better mental health. The increase in substance abuse, depression, and anxiety prompted the World Health Organization to release a brief on mental health outlining the challenges and the resources available and required to address the crisis. Dr. Garrett Rossi offers commentary in the Psychiatric Times, sharing his opinion of barriers to resolution, including the increased challenges in treating patients with mental illness -- just last month, a patient shot other patients in a waiting room of a mental health provider in Atlanta. 

Schools haven’t prioritized counseling programs or services over the years, which has increased the student-to-counselor ratio and impacted mental health supports. The American School Counselor Association data suggests that more than 50% of schools are over ratio, meaning counselors serve more than 250 students per counselor. Indeed, the average ratio today is 408 students to one counselor. 

Our poor efforts and progress in gun control and mental health support create an opportunity for more shootings and other criminal acts in our schools. Now is the time to assess regulation on gun control, especially assault weapons, and to acknowledge that we are not serving our students well in support of their mental health needs. The sooner we pay attention to these issues nationwide, the sooner we can reduce the risk to our student’s safety at school. 

• How One District’s Mental Health Program is Saving Millions & Helping Students
• Building A Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) Framework for Mental Health

To share your feedback and ideas on this article, consider joining our Tech & Learning online community here

Students have always experienced test-taking anxiety but in recent years the problem has gotten worse, says Dr. Janani Krishnaswami, a Texas physician who helps students overcome these stresses before high-stakes exams such as the AP, SAT, or ACT. 

Krishnaswami, who is also a content author for UWorld, a test-prep service, shares best practices and tips for educators looking to help their students reduce their test-taking anxiety. 

1. Reducing Test-Taking Anxiety: Make Sure Your Students Practice Test Taking

“Test taking is an art and a skill that's independent of actually learning material,” Krishnaswami says. “So it's very important for teachers to understand that while they're doing a great service by teaching this material with enthusiasm, a lot of emphasis has to be placed on test taking itself.” 

Test-taking strategies should be covered in class and educators should give students test-taking practice. “Test taking itself has to be taught as almost a separate skill,” she says. However, that doesn’t mean these strategies can’t be incorporated into the class material. “You should use test taking itself as a way to learn material; they work synergistically,” she says. 

2. Help Students Shift Their Mindsets  

Part of preparing for the day of the test is making sure you go into it with the right mindset. Teachers can help students establish this by showing empathy and helping students recognize all the challenges they’ve successfully overcome previously. 

“Typically, human beings tend to have negative cognitive biases, we tend to over-emphasize the things that have happened to us that haven't gone exactly according to plan or where we feel deficient,” Krishnaswami says. “We tend to overlook those things where we'd actually done a good job or actually did better than we thought."

Overcoming those unconscious biases is essential. “That's where teachers can actually help guide that student in understanding, ‘Hey, what have you done well? What do you think your strengths are?’” she says. “Then when we start to do a lot of catastrophizing and get into what-if scenarios and worst-case thinking, let's counter that with, ‘What would you like to see happen? What's your ideal vision for yourself?'” 

3. Remind Students to Focus on What They Can Control  

Educators can remind students to focus on what they can control leading into a test, which includes their preparation on the material and test-taking strategies, and their mindset. 

“Once you've done those two things, there is an element that is going to be outside of your control and that is something that we all have to accept,” Krishnaswami says. “You don't know exactly what assortment of questions you're going to get. Maybe you didn’t sleep that well the night before, and you definitely can't control what that result is going to be.” 

Despite these elements beyond their control, students who know they prepared properly can take solace in that. “That is a great tool to help with anxiety when you realize that, ‘Oh, I can't control everything that happens to me, but I'll put in my best work,'” Krishnaswami says

4. Use Technology to Help With Mindfulness  

Healthcare professionals can help students learn how to cope with anxiety spikes in the moment. Something as simple as a student wearing a rubber band on their wrist and snapping it when they feel anxious to remind themselves to calibrate can be helpful, Krishnaswami says. 

Technology can also assist in providing mindfulness practice. “I really love Insight Timer,” she says. “It’s an app that has everything from breathing practices to guided body scan meditations.”

Much of it is free and it incorporates a wide range of mindfulness practices from different cultures as well as offering music-based meditations. Other apps with similar features that Krishnaswami also recommends include Open, Calm, and Headspace. 

Whatever app or mindfulness practice a student uses, repetition and consistency is key. “The more you use them in a routine, the more effect you'll see,” Krishnaswami says. “Rather than just using it sporadically or right before a test, it's going to have more effect when you start building that daily practice.” 

• I Took CASEL’s Online SEL Course. Here’s What I Learned
• Fostering Well-Being and Social-Emotional Learning Skills

To share your feedback and ideas on this article, consider joining our Tech & Learning online community here

Emmy Werner studied resilience, at a time when resilience research was not widely recognized, as a resource to help traumatized children outside of scholarly literature, until now. Werner’s work is based on a remarkable longitudinal study that tracked hundreds of children who were born on the Hawaiian island of Kauai in 1955, over four decades.

One out of three of the children from Kauai identified as high-risk grew into unexpectedly competent, confident, and caring adults. They did not develop behavior or learning problems during childhood or adolescence. They succeeded in school, managing home and social life well. These children grew into adults who were somehow able to overcome incredible odds, leading to successful and fulfilling lives. 

This study challenged the persistent belief that at-risk children cannot succeed. How did they beat the odds?

A consistent pattern of protective factors were revealed in these resilient children:

1. Protective factors within the individual: These included characteristics such as intelligence, a positive outlook, a sense of humor, and a talent or interest that provided a sense of purpose and identity. 
2. Protective factors in home life: These included having at least one supportive and involved opportunity to establish a close bond with at least one competent, emotionally stable person who was sensitive to their needs, often substitute caregivers such as grandparents, older siblings, aunts, or uncles. 
3. External factors: These included access to supportive social networks, such as teachers, mentors, and peers, and opportunities for involvement in activities that fostered positive relationships and skills development. 

The second and third factors are provisions that schools and communities can foster, but the first factor may seem dependent on the individual. Yet, internal resilience can be learned, resulting in these protective factors interacting in a synergy that compounds positive long-term consequences. Indeed, schools and communities can implement the lessons learned from Werner’s study. More evidence across other studies provide validation for generalizing strategies to disadvantaged children in schools. 

Learning Resiliency from Historical Patterns 

A more recent tragedy, with parallels to post-Covid student trauma, was conducted for Katrina hurricane survivors. This disaster wiped out much of the city of New Orleans in 2005.  Researchers published findings on “resilience outliers” a decade later, in Children of Katrina. These kids were displaced from school and home for a year, and had no digital access to connect to their educational or social lives. 

Similar to the pandemic, 100,000 post-Katrina students were isolated, stripped of critical developmental and social learning opportunities. However, the researchers found individuals who had not only survived, they went on to lead successful, thriving young adult lives. As with Werner’s findings, a sense of strong community helped Katrina kids rebuild their lives. And like the Kids of Kauai, having a strong support network helped those traumatized children experience post-traumatic growth.

Patterns in history reinforce solutions. Moving ahead to 2014, Google researched who their most successful employees were. The assumption was that those who went to prestigious universities topped the list. Certainly, they were given the conditions to succeed, except they were beaten out by individuals who had endured a trauma at some point in their lives, and excelled not despite, but perhaps because of, the lessons learned from overcoming. 

This study reinforced that not all is lost. In fact, resilience is sometimes best learned through real-life challenges. Incorporating protective factors helps traumatized individuals draw strength, rather than weakness, from circumstances.

Expectations and Outcomes 

The Pygmalion Effect, another study regarding school community support that dates back a half century, showed how teachers who were told certain students were gifted, expected them to excel academically. Another group of students, they were told, were average. In reality, there was no difference between these groups. Yet the teachers treated the perceived gifted as more intelligent, providing them with more attention, encouragement, and opportunities. 

As a result, the perceived gifted students demonstrated gifted levels of performance while their peers performed as expected, with average performance. The Pygmalion effect revealed higher expectations leading to better performance. 

Teacher perceptions and attitudes toward students often include unintended biases. Being conscious of this can help all children, by pushing past our biases to create supportive learning communities, so all children are given opportunities to excel. 

Consider a template to guide educators:

• Teaching resilience to children so they can learn to persevere. Resilience building can often be achieved through inspirational stories of overcoming trauma.
• Provide strong affiliations to mentors, coaches, and teachers to foster a sense of connection to adults in the life of children in need.
• Provide outlets for supportive social networks, such as teams, clubs, religious affiliations, and other organizations to connect students to these children.  

While not a failsafe, these actions, as evidenced, certainly increase the odds of success for those who have had to overcome barriers in early life. Stacking these strategies together further compounds the likelihood of success for many students, certainly more than without. 

• Reversing Digital Disruption for Students
• How to Lead Post-Pandemic Students to Thrive After Years of Isolation

To share your feedback and ideas on this article, consider joining our Tech & Learning online community here

The importance of keeping a healthy school in the true sense of the world has never been so universally understood as it is in this current era. Perhaps we can consider it a silver lining of recent challenges—this increased awareness and acknowledgment of SEL’s value and considering the whole child when creating a positive school environment. 

The corporate world has long understood the benefits of investing into employee well-being by offering programs for stress reduction, nutrition, and physical activity and to help steer away from problem habits that wear on a worker’s happiness and productivity. 

As states and schools follow suit, busy educators already at their limit for time and energy in the classroom face a struggle to add more tasks to their plate, so districts are hiring wellness coordinators to lend a hand in implementing initiatives into the daily lives of their students.

What is a Wellness Coordinator? 

A wellness coordinator provides leadership in the school setting, acting as a liaison between educators and the various programs and policies affecting students’ (and in some cases, employee) well-being. They offer guidance to promote a positive and healthy environment on campus and share knowledge of the latest programs, policies, and initiatives offered to help learners. They devise plans on how to organically incorporate these positive models and offerings into the classroom, rather than to have programs competing for precious instruction hours. 

Wellness coordinators can step in and find solutions for individual students, but rather than a traditional behavioral or mental health-specific helper such as a social worker or school therapist, their role is more focused on overall well-being of the school population.

“In today’s fast-paced, rapidly changing educational atmosphere, leaders and districts need to create a positive environment,” says Dr. Matthew X. Joseph, Director of Supervision for Brockton Public Schools. “Although this is challenging for every leader, navigating these uncharted waters with care is critical. The drastic shifts we’re all facing due to the increased demands are reminders of just how vital positive wellness and school culture is.”

What Does a Wellness Coordinator Do? 

A wellness coordinator can evaluate long-term needs for students and staff within a campus or district and create a plan to reach goals for improvement. They can offer recommendations regarding specific programs to solve issues, or provide guidance on how to follow existing policies in a positive and cohesive way. 

Often, part of their task load includes learning about state and federal programs available to increase the health and happiness of students. This could include nutrition, physical education, or mental health topics. In some cases, they might even participate in a grant application process to fund additional initiatives. 

Collaboration with district educators and leaders on school health programs that address wellness priorities is key, as well as fostering partnerships with the greater community to reap further resources for students and their families.

What Qualifications Does a Wellness Coordinator Need? 

Most wellness coordinators hold a bachelor's degree as well as experience in some health-related area, which ensures evaluations and recommendations are valid and appropriately assigned. 

Good communication skills are a must as wellness coordinators have to connect with students, educators, and administration. Organization skills for this holistic health hub are also crucial as day-to-day communications and planning sessions could extend to a variety of parties. 

As a champion for well-being, creativity and enthusiasm to encourage participation and get both teacher-and-student buy-in to create a healthier and happier school environment is an obvious plus.

“Relational trust is built on people and our connections,” says Joseph. “Emotions such as empathy, commitment, compassion, patience, and positivity are critical to building a strong educational community. When coupled with schools’ current needs to face change and new possibilities, having a healthy community is even more paramount. During my research at Boston College and when I wrote ‘Power of Connections’, I looked at building a positive community and its impact on school culture. I learned that a positive school environment makes a difference in productivity, satisfaction, and happiness at work. A culture of educator wellness and positivity also helps to build trust among colleagues, and it becomes safer to open up to change.”

Using a Grants to Hire a Wellness Coordinator 

Fresno USD was awarded a $150,000 Wellness Coordinator grant from the Kaiser Permanente Foundation to aid student wellbeing. The district hired Anita Ruiz, who will coordinate initiatives focused on improving food security and nutrition, increasing physical activity, providing increased social-emotional supports, and connecting students and families with outside community resources.

“We are proud to once again be chosen as a grant recipient by the Kaiser Permanente Foundation and are excited to be working with them on this innovative initiative for the betterment of our students, families, and communities,” says Fresno USD superintendent Bob Nelson.

• 3 Wellbeing Initiatives That Work for Schools
• Supporting Student & Teacher Well-Being

To share your feedback and ideas on this article, consider joining our Tech & Learning online community here

Students across the U.S. and globe are experiencing a mental health crisis that was exasperated but not, experts agree, caused by the pandemic. 

During a recent Tech & Learning webinar, hosted by Dr. Kecia Ray, a team of panelists discussed how cultural shifts and tech tools paired with teacher, parent, and student education can help lead to healthier, happier, and ultimately, more academically successful students. 

Watch the full webinar here. 

Key Takeaways

Sobering Statistics 

Dr. Nicole Cobb, associate chair of the Department of Human and Organizational Development at Vanderbilt University, began the webinar by sharing a number of stark statistics around student well-being. 

“Over the last year or two, 70% of public school students have been asking for more mental health support at school and in their communities,” she said. “Thirty-two percent of students say they are stressed out. Eighty-three percent say that they have physical symptoms related to their anxiety, their stress, their depression, and 42% say they feel persistently sad and hopeless, and they do not see it getting better.” 

In addition, Cobb shared how research indicates one in five students have seriously considered or attempted suicide. “Suicide is the fourth-leading cause of death between 15 and 29-year-olds. These statistics, just tell us that this is a real problem. This is not passing. COVID only heightened our awareness of this, but it is something in our country and even globally, we've been struggling to address for quite some time now.” 

Prerequisite for Learning 

As educators know, anxiety, stress, and trauma are not only harmful to kids mentally and physically but also academically. “If we're not working our way through and healing our stress and trauma, we can get to the point where we are not able to learn in meaningful ways,” said Dr. Kathryn Kennedy, founder and executive director of Wellness for Educators & Consult4Ed Group. “The healing process needs to include not just the cognitive healing, but also bodily healing, because trauma and stress are not just stored in our minds, but also in our physical bodies.” 

She added, “When safety, community, and relationships are strong, that's when learning can actually take place.” 

It’s Okay Not to Be Okay

The first step to solving these problems is creating space within a district’s culture to discuss feelings. “What we need to do as districts or schools, or even just in the classroom, is to normalize not being okay,” said Michael Garcia, a counselor and owner of Paradigm Counseling & Consulting, PLLC, who specializes in the treatment of children and adolescents in trauma and their families. Garcia added, “It's okay to not be okay. We can talk about this. We can openly use our words to say, 'This is how I feel.'” 

Providing professional development and educating teachers about trauma-informed practices is a key component in building this type of culture, Garcia said. “So when little Johnny is in the classroom, getting these big feelings and these big behaviors, then we can keep our calm. We can be curious about ‘Hey, what is it you need right now?’ and create this culture of meeting needs.” 

Being Proactive Rather Than Reactive 

Many schools use digital monitoring tools, except education is not yet getting the most out of these tools, said Channing Anderson, product engagement manager at Impero. 

“Districts buy these things and they use them reactively, they wait until a student does something wrong or something bad and they go and find the evidence and then they come to that student,” she said. 

These tools can be more powerful and helpful if they are used preventatively. In this way, the focus can be on education rather than punishment. 

“Whenever we use these tools to punish students or to control students, and to try to control their online behavior, we're actually not shaping their behavior at all,” she said. “We're not doing anything to help them learn how to navigate their online life. When we use these tools in a proactive way to learn more about the students, then we are helping these students learn how to navigate the challenges that come with living online.” 

At Tech & Learning, we have been incredibly inspired by the unique ideas educators develop to engage students, highlighted in our Innovative Leader Awards. 

From the recent Maryland regional leadership summit, we chat with Jenna Whitney, a STEM teacher from South Allegheny School District in Pennsylvania, who won for Best Example of Teacher & Student Wellbeing Programs for her Kindness Club, Random Acts of Kindness program, and other positivity initiatives. 

“We are always hopeful we can be helpful and make the lives of others easier,” says Whitney, who shares tips to help other educators and administrators interested in creating a kinder and more supportive school environment.

1. Start Small: Create a “Random Acts of Kindness” program 

“Our Kindness Campaign was created on the basis of making our school a literal nicer place to be,” says Whitney. “We were inspired by our local legend, Fred Rogers, and his work in supporting the healthy development of children through wonder. At South Allegheny, we work hard to treat everyone like they are your neighbor.”

Students involved in the Kindness Campaign meet two to three times per week during a flex period to brainstorm ideas and then execute the acts of kindness. The group creates random acts of kindness boxes (snacks, pencils, trinkets, friendship bracelets, stickers, etc.) to give out during the day or make notes of encouragement to give to students and staff.

2. Use Social Media for Good  

“Our Kindness Campaign asked if we could start our own Instagram account to promote kindness,” says Whitney. “We post quotes within our daily stories about kindness and pictures of our work. The plan is to continue to feature people we find doing kind things in the school on our @sakindnesscampaign account. We have a nice following from our students and community members right now, but would love to see it grow. The most important part of this is having our team understand that being kind has a ripple effect and doing things for others also makes you feel good.” 

3. Make Others Feel Seen 

Whitney’s Random Acts of Kindness Club extends beyond students and ensures that every member of the school community enjoys a moment of recognition for the good work they do. 

“The impact of that acknowledgement dramatically changes someone's day,” says Whitney. 

The Kindness Club serves staff by doing small jobs they cannot find the time for, puts smiles on students' faces, and gives a nod to school support personnel often forgotten, such as referees and umpires, by publicly thanking them for their efforts on the field or court.

4. Get Creative with Funding 

“Many of the supplies we use are school supplies like stickers, construction paper, markers, and notecards,” says Whitney. “However, when we make our Random Acts of Kindness bags and teacher appreciation gifts, we do have to get creative with funding.”

The club hosts mini fundraisers within the school and also receives donations from the community when they hear about the program. The group has also been funded through the Donors Choose platform to replenish materials.

5. Look Outside the School Building 

The students have looked to spread kindness beyond the walls of the school by volunteering with partners in the community 

“We are looking to get involved with our local animal shelter and food bank,” says Whitney. “We are also part of a program in the Pittsburgh area that has provided school supplies to our district for free for years. We were finally able to give back and volunteer at their warehouse helping in preparations for their teacher giveaways.”

5 Simple Steps to Promoting Wellbeing in the School Community 

In addition to working with community groups, Whitney offers other suggestions to spread kindness:  

1. "It seems so simple but just saying hello and smiling at people when you see them,” she says.
2. Include people. “We want to make sure everyone knows they have someone in the building to go to when they need it,” she says.
3. Send little notes of encouragement to friends and people who you aren't friends with yet.
4. Support students and teachers in their life outside of the building by asking about their interests and following up with them after a big event.
5. In general, just be a good friend, show up, listen, care, and exhibit all the other qualities that make people feel loved.

“We are very lucky at South Allegheny to have such flexibility in our schedules and understanding from our administration of why initiatives like this are so important,” says Whitney. “I look forward to watching our Kindness Campaign grow into a much bigger piece of our culture.” 

• Innovative Leader Awards
• Tech & Learning Regional Leadership Summits

School leaders have a responsibility to help students and faculty understand the challenges with post-pandemic learning, and more importantly, the solutions to these problems. 

Post-pandemic children entering middle school experienced half of their school years in utter social isolation. This inhibited natural development that occurs in typical social situations. From walking school halls with peers to eating lunch together and playing in semi-organized games at recess, children missed the moments that help them learn to resolve typical day-to-day conflict. This has perpetuated an escalation in conflict beyond common occurrence. Tensions escalate as children struggle navigating how to interact with each other on a daily basis, without the benefit of learning this earlier in school.

It was inevitable that conflict would present a challenge post pandemic in the absence of instrumental social interactions. School communities are busy trying to get back to the "normal" business at hand. We are running through our day teaching children, meeting assessment and performance milestones, scurrying between ringing bells, answering curricular demands, and preparing students for the day’s rigor. Parents too, are eager to have their children return to school routine. Yet, we must realize that these children require a different kind and level of attention.

Normal conflict is resolved between individuals in hundreds of interactions throughout a day. However, schools have seen an increase in typical conflict spiraling in unusual and accelerated ways. Onlookers demand harsh discipline for unresolved conflict. While discipline is necessary for accountability, it is not the solution, at least not as a standalone. Teaching children to learn through conflict is a valuable lifelong skill, and focuses on the future.

Finding Effective and Practical Solutions 

Discipline focuses on the past. As school leaders, we must ensure children move forward in these situations to minimize behavioral overreactions, not backward into regressive actions.

The post-pandemic kids need more. We cannot effectively support them until we stop blaming schools, leaders, teachers and parents and start treating students in ways that allow them to journey back to healthy wellness and success. Consider this video of a principal who resigned in frustration because of this problem. We must stop demonizing one another and work together for solutions.

Practical ways to do this are available and we should keep a trained eye on sensible evidence. Incorporating effective approaches to help post-pandemic kids recover from the absence of social interactions is one refreshing answer. Here are evidence-based, in-class practices for teaching conflict resolution, with a focus on the recognition that blame cannot enable progress, but solutions can and will.

Approaches To Help Post-Pandemic Students Learn to Resolve Conflict Constructively 

1. Move kids away from primal reactions and toward deep-focus logic.

The primary causes with student conflict escalations have been simultaneous social isolation and overexposure to negative social media. Over the past few years, children spent far too much time online and physically alone. I have written about reversing digital disruption for students previously. 

To help children regain social skill sets for managing conflict, move them away from primal thought processes, frequently brought on by negative social media, and enable learners toward deep focus and logic. This can be achieved by using tools and resources within classroom contexts. This serves the dual purpose of teaching children higher sets of cognition and empowering teachers to tap this mindset to help them achieve better.

2. Find wins and embrace failure

It is human nature to long for a sense of achievement, which can provide deep satisfaction. Equipping students with the tools necessary to experience the satisfaction of their successes enables them to be inspired by small wins. By fostering opportunities to recognize micro-wins, students can visualize their progress, and be further motivated to pursue additional successes. This aids resilience too, an additional skill lacking from the context of social isolation.

Students can benefit from learning that successful people actually fail more frequently than unsuccessful people. The difference is that successful people refuse to give up, and eventually stumble on their successes. Unsuccessful individuals throw their hands in the air and stop at the first or early signs of struggle. Working through failure can ultimately spur creativity and innovation.

3. Induce empathy and civility practices

When we engineer empathy, the brain's frontal lobe lights up, activating a higher state of mind. That's good news because this part of the brain is the most evolved. We sift and sort through problems, spark creativity, and you guessed it, effectively resolve conflict. Within this critical thinking area of our brain, we are engaging in higher order thinking and learning. That's a win-win for students.

Civility makes us more intelligent. As Porath explains, "Incivility robs cognitive resources, hijacking performance and creativity, so even if you want to perform at your best, you can't." Proof: those exposed to words associated with rudeness did 17 percent worse on a test of information recall and failed to spot 43 percent more math errors. In short, being uncivil, as in overreactions to conflict makes us less intelligent. Much less.

By implementing practices that promote resilience, the empowerment of small wins, and in-class practices such as the use of tech tools to tune the mind, students can sort through their challenges. That's a big victory for post-pandemic kids who suffered through social exclusion for too long. This is how we can speed up their recovery, and help them succeed.

• Reversing Digital Disruption for Students
• How to Quiet the Hyperactive Hive Mind in Schools

ExperienceCraft is a Minecraft server that is not all that different from other Minecraft multiplayer servers. 

Kids who join the server are able to build, chat, play, and share with one another across a wide variety of in-game activities. But those who participate in this server have all had one unfortunate experience that ties them together. 

“Every kid there has lost somebody important to them in their life,” says Katie Salen, who is one of the drivers of the program.  

The server was launched in the summer of 2022 in partnership between two nonprofits Experience Camps and Connected Camps and the University of California Irvine. The goal is to provide a safe, moderated, grief-aware online community that fosters connection year-round in a digital space. There is also a significant research component to the project to help better understand how to develop youth-centered, equitable and safe online experiences, says Salen, who is the co-founder and chief designer of Connected Camps and also a Professor in the Informatics Department at UC Irvine. 

How ExperienceCraft Started  

Experience Camps is a nonprofit that hosts a yearly week-long overnight camp for grieving children. The organization recently began efforts to extend its supports “beyond the bunk.” They partnered with Connected Camps, which specializes in building safe online communities for kids, to build a Minecraft server that could build on the in-person camp's programming. “The challenge of summer camp is it's restricted to kids who can physically get there,” Salen says. She adds, even for those who can attend, it’s a short period of time. “They make friends, they develop really strong mentoring relationships with counselors, and then it just kind of poof, disappears. So the idea was, could there be a digital kind of bridge that would basically extend that experience year-round?” 

The online experience would also provide access to those unable to attend in person via the Minecraft server and linked Discord server. “If they can't go to the physical camp, they could participate in this community and not get all of the benefits, but get some of the benefits of being in communication and partnership and collaboration with other kids who are probably going through something that's pretty similar to something that they're also going through,” Salen says. 

What The Experience Looks Like  

The rallying point for the community is passion for the  Minecraft game, the same as it would be in another Minecraft server. “The idea is, let’s meet kids where they're at: Here's a game that they love to play,” Salen says. “Then let's surround the game that they love to play with the kinds of supports that are going to help them build a community that is going to help them along on their grief journey.” 

To help with these goals, there are research-backed elements to the server that support its users. “There are parts of the world that have been designed in a grief-positive way,” Salen says. “There is a Memorial Garden where kids are encouraged to build [memorials] around the person that has died and different activities that draw on the work that Experience Camp has done with grieving children around just giving them a space to express what they're feeling.” 

The server moderators are college students. They are trained to support kids that are experiencing grief and to provide near-peer mentorship. “If you can connect with someone just a little bit older than you who shares an interest, it can be really transformative to a young person,” Salen says. 

What Is Being Studied and How Your Students Can Participate 

Part of the goal of this server will be to study how to better foster connections between grieving youth in an online environment. “One of the things we're hoping for there is that they feel a sense of belonging,” Salen says. “It’s really important to grieving children that they feel that they are part of a community that gets them. This is mostly true of all kids.” 

Salen and her colleagues are also looking to better understand which online grief supports in this type of space work and why. “So what does a memorial garden environment really offer young people?” she says. “Part of it is it gives them a chance to express something. We know from the literature that's important.” 

In addition, conversations with peers and the moderators might help them develop a larger vocabulary to express their grief. “We know that a lot of people, even adults, have a hard time talking about how they feel,” Salen says. “So we've been looking at mechanisms to really deepen kids' vocabularies around how they're feeling – how to talk about their grief.” 

Educators who have grieving students who might be interested in joining the server can direct them to its site. The server is safe-listed, so every participant on the server is known and vetted. 

“There's a process for signing up where we make sure that the young person is who they say they are,” she says. “But it’s intended to serve any kid who is grieving.” 

• What is Minecraft: Education Edition?
• How To Talk About COVID Grief in The Classroom

Hiveclass is the remedy to a generation of students who spend an average of six hours per day looking at a screen. This online platform wants to turn passive screen time into active.

By collating a huge library of video guidance on sports, Hiveclass aims to offer an engaging web-based way to get students moving and keep them more engaged in sports as part of their education.

Covering a variety of sports -- including volleyball, basketball, dance, hockey, soccer, and tennis -- this aims to appeal to a wide range of students. The idea is not only to improve performance for students who already play sports, but also to help draw in those who otherwise use their screen time for more passive watching.

Here's how Hiveclass works so you can decide if it's right for you.

What is Hiveclass?

Hiveclass is a web-based platform that offers guidance to children on how to play sports and improve as they progress through the system. The idea is to engage more kids in active screen time to get them moving rather than only passively watching.

Hiveclass covers a variety of sports that include basketball, dance, field hockey, fitness, lacrosse, self-defense, soccer, tennis, and volleyball. All that is available on the device of the student, so they can use this as and when they please.

Crucially, Hiveclass works with schools and libraries across the U.S. to provide these resources to students for free. Students can access these as and when they need, and teachers can use the tools to help students in and outside of class.

The guidance itself is given by athletes who specialize in their particular sport and through professionally shot videos. These are created with a curriculum-based approach and are available in English or Spanish. All of the content can be accessed via smartphone, tablet, laptop, or PC, anywhere with an internet connection.

How does Hiveclass work?

Hiveclass is available in two formats, one for educators and the other for libraries. This gets educators access to the wealth of digital content to teach with, all of which is set to standards as put forward by Shape America. 

It also allows educators to track student progress to easily monitor performance and goals.

Students are able to access all the content they need via the platform, which can then be monitored by educators. Since the system requires a sign-in, once authorized on a device, a student can get access to that content anywhere via an internet connection. The idea being that any open space can be used by students to help them improve their athletic abilities, physical health, and overall wellness.

Most of the content is presented in follow-along style videos. But there is also a selection of questions and an SEL component to help students engage beyond the physical movement side of the practice. 

What are the best Hiveclass features?

Hiveclass is built to curriculum standards as designed by a team of top physical educators, aligning it with the national standards set forth by Shape America. 

Since all that is self-guided, it can allow students to progress without even being in class, or being with an educator in person. This is ideal for engaging students less comfortable in groups but also to help already engaged students to progress further on their own time.

The platform is built to be inclusive with content developed specifically for all students with accessibility features throughout the content. It is possible for kids and educators to search using filters that provide results that are tailored specifically to anyone with certain needs. Helpfully, you can also preset profiles, so at the tap of a button only content specific to that student will be displayed. 

A Reading Hive is available that allows libraries working with the platform to showcase relevant books that students might want to borrow to learn more about an area or skill on which they are working.

How much does Hiveclass cost?

Hiveclass offers separate pricing for educators and libraries, with packages tailored specifically to each. These packages are also tailored to the scale and needs of the education institution in question. 

As such all the pricing is on a quote-by-quote basis. You would need to make an inquiry with a representative of Hiveclass, who then will discuss your needs and work out a price.

The licenses of a library, for example, work on an annual basis with payments established on that level of commitment.

Hiveclass best tips and tricks

Use any space
Adapt to the space you have. In a classroom? Use a balloon instead of a ball to teach the basics of volleyball.

Go green
Have students use their local green space to work through part of an exercise and then feedback to the class how it was to go out into that space and exercise.

Reward the work
Set targets, and for students that exceed those, reward them with in class benefits, such as a rest during the tougher training that week for example.

• What is Padlet and How Does it Work?
• Best Digital Tools for Teachers

In January 2022, RAND Corporation surveyed teachers and principals for its 2022 State of the American Teacher and State of the American Principal (SoP) reports. The results were not good: 

• 73% of teachers and 85% of principals reported experiencing frequent job-related stress vs. 35% of the general population of working adults. 
• 28% of teachers and 28% of principals reported symptoms of depression vs. 17% of other working adults. 
• 24% of teachers and 19% of principals said they were not coping well with job-related stress vs. 12% of other working adults. 
• 1 in 3 Hispanic or Latinx teachers experienced symptoms of depression compared with about 1 in 4 non-Hispanic or -Latinx teachers. 

If you’re looking to start some wellness initiatives and or ways to make your teachers, staff, and students try and manage their stress, here are three to consider. 

 Wellbeing Initiatives: A Mindfulness Infusion 

Wellbeing has been a key ingredient at Downers Grove South High School in Illinois for several years: a counselor who specializes in mindfulness practices visits classrooms and holds Mindfulness Monday every week for all 450 teachers and staffers; there’s a mindfulness club for students; and every teacher and staff member has a free subscription to Insight Timer, an app designed to support mindfulness.

“The app offers meditations, journaling, breath work, aspirational quotes, yoga, and pre-recorded courses you can do at your own pace,” says Sara Courington, associate principal for student support services. “We want people to take a break and give their brains a chance to catch up.” 

Each week, the school averages close to 2,000 minutes of app usage. “Making this subscription available lets our staff know we care about them and their mental health. We’re showing them we understand how difficult the last few years have been.”

Creating Digital Wellness Rooms 

Brick-and-mortar wellness rooms are becoming more common in schools, but Indian Prairie School District 204 in Illinois went one step further and established a digital wellness room, The Grizzly Zen Den, at Grainger Middle School. 

“We created the Zen Den during quarantine when remote learning was causing students a lot of stress,” says Andy Fekete, CETL, instructional technology specialist. “Some teachers and social workers decided to build a virtual space where they could send students to take a quick break, play a game, or do a mindfulness activity or breathing exercise.” 

The Den was well-received by students and families, prompting some of the other middle schools to share wellness resources through Google Classroom, such as this Virtual Calming Room. Recently, a second building, Crone Middle School, opened the Crone Zen Den. 

Reevaluating School Through a Wellbeing Lens 

Glenbrook High School District 225 in Illinois has been exploring student success across all domains through the wellbeing lens, which is encouraging a lot of positive changes, says Ryan Bretag, director of instructional innovation. “Belonging, mindfulness, purpose, optimism, vitality, and identity are at the core of our work when it comes to wellbeing, and we’re looking at everything through those six pillars.” 

Each pillar has an academic tie-in. For example, belonging links to supportive relationships, collaboration, and community building; purpose aligns with grit, growth mindset, problem-based learning, and student engagement.

The 25-person physical education department at Glenbrook South focused on belonging and vitality to redesign its entire program. “They wanted a curricular approach that focused on functional fitness, something inclusive that created a community our students would be excited and optimistic about,” says Bretag. 

After a lot of research, they became a CrossFit affiliate and went through Crossfit Level 1 certification. They turned the outdated fitness center—a typical space with barbells, equipment, and metal racks—into a beautiful, open space with equipment that can be moved around every day for a variety of setups. “We have barbells that aren’t designed just for male hands, and the plates are the same color and size so there are no comparisons,” says Bretag.  

Nearly all of the classrooms have been redesigned as well, guided by belonging and optimism (see more here). Recently, 100 students attended an offsite retreat focused on student voice. “It was an opportunity for students to share their ideas, experiences, and beliefs so that we can understand our students, make better connections and continue to improve instruction and curriculum,” says Bretag.

The district views wellbeing as an ongoing journey that starts with giving the adults what they need. Says Bretag: “Do our adults practice helpful mindfulness strategies? If they do, they’ll be the best models and stewards for our students.”

• 4 Ways to Create Virtual Healing Spaces in Education
• 5 Ways Teachers Can Support Student Healing and Restoration

A few years ago Randolph Township Schools in Randolph, New Jersey, decided to make mental health a focus. 

This was long before the  COVID pandemic and the current nationwide emphasis on mental health and social-emotional learning, but even then school leaders noticed the beginnings of the ongoing mental health crises in adolescents. They also realized that traditional public school supports that tended to focus on interventions after a mental health crisis occurred were not robust enough to meet the need. 

“We were experiencing a lot of hospitalizations, students were being placed in partial hospitalization programs or intensive outpatient programs, and the expectation was that they were going to be able to return to a classroom of 20 with just access to a school counselor, and we found that that wasn't enough to meet the needs of our students,” says Walter Curioni, Director of Special Services at Randolph Township Schools. “It worked when you're dealing with a student or small segment of the population, but when you're looking at 40 percent of students who are experiencing severe anxiety, severe depression, you have to have more comprehensive supports in place.” 

The district was able to help those students and their teachers by launching a comprehensive program to support mental health for everyone as well as providing training. Even though there were initial startup expenses, the program has ultimately saved the district significant money because they are no longer paying for as many students to attend schools or programs out of the district, Curioni says. 

A More Proactive Approach 

Many of the students the Randolph Township Schools saw struggling were high-achieving students. “These are students that were in AP classes, they were in honors classes, and they really pushed themselves to the brink,” Curioni says. “Then you add to that increased anxiety or increased depression, and they were missing considerable time. We were seeing school avoidance.” 

Randolph Township Schools partnered with Thrive Alliance Group, an organization dedicated to providing effective mental health programs at schools, and hired several Thrive counselors full-time. “We work closely with Thrive Alliance group to really train our teachers, work with families, and help students then transition back to a traditional public school setting,” Curioni says. “Years ago most of these students would be forced into a private school for students with disabilities or forced into classification to try to have their needs met. So we took a different approach, we took a more proactive approach to meet their needs in a traditional public school.” 

Students who need additional support attend a general education class overseen by a counselor but taught by a general education instructor trained to meet these students’ needs. 

Data on Mental Health 

As part of these efforts, the district has hired three full-time Thrive clinicians, who help guide the district's mental health program in addition to running trainings for teachers and educating parents and students about mental health. 

District leaders also ensured student well-being was one of the metrics evaluated when looking at school data. “We started a school Connections team at each building level,” Curioni says. “We're looking at trends. Every month, we're looking at attendance, we're looking at discipline, and we're looking at any sort of outlier that gives us a glimpse of if a child is in crisis or not. We put all of that data on our dashboard so that our mental health providers are looking at it in real time, which is helped us tremendously.” 

This data could help educators and counselors monitor students who were at risk. “We're tracking them every single day, and we're meeting with them every single day,” Curioni says. “So we've really taken a very aggressive approach in terms of recognizing some of these disorders at an earlier time so that we're treating students before it reaches that acute stage.” 

Cost Savings and a Cultural Shift  

Despite initial startup costs, working with Thrive Alliance Group and devoting more resources to mental health has saved the district in a major way, Curioni says. “Our out-of-district numbers have gone down tremendously. We were at 70 students, we're at 18 students currently. So you're looking at roughly $100,000 a year per student that goes out of district, plus transportation costs. So we're saving millions of dollars.” 

In the past, parents would frequently argue their student needed more support than the district could provide but such an occurrence is rare now. “Word gets in the community that you really value mental health, so parents are then less inclined to ask for out-of-district placements when they know their child can be supported in a public school,” Curioni says. 

These savings have been fueled by the individual programs the district has implemented as well as the overall mindset change that has occurred. 

“Everyone in the building can tell you about the supports, everyone in the building could tell you where you could get those supports, and I would say everyone in the building feels more comfortable because they know now through the work of their colleagues, what is expected and what role they play,” Curioni says. “If you surveyed our counselors, if you surveyed our families, they would tell you a lot about different mental health disorders because of education that they're getting from workshops and trainings. So it's definitely changed the culture of our community.” 

• CDC: More Than 1 in 3 High Schoolers Experiencing Poor Mental Health. What Schools Can Do
• An MD Turned High School Teacher’s Prescription to Improve School Mental Health

At a recent Tech & Learning Regional Leadership Summit, one session led by Amy Bigbee Grosso, PhD focused on teacher and student well-being, which was a new session for the event. It was a much-needed and well-attended opportunity because all the participants agreed that learning cannot happen when there isn’t a safe and engaging classroom environment. 

The participants focused on empathy, student well-being, and creating psychologically safe classroom cultures. We discussed many topics to support student learning and well-being, and made sure to also address our educators’ needs, coming away with many strategies that will support our learning communities, learners, and educators. 

Teachers need to be able to create emotionally safe spaces in their classrooms and be willing to play a critical role in the emotional well-being of their students. Providing strategies for them to do so is critical.

Practices for Supporting Student Well-Being 

Foster a Feeling of Empowerment 

Equipping students with structure, consistency, and choices is crucial for fostering their sense of empowerment and control. Classroom consistency builds a sense of normalcy and safety. Routines such as posted schedules, daily greetings, collaborative problem-solving methods, and focusing on process over product are methods teachers can start with.

Allow the Use of Digital Creative Tools

Teachers can offer a range of digital tools. However, some students prefer open-ended drawing or drawing from prompts. For example, our group discussed anti-coloring books to explore student expression with a comic creator such as Pixton, which provides templates for SEL lesson ideas, or Shape Collage to allow students to design a collage in any shape of their interest.

Incorporate Music

There are many opportunities to stream music into the classroom. Playing music and allowing movement or yoga are effective methods of promoting a sense of calmness in class.

Understanding Student Behaviors

Disruptive student behavior, such as interrupting, calling out, not finishing an assignment, teasing, and saying "no," can be seen as attention-seeking. These behaviors are often misunderstood or lead to the teacher saying, "You are making bad choices." We often take time to try to punish the bad behavior instead of finding methods to correct the behavior and highlight the desired behavior. Focusing on the desired behavior will refocus the students and create a positive focusing climate, and the student will find attention by being positive.

Supporting Teacher Well-Being 

In addition to the need for student well-being, teachers are at genuine risk of burnout. Our group discussed how teacher stress affects students' well-being and achievement. A common theme was that if teachers lack belonging and connection, their students will feel the same way, impacting their excitement for learning and development.

Our group discussed ideas for school and district leaders to support teacher well-being. This discussion empowered our group, and these strategies can also support you.

Value Your Staff

A major theme was asking leaders to focus on kindness and gratitude. An act of thanks or kindness produces positive sentiments, stronger professional connections, and improved well-being. So utilize simple ways to build appreciation and compassion into staff's day. Kindness and gratitude are contagious, so imagine the benefit to your classroom!

Provide Time To Talk To Peers

Teaching can be an emotionally demanding job with daily challenges. Create structures that allow teachers time to discuss issues and focus on solutions rather than constantly venting about the problems. While a venting session may make educators feel better in the short term, it doesn't solve problems that cause stress. In turn, teachers feel stuck. Instead, allow teachers to spend time with a supportive colleague and implement a problem-solving protocol. The more solutions a school creates, the better the environment will be for teachers.

Encouraging Collaboration

We talked about how teachers feel alone and need time to collaborate. The participants shared that teachers in their schools who employed collaborative practices were more innovative in the classroom and less stressed about the job. In many cases, teachers may have solved problems with access to the same resources in the same context as others who haven't been able to solve them. So why not share? Sharing knowledge and ideas allows teachers to feel supported and reach the desired results much more quickly. Additionally, collaborating greatly benefits the teacher who shares the knowledge and ideas.

Manage Administrative Communication

How often have education leaders sent an email the second something pops into their head, regardless of the time of day? We discussed that this practice might be tempting in order to "communicate" but could place unnecessary pressure on staff who feel they shouldn’t be available via email 24/7. Our groups suggested that leaders should send emails at reasonable times and ban sending emails on weekends. It was recommended for teachers to delete or, better yet, never add work email to their personal phones. When they leave the school, it is time to get refreshed and enjoy time away from the role. Not be tied in 24/7.

Create a Space Where Teachers Feel Welcome

Teaching can feel like a lonely and overwhelming job sometimes, and staff must have the time and space to relax during the day. One suggestion was to create a staff room that is open to all with a relaxed atmosphere. Also, providing healthy snacks, treats, drinks, and music can deliver staff the opportunity to take a real break from the classroom.

It is essential to continually monitor and support staff well-being throughout the year. It’s no mystery that teachers typically have overwhelming workloads, high-stress levels, and a significant risk of exhaustion. Conversations such as these during professional development events and implementing strategies are critical to support our educators and leaders.

• Restoring Hope and Optimism in Schools
• How to Show Appreciation for Teachers

There is a delightful YouTube channel called Pocketful of Primary. The host documented her seven-year teaching experience, offering great ideas for classroom organization and teaching strategies. She recently posted a video explaining why she left teaching. She was overextended! She had no hope of being able to manage both teaching and the social media presence she had grown, and one became more fulfilling than the other. She relied on her optimism in helping other teachers guide her decision. 

Hope and optimism are the nets between humans and the abyss. But what exactly is hope, and how does one find it? According to some theorists, hope can live in the heart and mind. Hope theory suggests a perceived capability to achieve desired goals by motivating through agency thinking. We find this with people experiencing significant illnesses or trauma in particular. 

Optimism is formed through close relationships, business life, and a lifestyle that comprises a happy life. It acts as a middleman between what is happening in a person’s environment and how that person assesses what is happening. Without hope and optimism, humans are lost. 

Sometimes the noise of negativity impacts optimism and decreases hope. For instance, it must be challenging for a principal to hear about how horrible public schools are when he/she is in the process of leading one. But we seldom think about the words we use or the timing of our expression. In today’s minute-by-minute analysis of life through social media, getting a story or message out is more important than the accuracy of the message.

Restoring Hope and Optimism in Schools: First Steps 

So what can we do to restore hope and optimism in our public schools? First, to borrow an adage, if you can’t say something nice, don’t say it at all. Schools are struggling to find hope and, as we see from our host of Pocketful of Primary, they are struggling to keep their teachers. Not because teachers necessarily want to leave but because more profitable and less stressful opportunities are presented to them. Leaders are beaten up with their daily responsibilities and have little time to offer positive promotions for their schools. But the community could step up and take on that role! We are all in this together. The cornerstones of a community are schools, businesses, faith organizations, and government. Every thriving community has each of these pillars, and they are beating on all cylinders and in sync. By supporting one another, these pillars help create stability within the community. 

If we don’t have optimism for our schools, our communities will fail in time. Without optimism, we lose sight of hope and begin to wallow. 

Creating a Positive Buzz for Schools 

Growing optimism for public schooling is a community effort. Get your community involved in supporting schools by following these few tips: 

• Share news of celebrations from the school to faith organizations in the area to share with their fellowship. Help people who don’t send their children to public schools see the beautiful things happening inside. 
• Communicate with governing agencies and elected officials about the current events at the school. Invite elected officials to see how awesome your kids are every day. 
• Put signs up all around campus – not just at the front entrance – celebrating the school and the students’ successes. 
• Display student art OUTSIDE and inside community centers along with local grocery stores and other establishments. Help the community experience what the parents experience when hearing great news about their kids. 
• Showcase your teachers! Not only with a teacher of the month celebrations, but get a committee together that includes local establishments willing to celebrate teachers in the community. 
• Hold a parade! Let’s celebrate the fantastic work kids, and their teachers and leaders, do in a given school year and host an end-of-the-school-year parade in your community! 
• Check into a 50+ community and ask them to send teachers well wishes each week. Ask them to send texts, emails, or cards to encourage our teachers! 
• Think about perks that don’t cost much money (such as letting teachers leave 30 minutes early on Fridays – you know they’ve worked their time!) 
• Ask faith organizations and local businesses to adopt a classroom to offer encouraging notes, snacks on Friday, pizza parties, etc. 
• Always talk positively about public school! We can’t afford to talk it down anymore. 

We could have a pebble in the pond effect with public schools with these few actions. Don’t believe it? Let’s put it to the test! Create a buzz of optimism about public schools in your community and build the hope every family, teacher, and school administrator deserves. Let hope for public schools live in your heart!  

• Bringing Back Joy to the Classroom
• How to Show Appreciation for Teachers

Quiet quitting is a viral term with a meaning that’s open to interpretation. Some say it entails mentally checking out from your job and doing just the bare minimum to avoid getting fired. Others claim that despite the negative-sounding connotations, quiet quitting actually refers to establishing healthy work-life boundaries and not working outside the hours you are paid for or engaging in activities beyond the scope of your position. 

No matter how you define it, quiet quitting has important implications for educators. 

“It is detrimental for us to have quiet quitters who are disengaged from the work, but it's also very important that we're helping to build some work-life balance to retain the amazing teachers that we have,” says Dr. Andi Fourlis, Superintendent of Mesa Public Schools, the largest district in Arizona. “Teachers are known for not having a very good work-life balance, they become dedicated to their children. And so they work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 12 months a year.” 

Fourlis and three other superintendents discuss how they guard against burnout in their districts by encouraging positive work-life balance. 

Quiet Quitting and Culture of Overwork In Education  

About a decade ago, Dr. Brian Creasman was the opposite of a quiet quitter. In fact, he succumbed to the dark side of overwork as a principal. “I was working 80 hours a week,” says Creasman, now superintendent at Fleming County Schools in Kentucky. “I would get to school at 4:30 a.m., I would leave at 10 p.m.” 

The intensity and stress of this work schedule twice landed him in the hospital with an irregular heartbeat. Creasman, 2020’s Kentucky Superintendent of Year, realized that not only did he have to change but that the culture of education needed an update as well. “We are trained from teacher to principal to superintendent to focus on the health and wellbeing of students – ours comes last,” he says. 

Creasman is now dedicated to updating that mindset and improving the lifestyles of educators. His book addressing that, Prioritizing Health and Well-Being: Self-Care As a Leadership Strategy for School Leaders, will be published in October.

A healthy work-life balance might look different in different schools and districts but a key is creating a culture that recognizes that educators are not truly helping their kids when they don’t take care of themselves. “We can't do our work if folks aren’t okay. We can't be our best if people aren’t well,” says Dr. Curtis Cain, superintendent of the Rockwood School District in Missouri and AASA’s 2022 superintendent of the year. 

Promoting Work-Life Balance in Your District 

Dr. Andrew R. Dolloff, superintendent of the Yarmouth School Department in Maine, is the author of The Trust Imperative: Practical Approaches to Effective School Leadership. His advice for promoting a culture of work-life balance: “You need to focus on what's important, and a lot of the minutia may not be.” 

With this thinking in mind, Dolloff frequently lets staff at his district’s central office leave an hour early on Fridays in the summer and cuts meetings short if the agenda items have all been met. This naturally helps guard against the wrong type of quiet quitting. 

“You get so much more mileage with your staff when you say to them, ‘Hey, the rest of the afternoon is yours,’” he says. “In education, we don't have a lot of additional financial resources to provide people with other incentives, and studies show that those aren't all that effective anyway. What we can do is try to give people back a little bit of their time.” 

Providing a diverse network of support is also key. In Fourlis’ district, they are creating teacher teams so educators can help one another and are not isolated. Each school has a counselor who is available to teachers in addition to students. The district is also providing instructional coaches who Fourlis says can help teachers realize it’s okay to work less. “Many, many of our teachers, are working around the clock, and they need to be given permission that ‘What you're doing is enough, it is okay to take good care of yourself.’” 

Addressing Negative Quiet Quitting  

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the education field, like others, has those who have checked out from their work. Individuals who appear to be truly quiet quitting in the negative sense of the term should be met with to discuss the issue, school leaders say. 

Dolloff holds these meetings in private and tries to approach each one with curiosity and compassion. For instance, one employee of his was suddenly constantly late. Rather than tell her if she wasn’t on time her pay would be docked or it would go on her evaluation, Dolloff met with her and said, “Hey, we noticed that you're not getting here on time. It's been pretty consistent. This is a new pattern for you. What's going on?” 

As it turned out her partner was having significant health challenges and she was struggling to handle everything. “By showing empathy, we were able to help her figure that out, and yet also get her to work on time,” Dolloff says.

Cain agrees that the best way to deal with a negative form of quiet quitting is with compassion. 

“If you see someone who is struggling, or someone operating in a manner that is atypical for how they typically operate, I think it's important that we have a conversation. What can we do? What support can we provide? How can we be of assistance?” he says. 

Promoting wellness in schools needs to be a teamwide effort. “It's not just about the administrator supporting the teacher,” Cain says. “It’s the teacher supporting the instructional assistant in the classroom. It’s supporting a fellow teacher. It's the teacher checking on the administrator.” 

He adds that all educators need to look at colleagues and ask, “What can we do to help make sure that you're okay so that you are then okay to be working with kids?” 

• Teacher Burnout: Recognizing and Reducing It
• SEL For Educators: 4 Best Practices

Sometimes, there are misconceptions about what a multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS) is. 

“MTSS as a way of thinking, it's not a program or an intervention,” says Judy Elliott, Ph.D, an education consultant at EduLead, LLC.

Elliott, the former Chief Academic Officer of the Los Angeles Unified School District, and Melissa DeWalk, director of Student Services at Odyssey Online Learning, discussed ways MTSS can be used to support educators and students during a recent Tech & Learning webinar hosted by Dr. Kecia Ray and sponsored by DreamBox Learning. 

Watch the full webinar on-demand here. 

Key Takeaways  

Leadership Style Matters

Elliott shared research that looked at 747 interventions in schools that provide strong support for MTSS. “What they found was that having an effective principal, using collective leadership in a school, had a greater impact than 70 percent of those 747 interventions,” Elliott said. She noted that leadership explains about 25 percent of the variation in student learning across schools and that classroom factors account for more than 33 percent of the variation seen in student learning between schools. 

Intervene Early 

A good MTSS framework can allow educators to identify students who are struggling and then act before these struggles get out of control. “We shouldn't be waiting for a student to fail before we're stepping in,” DeWalk said. She noted that her virtual school has recently shifted its thinking around this and has had positive results with its renewed emphasis on intervening before a student has had significant struggles. 

Leadership Buy-in Is Essential 

Given the challenges coming out of COVID, DeWalk said education leaders need to embrace innovation in MTSS. “Let's think outside-the-box about MTSS, and let's not get so stuck in those tier one, tier two, tier three boxes and the things that we were doing prior to COVID,” she said. 

Modeling MTSS 

“When we do this work in brick-and-mortar schools there needs to be a district leadership team that's always meeting together and clearing the branches off the pathway so that the teachers and leaders can run freely down the path,” Elliott said. “Communication and collaboration mean that the leadership at the district level is really modeling communication and collaboration. The vision is really clear. The expectations are there from the boardroom to the classroom.” 

Establishing an MTSS Culture 

Creating the type of clear pathway for MTSS that Elliott referred to requires agreed-upon definitions of terms and expectations. “I always advocate that the first thing school districts need to do is create a board policy around multi-tiered systems of support and what that looks like. What's the definition? What are the non-negotiables? What does that look like for your district?” She added school leadership needs to build off of district leadership and this will ultimately lead to student success. “Student achievement is higher in schools where collective leadership is used and there are lots of interactions going on amongst and between teachers.” 

Parents Also Play a Key Role in This Process 

Educating parents on how to help navigate their students through a district's MTSS is also critical. “What I've found is that most parents really aren't equipped to fully advocate for their kids when it comes to academics,” DeWalk said. “So part of the way that we have really tried to reach in at our school is by educating the parent as much as we're educating the student about why we feel the extra resources and interventions that we're putting in place are important.” Efforts in this regard include having a student engagement specialist work with parents to coach them through the process of supporting their children's academic careers. 

Evaluate MTSS Programs 

Assessing your MTSS is, fittingly, all about collaboration. DeWalk said she liked to regularly check in with the people who are working with students to get a sense of what is working well and what can be improved. “I think it's really easy for us to make policy and procedure about what we're going to do,” she said. However, those policies and procedures might not always work as well in reality as they seem to on paper. “Regularly check in with your team to make sure that the policies and the procedures that are in place are actually supporting them and that it's not just an additional thing that they have to do in order to go through the MTSS process with a student,” she advised. 

Tech & Learning Webinars

For many students, math and anxiety go hand-in-hand. According to a new study, this anxiety can hinder how students study math. 

In the study, researchers found that math-anxious students – even if they are good students overall – spend more time passively studying the textbook than engaging with real-world math problems, which is a better use of study time. 

This study confirms what Jeanette Nicholas, a math teacher at Belle Fourche Middle School in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, and many others have long known about the negative role anxiety can play in regard to math. With her students, Nicholas uses a variety of strategies to help students overcome their anxiety and form a more positive relationship with math. 

Inspire Students with Math Anxiety By Showing Them Success 

“They need to see success,” Nicholas says of students who are anxious about math. Nicholas teaches a supplementary math class that offers additional support. To build student confidence, she’ll often have them start off by solving types of problems for which they’ve already demonstrated proficiency. “So if the teacher’s starting a unit on fractions, and I know that she's going to be teaching some concepts like adding and subtracting unlike denominators, we'll go back and review adding fractions with like denominators.” Students then move on to tackle more difficult problems.

Technology can help with this process. Nicholas’ uses Get More Math, math practice software that lets students track their progress through a color-coded system. For example, when students revisit an old skill, the teaching tool reminds them of their previous mastery. As students learn new skills, they can see their progress, further boosting confidence and dispelling anxiety. “Even if they think, ‘I'm not very good at this,’ they suddenly realize, ‘Hey, I'm getting some points off it,’” Nicholas says. 

Correct Mistakes and Encourage Students Not to Label Themselves as Bad at Math 

In middle school, many students start to form lifelong associations with certain topics and can grow to hate math. “Usually by seventh grade, they know they're not good at math,” Nicholas says. However, encouraging them to try anyhow and providing them with those initial opportunities for simple success can encourage students to change their perceptions of their abilities. 

In addition, it’s important to give real-time feedback and chances to address mistakes. Nicholas favors math learning tools that have students correct the problems they got wrong. She also makes sure to offer extra help to struggling students and encourages peer mentoring as well. “It’s cool to see the students who know how to do that problem, they can help each other,” she says. 

Ultimately, for Nicholas, combatting math anxiety is all about building student self-confidence. With enough practice, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

• How to Help Students Develop Lifelong Math Skills
• How to Discuss Eco-Anxiety with Students

Watch any toddler trying to recite the alphabet or count their numbers while jumping up and down, and you cannot help but notice the pure joy in learning letters and numbers. 

Every teacher aspires to see the ecstasy of acquiring new knowledge in their students, and now more than ever, teachers should strive to make the classroom a place of happiness. The emphasis on social and emotional learning through the curriculum is undoubtedly focused on raising awareness to have a more cohesive and engaged classroom. Still, it takes more than SEL to have joy in a classroom. 

As recently as 2018, psychologists were still debating the concept of joy, and the body of work related to joy in psychology remains relatively small. Still, a group of psychologists, philosophers, and theologians are working to connect the research on joy into a more unified collection of work as part of an interdisciplinary project called the Theology of Joy and the Good Life at Yale University. 

Harvard Graduate School of Education is also pondering the topic of joy in teaching. In the recent article, the author quotes Decoteau Irby, who describes an erosion of joy in our schools and notes that although learning isn’t always a joyous experience, the confidence gained by academic struggle does produce joy. Gholdy Muhammad’s equity framework, as shared through her book Cultivating Genius, includes joy as one of its five pillars.  

Instilling Joy in Learning

How can a teacher move from SEL to JOY? Consider the definition of joy, and work backward from there. Keeping in mind that within the definition, we learn joy takes two forms: passive and active. Passive is connected to feeling contentment, and active involves a desire to share feelings with others and involves engagement. With this in mind, we think of ways to engage the learner in more positive, less overwhelming, and intrinsic ways. 

To get started infusing more joy in your classroom, consider these ideas:

• Offer students an opportunity to experience some form of success throughout the day because small achievements serve as catalysts toward meeting greater learning goals. 
• Incorporate play! All grade levels and all subject areas can incorporate elements of play. 
• Offer choices. A student who has options can be inquisitive and creative. 
• Be patient and allow student’s enough time to enjoy the activity. This is similar to wait time in questioning but feels much longer when trying to apply to practice. Yet, it can make a difference in your student's level of engagement. 
• Allow students to choose activities that align with their interests and abilities. 
• Encourage collaboration and creativity. 
• Be flexible. The learning environment greatly influences whether a student wants to learn or shut down. Try to create a flexible classroom that accommodates a variety of interests and skill levels. 

Students naturally want to learn (remember our toddler), and allowing the opportunity for them to have positive experiences through learning ultimately leads to joy. Our schools are full of emotions, and joy should be the leading one. 

• Innovation in Education
• What Is SEL?

Teacher burnout continues to plague education. A recent survey from the RAND Corporation found that burnout is impacting both classroom teachers and school principals, all of whom report experiencing frequent job-related stress at about twice the rate of the general population. 

The survey, conducted in January 2022, found that well-being was particularly poor among Hispanic/Latinx teachers, mid-career teachers, and female teachers and principals.

Staffing was a top source of stress for principals, and teachers and principals of color were more likely to experience racial discrimination. In addition, nearly two-thirds of the teachers surveyed reported taking on extra responsibilities during the pandemic. 

Previous research has found similar results. According to a National Education Association survey, 55 percent of teachers are thinking about leaving their profession earlier than they planned, with nearly 600,000 teachers already having left the profession between 2020 and 2021.

As concerning as these numbers are, there are reasons for optimism. Pandemic disruptions to education have decreased somewhat in recent months and the new school year promises more of a return to normalcy. Educators can also learn to recognize and overcome teacher burnout, which is critical to successfully remaining in the classroom and working with students.

Symptoms of Teacher Burnout  

Teacher burnout, and burnout in general, has three main symptoms, says Laurie Santos, a cognitive scientist and Yale University professor who teaches the popular Yale “happiness” course.  

1. Emotional Exhaustion
Even after a really great night of sleep, you just feel unrested and exhausted the next morning, Santos says. 

2. Depersonalization
“It's like an extreme cynicism of other people. You just read other people's intentions as negative,” Santos says. “You get really frustrated even when people are asking you for things that are part of your job description.” 

3. Lack of personal efficacy
“You feel like you're not doing your job at work,” Santos says. “You feel like you’re not making a difference, and you feel frustrated in terms of how effective you are.”

Santos advises teachers to look for these signs of burnout in themselves and to consider taking The Maslach Burnout Inventory, a free survey that assesses occupational burnout. 

Recently, Santos noticed the signs of all three areas of burnout in herself and will take a leave absence to address it. “My first sign was starting to get frustrated with students for asking the normal kinds of things that students ask in my role as a head of college,” Santos says. “I was also really feeling ineffective in my role. The COVID-19 pandemic had changed my job completely.” 

Santos also felt emotionally exhausted, and knowing the science behind burnout, she decided to take action. 

Reducing Teacher Burnout  

Learn to Say No 

Kyle S. Whipple, a professor of Education for Equity and Justice at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, warns the future teachers he works with to establish boundaries. “You're going into education, I promise you that every hour of every day, you could work if that was your goal,” Whipple tells the students during the first week of classes. “You will always have a basketball game you could attend. You will always have something you could be grading, and you will always have some lesson plan that could be better than it was.” 

It’s important for young teachers to not let their passion for education overextend them. “A lot of us do receive a ton of energy and excitement and thrill from our jobs,” Whipple says. “I love coming to work. It's very fun for me, I love engaging with my students. And that's awesome. But you know what else I love? Being in a kayak.” 

Whipple sets boundaries on digital communications. His phone turns off at 10 p.m. each night and does not go back on until the next morning, and he doesn’t accept requests that will take up too much time. “Part of my spiel with my students is if they don't learn right now as undergraduates to start saying, ‘Nope, I'm not going to do that thing because I want to do this other thing instead,’ they'll really struggle their first two or three years of teaching because, my gosh, do we overwork our early teachers.”  

Listen to Symptoms of Burnout and Make Your Identity About More Than Your Profession

Many times when people feel symptoms of burnout they try to suppress their emotions. This is a mistake. “We ignore our negative emotions at our peril,” Santos says. “They're really signs that we need to make some changes in life. Think of putting your hand on a hot stove and experiencing pain. If you just ignore that pain and keep your hand there, you get an awful burn. And I think our negative emotions work the same way. If you're noticing some of the signs of burnout in yourself, you need to take some action. You need to make some changes at work.” 

In addition to finding ways to rest at work, there is evidence that shifting your identity to something other than your profession can help reduce your risk of burnout, Santos says. 

“Burnout really happens when people are putting their all and putting their entire identity into the job that they do,” Santos says. “I think that this is something you see a lot in teachers. And so finding other ways to enact your identity -- putting time and effort into being a good friend, into hobbies, and into being a good parent – these are ways that you can shift your identity away from work. And that means that when things are tough at work, there's something else that you can focus your energy on and get enjoyment out of.” 

• Explaining SEL to Parents
• SEL For Educators: 4 Best Practices

Unfortunately, most students and their families, and even teachers, have experienced some type of trauma. These emotional adverse experiences range in frequency and intensity for each individual and can include: being the subject of neglect and abuse (physical, emotional, sexual); witnessing and/or being part of violent acts; enduring household dysfuction (parents who are incarcerated, abusing alcolol and drugs, and/or going through divorce or seperation); or experiencing unstable living conditions. 

While trauma-informed care is part of many therapeutic plans of school counselors, those sessions are not as frequent, whereas teachers see students on a daily basis. Given this, it is often necessary to embrace and employ trauma-informed approaches to teaching. 

Here are a few trauma-informed teaching practices that any teacher can add to their pedagogical toolbox.

Educate Yourself On Trauma 

We know as teachers that in order to provide students the most effective educational experience, we must be knowledgeable and build our capacity to facilitate learning. The same is true for non-academic components of our instruction. Utilizing a trauma-informed approach to teaching starts with learning what trauma is, how it impacts students and their families (especially during school time), and finding ways to address it during school. 

The U.S. Administration for Children & Families trauma-related resources for schools is a good place to start and includes a trauma toolkit for educators. 

Acknowledge How Bias Influences Supporting Students’ Journeys Through Trauma 

As humans, we all bring bias, perspectives, and ways of thinking to the classroom, even if it is intentionally. As poverty, racism, stereotypes, and the delivery of microaggressions are all factors that impact trauma, we must remain cognizant of how our own biases may impede on us supporting students who experience trauma and cause us to lower expectations for them, which is a dichotomous approach to trauma-informed teaching. 

Instead, we should believe that all students have the capacity to be resilient and we should nurture their grit. This includes using language in your teaching that motivates students, encourages a growth-mindset that draws on their strengths and assets, and addresses “mistakes” as learning opportunities. 

Embed Social-Emotional Learning Into Daily Lessons 

Students need time to process, make sense of their lived experiences, and engage in activities that can help them move forward and persevere. Provide learning activities in which students strengthen their executive-functioning skills. In addition, include opportunities for reflection. This can be done in a journal or even voice-recorded reflections so students can talk through their feelings. Allow opportunities for students to express themselves creatively too. Include freehand drawing time or on blank online canvases such as a Padlet or Google Jamboard. 

Create Safe and Affirming Spaces 

Some schools, such as St. Malachy School in Philadelphia where I serve on the advisory board, has a “Peace Room.” The Peace Room is a safe space within the school where students can focus on self-regulation, debrief, and calm themselves. It is also located adjacent to both a school counselor and behavior specialist. 

If your school does not have the resources to create a separate Peace Room, you can use an area in your classroom. Virtual healing spaces can also be used in online learning environments. 

Incorporate Mindfulness Activities 

Before lessons, allow time for students to center themselves and de-stress. While there is no way to know exactly what they are thinking about without them sharing in its entirety, we know that when trauma is experienced, it can be mentally consuming and distract students from focusing on the task at hand. By incorporating mindfulness activities before lessons, students have the opportunity to be present and not overwhelmed with forces outside of their immediate control. 

Draw on Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems Theory 

Remember, trauma is not something that happens in isolation. Various parts of students’ environment, community, and relationships are intertwined. As you approach teaching through a trauma-informed lens, consider the student holistically and include aspects of “the whole child” in learning activities. This means addressing learning by working toward developing not only students’ academic needs, but also their social, cognitive, emotional, and physical needs. 

These are just a few trauma-informed approaches to teaching that you can start using to support your students. Try some of these or others that you find. The goal is to cultivate learning environments for students where positive outcomes for the students’ holistic development can be achieved, despite past adverse traumatic experiences. Students are resilient and having their teachers on board with trauma-informed approaches to teaching can only be a strength. 

• 5 Mindfulness Apps and Websites for K-12
• 4 Ways to Create Virtual Healing Spaces in Education

When it comes to diagnosing and treating the mental health crisis facing students and educators, Dr. Christopher Jenson might be uniquely qualified. 

Jenson began his career as an ER physician before switching careers and becoming a high school science teacher for nine years at Blue Valley School District in Kansas. His unusual career trajectory from medicine to teaching was prompted by his passion for helping young people and his own family’s situation. His wife is also a medical doctor, and when they had children, they thought it would be better if one of them had a more predictable schedule. 

“When I made that segue, I was like, ‘Okay, I'll go teach. I'll do this for a while, and fuel that passion, and provide some stability for our family, and then I'll figure out some consulting job after that,’” he says. “Well, that plan turned into nine years of being a high school educator.” 

Then when the pandemic hit in 2020, he realized there was a need to combine his two careers. 

“COVID is when I discovered my niche,” he says. “It became glaringly obvious that schools and school districts needed help navigating health issues.” 

Jenson’s book, After The Mask: A Guide to Caring for Students and Schools, was published last year and provides advice for school leaders on navigating the post-COVID era. Jenson also runs Diagnosing Education LLC, a school consulting service. 

Much of Jenson’s work focuses on helping educators and school leaders overcome the dual student and teacher mental health crisis. 

Understanding The Crisis 

The trends in adolescent mental health were extremely troubling even before the pandemic. 

“CDC data said between 2009 and 2019 that depression had gone up 40 percent in adolescents,” Jenson says. “Then the thing that really struck me, that hit me to the core, was according to the [CDC’s] Youth Risk Behavior Survey in 2019, roughly 18 percent of kids that were in high school had contemplated to some extent, the idea of suicide.” 

That meant nearly 1 in 5 adolescents had contemplated suicide before the pandemic added fuel to the fire. 

Teachers are also struggling. “Staff are going through high attrition rates and exhaustion,” Jenson says. He adds that potential solutions to the mental health crisis in schools need to benefit both students and teachers. 

Improving Teacher and Student Well-Being 

“Here's a difficult thing to swallow,” Jenson says. “Schools are not built inherently to support preventive mental health. They have a handful of counselors, they're lucky if they have a social worker. They're really blessed if they have a dedicated school psychologist, not every district does, but they try to provide support to children in whatever capacity their budget allows.” 

To supplement the work of mental health professionals in schools, Jenson believes teachers can help ease mental health struggles of their students in a way that simultaneously makes their job easier. He believes this is possible by having teachers cut back on content while still meeting their state’s requirements, and implement emotional- and relationship-building exercises into each classroom. 

“Although teachers are extremely taxed and exhausted, I think they would love the idea of feeling justified to get back to their favorite part of teaching, and that is connecting with kids,” he says. “Three specific things that teachers are qualified for: self-esteem, self-efficacy, and the power of relationships. While I think third-party curriculum is great, I don't think anyone can outperform a teacher.”

Putting This Into Practice

Jenson was able to build lessons helping students develop these skills by reframing his approach to content on certain days. “The state of Kansas, or any state, doesn't tell me how long I have to teach, they just say, ‘At some point cover the lung,’” he says. “So I started trimming my lessons and saying, ‘Okay, instead of spending three days on the anatomy of the lung, I'm going to do two days. And tomorrow we're going to talk about the ethics of lung transplants.’ I'm going to do it in a school-safe environment appropriate for the kids and the age that I'm dealing with.” 

Together with his students, Jenson delved into the process of a lung transplant, asking questions such as, “Why do people need lung transplants in the first place?” “How do they pick who's going to get one and who's not?” “What's wrong with that process?” “What are some shortcomings in it?” “How would you design it to be better?” Jenson says these questions prompted interest and passion from students. “All of a sudden, yeah we're doing science, but what we're really teaching is empathy, problem-solving, efficacy.” 

This type of discussion day can also serve as something of a break for teachers, Jenson says, because they don’t have to conduct lesson plans and it doesn’t have to generate homework.  

Jenson says teachers can feel confident cutting back on their traditional content just a bit because students have access through technology to everything they might need to know about a topic, and it’s more important that they learn critical thinking and emotional skills than memorize more material. 

Using Tech and Learning From Healthcare 

The healthcare field also offers lessons in efficiency for the world of education, Jenson says. For example, many teachers feel guilty when they have to take time off because arranging coverage is difficult. Jenson proposes creating an on-call system, modeled on hospitals. In this system, a teacher might be on-call for colleagues twice a semester but at other times can take time off without guilt because they know a fellow teacher will be on-call to easily step in and cover for them. 

“There's the art of triage and workflow,” Jenson says. “We do this for classroom needs, we call it classroom management. We can do it for ourselves, right? There is learning how to know the difference between caring and energy. I care about a lot of things, but I'm only going to devote my energy toward things where I can make an impact.” 

In addition, Jenson advises using technology as a method of saving teachers’ time. For his classes, Jenson created detailed supporting materials available online for teachers and parents for each of his lessons. Then he would direct individual students to the resources they needed in particular 

“There's an approach to treating chest pain in a hospital,” he says. “You kind of follow an algorithm. Now, every patient is different. So you'll start down that algorithm, and then you individualize their care. The point is there is still an algorithm, and technology allows you to kind of create an algorithm for predictable needs in a classroom setting so that you reduce your workflow. And then you have a conversation with a kid and you individualize it, but until you get to that point, you've saved yourself a lot of time.” 

• CDC: More Than 1 in 3 High Schoolers Experiencing Poor Mental Health. What Schools Can Do
• Tech & Learning SEL Stories 

To become a school counselor in most states one must obtain an accredited master’s degree in school counseling, says Jill Cook, executive director of the American School Counselor Association. 

Getting this master’s isn’t easy, however, once entering the job market, school counselors are in demand. Cook shares insights into what the job is like. 

Who Becomes a School Counselor?  

In the past, most school counselors were teachers first because many states used to require teaching experience or a bachelor’s degree in education, says Cook, who was a music teacher before making the jump to counseling. 

Now, most of those requirements have gone by the wayside, opening up school counseling to those with many different career and educational backgrounds. “I know people in the profession today who were police officers, some business people, somebody who was a flight attendant, somebody who worked for the Campbell Soup Company,” Cook says. “We have several people who worked on the juvenile justice end, and they wanted to work on the other end of that line with kiddos.” 

Cook says school counseling programs are looking for applicants from diverse backgrounds who are enthusiastic about the work of school counseling. “They want to see people who have a passion for working with young people and in a K-12 setting,” she says.

What Do School Counselors Do?  

The role of a school counselor is not to be confused with the role of a guidance counselor, which some older adults may remember from their time in school. “It's not a reactive profession where maybe you're just helping students with the college application process or just working with disciplinary issues,” Cook says. “Today's school counselors work with all students in a school.” 

This work takes place in a variety of ways. “One is through classroom instruction,” Cook says. “They do small-group work based on student needs.” 

School counselors do short-term individual counseling, however, there are some misconceptions about this aspect of the job. “School counselors do not do therapy, do not prescribe medication, don't diagnose,” Cook says. “But they might do solution-focused, brief counseling. They work with the classroom teachers, they work with families, they work with all the school staff.” 

Data Plays An Important Role  

In addition to holding group and one-on-one sessions, school counselors are increasingly involved in looking at various metrics of wellness and education within a school or district. 

“Today's school counselors analyze school and student data to identify gaps,” Cook says. These might be gaps in enrollment, resources, or opportunities. When counselors identify these gaps, they set goals and develop programs to help overcome them. 

“We're impacting student outcomes,” Cook says. “It's not just random work. It's really specific based on student needs.”

School Counselors Are In Demand  

The mental health challenges of the pandemic have led to increased demand for school counselors. “I've been with this association for two decades, and we've never had a school counselor shortage before,” Cook says. “We are now starting to see that for the same reasons we're seeing it in education as a whole: burnout, exhaustion, people reaching retirement age.” 

Some states have implemented programs to incentivize school counselor training and overcome financial and time-commitment barriers to entering the profession. In Colorado, for example, there is a program to provide those pursuing school counseling master’s degrees with paid internships, Cook says. 

How to Decide on a School Counselor Program?  

Those interested in becoming school counselors should look at accredited master’s programs. They also may consider the state they want to work in and learn what the school counseling requirements for that state are and any states in which they might one day want to work. While Cook says most states offer reciprocity with school counseling licenses, some states have additional requirements. 

No matter where you go to school, it’s important that you enjoy working with students in an educational setting. “It’s all about making connections and you do get to see students holistically, but ultimately, also in more specific intimate work, depending on student needs,” Cook says. “Good school counselors in a good school counseling program really are at the heart of the school.” 

• How to Address School Shootings with Your Class
• College Counseling is Finding Success Online

As Superintendent of Ypsilanti Community Schools in Michigan, Alena Zachery-Ross led her team to provide exemplary services to students, staff, and community over the last two years. They trained all administrators on the Trauma Resilient Schools through Starr Commonwealth and Elena Agular's work on Onward, hosted monthly events for all staff and quarterly events for families including town hall meetings with mental health professionals, and organized Boots on the Ground activities in their communities. 

In addition, the district also created a Resiliency Center that was a one-stop-shop resource for students and families. They also offered food and learning labs right in students' communities to allow them to feel physical and mental safety. 

For these efforts and others, Zachery-Ross was recognized with an Innovative Leader Award for Best Example of Teacher & Student Well-Being during Tech & Learning’s recent Northeast Regional Leadership Summit.

However, creating these well-being programs is only the beginning. Long-term support and success requires ongoing effort and commitment to certain best practices.

Nominate someone for the Tech & Learning Innovative Leader Award here

Encourage Ownership

“One of my mottos is, ‘People support what they help create,’” says Zachery-Ross, adding that by doing so, they’re more likely to be enthusiastic and engaged about the project. 

For example, the Sunshine Committee, which spreads positivity throughout the district (“cheers for peers”) and consists of staff from various departments, creates monthly opportunities for sharing and learning, both professionally and personally. They’ve organized online cooking classes led by a chef, orchestrated jazz concerts, held dance parties, and shared bitmoji classroom-building tips. 

“We want them to lead from where they stand, and they’ve had that opportunity,” says Zachery-Ross. “They didn't have to have a role of principal or instructional coach, but each one of them could bring that knowledge through their professional development. They could be the expert, and we give those opportunities for informal and formal leadership.”

Support Teacher Voice and Student Choice 

Everyone–educators, students, and families–is fatigued right now, says Zachery-Ross, so creating opportunities for teachers to express their voice has been a priority to boost enthusiasm for learning. 

“Teachers and students are burned out, yet when we connect the learning to real-life project-based programs, when we connect the teaching to something the educator is passionate about, instead of feeling drained that person lights up,” she says. “They want to tell people about it. They want to engage our students, and it rejuvenates people instead of diminishing.”

For example, for the district’s summer Grizzly Learning Camp, Zachery-Ross gave teachers freedom to have that voice. “We set up the framework for staff, and said, ‘You know we want specific standards that we're interested in covering over this amount of time. You propose what you would want to teach, what you would want to deliver, how you would like to be innovative and creative, what experience could you create for students, and apply,’” she says.

Consequently, allowing that teacher voice boosted student engagement by providing more choice. “We had over a third of our students attend because teachers connected standards to programs that were of interest to them, that they were passionate about, so it was a true extension beyond what the typical school they looked like,” says Zachery-Ross.

Keep Moving Forward

The pandemic necessitated innovation and new approaches to instruction, and Zachery-Ross encourages that spirit to continue. 

“Oftentimes we don't do things because we think our parents are going to be upset,” she says. “We found our students could tolerate new ways of doing things, our staff could tolerate it, as well as families and communities. We found that we're more resilient than we ever thought we would be. And students, quite frankly, did learn through the pandemic. They just learned differently, and acquired skills that we might not have thought they were ready for.” She points out how kindergarten students can now use digital tools, such as Zoom or Google Classroom, that are part of the professional world.

“We need to give opportunities for acceleration,” she says. “That takes these kinds of project-based hands-on relevant educational experiences that might not not look like our traditional programs.”

Focus on the Key Cs 

Before the pandemic, the concept of preparing students for jobs that haven’t yet been created was difficult to comprehend, says Zachery-Ross. But now three years later, the importance of developing the skills of learning is just as much a focus as understanding specific content. 

“What are things that will sustain?” she says. “No matter what, communication with other people, collaboration with others, being creative, being critical thinkers–there are certain things that no matter if we're in a pandemic or not, that can be sustained. And those are the things that when we talk about connecting this innovation with standards, that will be long-lasting and transferable skills that students can take to college to career to wherever they go.”

Embrace Failure

Of course, during the past two years there have been many challenges, and it’s unrealistic to think that each one was flawlessly resolved.

Zachery-Ross holds an annual “Fail Fest,” during which educators share some of the mistakes they made and chances they took that maybe didn’t work out as planned, and what they learned from these experiences. “Not being afraid to fail and learn is also just not being afraid to fail, right?” she says. “And that’s a hard thing to learn, because we all want to be perfect. We all want to do a good job, but sometimes you don't learn from that absolute and that's something we have to teach our students.”

For example, after getting devices to students for remote learning, Zachery-Ross and her team realized that it wasn’t enough to truly replicate the full learning experience, so they created a “classroom” for home by providing paint, markers, crayons, paper, pencils, and other supplies to students. “We just assume everyone has a whole classroom at home ready to go when remote,” says Zachery-Ross. “We were like, ‘Oh great, we got you a computer, but you don't have any books at home.’ So we should take these experiences from the pandemic and embrace them, and reflect on why we did them.”

Be Present

Leading a district in its education mission is more than setting policies and allocating funds. 

“John Maxwell talks about how everything rises and falls on leadership, and leadership to me is about influence,” she says. “How can we influence if we're not there? How can we influence if you don't understand, and the way to understand is to get to know people, so our motto is ‘Stronger Together.’ We can't do it by pointing the finger – I always say people don't follow your fingers, they follow what you do, how you communicate.”

Zachery-Ross says students immediately recognize if you’re authentic, so she tries to stay connected by being as visible as possible while also being her outgoing self. “When you create that sense of belonging, people will run through a wall and want to do work with you,” she says. “In order to truly lead, you can't have an ego. You can't. You have to be humble and even transparent when we do this. And if we're going to create a space that's safe enough to learn in, to truly be ourselves, to have a sense of belonging, then the leader has to show up.”

And that needs to be a trickle down approach of sorts. “If our staff don't feel like they belong, if they don't feel like they're a part, if they don't believe they are making a difference, then how can the staff make our students feel the same way?” 

Communicate Clearly

Trying to communicate clearly and without all the education acronyms and terms is a focus of Zachery-Ross. “We use the word well-being, we're using the word social-emotional learning, and that might frighten people,” she says. “Instead, can we ask the questions, ‘Do you see me? Do you hear me? Do you value me? Do you respect me?’ We have to sometimes just make it plain.” 

“How about saying, ‘Do I know Joe? Do I know their name? Does someone see me when we show up to work, is someone gonna miss me? If I don't come to school will someone think where am I? Do they value my opinion? Do they respect who I am as a person?’” she says. “If we get down to that core of those simple questions, then we can get to the point of finding what's needed for our students, for our staff, for our families, and then overall for our community.”

• Nominate someone for the Tech & Learning Innovative Leader Award here

The CDC’s most recent survey of high school students helps quantify the mental health problems teachers are seeing unfold in real-time, says Kathleen Ethier, director of the CDC's Division of Adolescent and School Health program, which organized the survey.

More than a third of students reported experiencing poor mental health during the pandemic. Nearly one-fifth had seriously considered attempting suicide, while 9 percent attempted suicide. 

“Any teacher will be able to tell you in great detail what shows up in our data, which is that the pandemic exacerbated a crisis in mental health for young people,” Ethier says. 

While the numbers from the survey are grim, a silver lining is that there are strategies to combat these problems that we know work, Ethier says. These include building school connectedness through social and emotional learning programs and effective classroom management. 

Understanding the Data on Adolescent Mental Health  

From January to June 2021, Ethier and her colleagues collected data from 7,705 public and private high school students across the U.S. who were representative of the country’s overall student population. 

In addition to the negative overall trend in mental health, CDC researchers found some groups were at higher risk. Nearly 47 percent of gay, lesbian, or bisexual students “seriously considered attempting suicide” compared to 13.6 percent of heterosexual students. Twenty-six percent of women surveyed seriously considered attempting suicide, nearly twice the number of men who considered suicide. 

While it’s easy to understand how the pandemic exacerbated negative trends in mental health, pinpointing what was fueling those trends prior to the pandemic is more difficult.

“If you are an LGBTQ student who doesn't have supports in your school, and there's bullying and you don't feel safe in your school, that will have an impact on your mental health,” Ethier says. “If  you are a young person of color, and you experience racism in school, there's a connection between racism and mental health, and that also can cause a problem.” 

Other potential non-pandemic factors are still being studied. 

“We don't know for sure why female students seem to be having more significant problems,” Ethier says. “There's some suggestion that social media is having an impact on that. And I think the story's not completely written there. There are some ways social media can be a great connector. But it can also lead to electronic bullying and to impacts on self-esteem and body image that female students may be particularly susceptible to.” 

How Schools Can Help Improve Student Mental Health 

Fostering a sense of connectedness in students is a key to combating the mental health crisis, Ethier says. The CDC research found that students who felt close to people at school had a lower prevalence of poor mental health during the pandemic. Only 28 percent of those who said they were close to others at school experienced poor mental health compared to 45 percent of those who did not feel close to others at school. Those who felt connected to school were also less likely to have seriously considered suicide (14 percent versus 26 percent). 

Part of building this sense of connectedness is creating a welcoming environment for all students. “We know that by making schools more inclusive for LGBTQ students, we are able to have a positive impact on mental health, not just for those students, but also for all students in the school,” Ethier says. 

Strategies for increasing school connectedness include: implementing social and emotional learning programs; reviewing disciplinary policies to ensure they are being implemented equitably across racial and ethnic groups; fostering relationships between students, their families, and school staff; and providing professional development for teachers to improve classroom management. 

While something such as classroom management is not intuitively connected to mental health, it can play a key role. 

“We have found that schools and classrooms that are well-managed are safer for students,” Ethier says. “There's less likely to be bullying in a classroom when the classroom is well-managed.” 

This sense of control should extend outside of the classroom to the cafeteria and hallways. “A safe environment where students feel safe is a really important source of connection for students,” Ethier says. “The more chaotic a school is, the less connected students feel.” 

• Tech & Learning SEL Stories 
• School Resiliency: Not as Simple as Remote vs. In-Person Classes
• Are Phones Good for Students?
• Students Less Likely to Be Suspended by Teacher of Same Race

Dr. Matthew Cheeseman lost both parents to suicide. 

“When you have two parents pass away by suicide, each and every day you look through a new lens of intent,” said the Superintendent at Beaufort County Schools in Washington, North Carolina, during a recent Tech & Learning webinar. 

Judging students and colleagues by intent rather than behavior is one of many ways in which Cheeseman – the NERESA Region 1 Superintendent of the Year – has tried to lead his staff and students through the mental health challenges of the past two years. 

Cheeseman and Dr. Tim Hudson, Chief Learning Officer at DreamBox Learning, spoke about how school leaders can use multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) to help teachers and students. The virtual event was sponsored by DreamBox Learning and hosted by Dr. Kecia Ray. 

View the webinar on-demand here. 

Key Takeaways  

Supporting Educators

MTSS Programs Should Evolve 

Beaufort County Schools has been very intentional about setting up its MTSS program to address social and emotional learning, student behavior, and traditional academic learning as well as staff needs. “Each and every month we have assigned times to really look at our programs, value our programs, and look at what we need to change moving forward based on those values,” Cheeseman said. “We've developed an intentional plan for what it should look like for students. But we've also strategically provided monthly professional development to assist our system principals and our counselors at the school sites.” 

A key component of that plan is providing educators with the MTSS support they need so that they can be empowered to empower their students. “We're working through our adults in order to reach those students,” Cheeseman said. 

Educators Should Be Part of the MTSS Plan 

“We've had a lot of adult behaviors that needed support and needed to be addressed,” Cheeseman said. The district had “adults needing to be recognized, needing to feel loved, needing to feel respected, but also needing some accommodations along the way,” he added. 

Often staff members don’t know how to ask for the support they need, so part of the district's plan has been to train principals and other school leaders in MTSS and establish more lines of communication for educators to request help and assistance. These school leaders are also making sure they’re asking their staff what resources they need to be successful in their lives outside of school. 

Encourage Educators to Strike the Right Work-Life Balance

“I tell everyone that I'm in contact with that I would like you to work to live instead of living to work,” Cheeseman said. “Although we're in the business of teaching and learning, and we desire to have the greatest student outcomes for all, our goal is to make sure that our employees have the resources they need to be successful. So they know that each and every day we want them to come back refreshed from living that great life on the weekends, living that great life at home in the evening, but at the same time being present 100 percent of the time when they're here at work.” 

The Right Kind of Assessments  

Accelerate Students Without Causing Trauma 

Educators want students to hit certain benchmarks, but they need to be realistic about how they identify students who have fallen behind and how they get to them to catch up effectively, Hudson, from DreamBox Learning said. 

“Not every student is on that same schedule. So if every fourth grader is not going to be proficient in fourth-grade standards by the end of this school year, we have an obligation this year to accelerate them in a way that can get them on track by the end of fifth grade next year,” Hudson said. “We have to have those realistic expectations. We don't want to inflict any trauma on students by trying to rush them through things in a shallow sort of way.” 

Be Smarter About Assessments 

Effectively identifying the students who need support means designing assessments that meaningfully test student knowledge. Hudson said that if we tested driving the way we frequently test math, we would test each driver on turning, then on acceleration, etc. without ever having them combine the various skills needed to drive. “If we do assessment this way, it's not going to give us the most authentic picture of a student's true performance capability,” he said. “Assessing those isolated skills is the wrong way to monitor progress toward driving performance.” 

If your math assessments can be easily answered by Excel, a calculator, or another tech tool, you may need to rethink your assessment, he said. 

Don’t Take Shortcuts

Hudson said it’s important for teachers to take the time to develop meaningful assessments that challenge students. “We can't prioritize short-term gains on shallow assessment items,” he said. “Good learning takes time.” 

He then quoted a friend’s grandmother’s sage advice: “If you don't have time to do it right, you better have time to do it twice.” 

• Tech & Learning Webinars

As we transition from the days of the pandemic and into what will become a “new normal,” it is important to support students and help them heal from the trauma they endured over the past couple of years. 

While on the surface some students may seem okay, not all have adjusted so well. We also do not know all of the challenges that students may have experienced due to changes to family job and income status, the loss of loved ones to COVID, and the mentally draining experiences of students of color dealing with heightened racial attacks. 

As educators, we cannot solve all of these concerns, but we can do the five things listed here to support student healing and restoration.

1: Be Mindful of Cognitive Load 

Yes, academics are important, and students must meet certain standards in order to move to the next grade. However, learning and growth is more than academics, and includes social-emotional well-being and growth. Consider the workload of students during and after the school day. Students, as adults do, need time to clear their mind and think. Too much content and required assignments can overload students’ brains. Also, consider having scheduled mental health days to help combat potential cognitive overload. 

2: Utilize Strength-Based Approaches 

Nothing is more stressful than always hearing from teachers about deficits in performance, thinking, and lack of contributions to the class. Instead of focusing on what students aren’t doing, show them that they matter and what they bring to the classroom is welcome and worthy. Draw on students' strengths when teaching and focus on their assets. Feeling and knowing that you are an important member of the class community, especially in these unstable times, can support student healing and provide a renewed sense of excitement around school, and contribute to creating dynamic equitable learning environments. 

3: Collaborate with Families 

Families are an extension of students. Likely, if students need support in healing, so do families. By working in concert with one another, teachers and families can collaborate to create robust systems of support for students as they heal. If your school does not have a formal opportunity to engage with families, check out the National Parent Teacher Association’s website, which offers a wide variety of toolkits to get started. 

4: Engage with Communities 

As teachers, we are all familiar with Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological System. While students’ experiences within the school environment is one of importance, there are also other spaces that students connect with beyond the in-person and online learning environments. To support student healing, find out about the students’ neighborhood and communities, and other layers of their ecological system that impact their world. There may be issues that students are dealing with beyond the classroom for which your school’s counselor or family services coordinator can provide resources. Leverage community organizations, leaders, and members who can consult with you and provide additional support. Here are a few other ideas on engaging community members. 

5: Give Grace and Continued Compassion 

It has been a long two years. Stress, illness, civil unrest, and uncertainty about the future has impacted us all. In order to support students in healing and moving beyond the remnants of the pandemic, we must give them grace and consistently show compassion. Grace can come in many forms, including being flexible with assignment due dates, celebrating small wins, and having the chance for “do overs.” Similarly, teach with compassion always, be kind to students, and show them that above all else, you care about them and their well-being. Another way to show compassion is to make time for students to center calmness using mindfulness apps and websites. 

We hope that you try some or all of the suggestions above to help support your students as they heal and restore. You may want to even start by creating virtual healing spaces that can be accessed by students, teachers, families, and the larger community.  

• Building A Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) Framework for Mental Health
• Building a Sustainable Social-Emotional Learning Plan

These have not been easy times for educators or students. 

Stress from the pandemic, social unrest, and more recently, the war in Ukraine, have all led to widespread reports of a spike in behaviorial incidents among students. In October 2021 the American Academy of Pediatrics declared an emergency in child and adolescent mental health. 

To address these mental health challenges, schools need to implement a multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS), say psychologists Laura E. Rutherford and Brittany Zakszeski. Rutherford is director of training and a research psychologist at Devereux Advanced Behavioral Health Consulting, a behavioral healthcare nonprofit, while Zakszeski is a training and consulting specialist at Devereux Center for Effective Schools. 

Building a Multi-Tiered System of Supports Framework: Recognize That a Majority of Mental Health Services Are Provided in Schools  

More than 80 percent of mental health services are delivered within the school setting, Rutherford and Zakszeski wrote in a recent playbook about social and emotional behavior in schools. 

“Most mental health services are provided in schools, for a variety of reasons,” Rutherford says. “Access to care and services is much easier in schools, and it's easier to refer to school-based services.” 

Receiving mental health services also has less stigma when it is provided in schools rather than in the community, Rutherford says. This is why a robust MTSS framework is so important for schools. 

Building an MTSS Framework: Establishing Tiers of Support 

Rutherford and Zakszeski suggest coordinating your MTSS framework around three tiers. 

Tier 1: “A really strong MTSS program would have supports for all students universally across the school,” Rutherford says. This should include social-emotional learning programs and perhaps some school-wide trauma-informed classroom management practices and supports. In addition, there should be a mechanism to identify students who are in need of additional support and therefore need Tier 2 interventions, Rutherford says. 

Tier 2: This should include targeted group-based interventions for students who are more at risk, and there also should be a mechanism to see if kids are doing well with these targeted group programs. If they’re not thriving, they need to be given additional Tier 3 level support. 

Tier 3: Students who were not sufficiently helped by Tier 1 and 2 interventions should get targeted individualized support. This might be individual school counseling or referrals to outside agencies, or outside agencies providing services within the school itself, Rutherford says. 

Building an MTSS Framework: Make it Comprehensive 

A good MTSS framework should encompass academics and mental health. 

“The type of MTSS framework that Laura and I really recommend is an integrated one that is focused on mental health alongside other indicators of social wellness, emotional wellness, and behavioral wellness,” Zakszeski says. “We're really saying, ‘Let's not have all these different programs and frameworks, and service-delivery mechanisms for addressing those different types of student needs. Let's have one integrated connected framework that's really advancing all of those types of outcomes.’” 

This type of framework is necessary because student setbacks are rarely siloed. “We know any challenges in any of those areas could really create significant barriers to students’ learning,” Zakszeski says. 

Building an MTSS Framework: Telehealth and Being Proactive 

Telehealth for mental health is an increasingly popular option for students. “Although these are not school-based mental health services, we certainly are coordinating with community agencies and providers,” Zakszeski says. “There is some research to suggest there are in some ways fewer barriers and more attendance and commitment to treatment if telehealth is an option, especially for some adolescents in some circumstances. So it could be a way to supplement the school-based services that are being provided primarily within the walls of the building in the schools that we're working in.” 

Given the current social pressures, Rutherford says that school leaders should plan on their students needing assistance. “Rather than saying, ‘Are there mental health needs?’ We should assume everyone's going to need some sort of support now because students have missed a lot of socialization and normal interactions on top of academics and other concerns.”

• Explaining SEL to Parents
• SEL For Educators: 4 Best Practices
• Building a Sustainable Social-Emotional Learning Plan

As Spring 2022 approaches, we prepare to move forward after more than two years of living through a global pandemic. While great efforts have been made to continue teaching and learning during these turbulent, uncertain times, students, teachers, and families have been woefully taxed. 

Virtual learning environments have proved to be effective in continuing teaching and learning, beyond the confines of a physical classroom space. However, these environments can also be used to create virtual healing spaces. Mental health and wellness is important for students to be able to focus and engage in learning, so having these spaces available is incredibly needed. 

Here are four online environments that can be used as virtual healing spaces: 

1: Affinity Break-Out Room Calming Circles 

Create a variety of affinity break-out room circles in which students and their families can come together over shared interests, issues, and obstacles currently being faced, while supporting one another. These smaller affinity break-out room circles, which can be hosted through a video conferencing platform such as Zoom, can be informal or formalized with questions to consider. You could even collaborate with your school’s counseling staff to serve as a facilitator for these calming circles. The affinity spaces can be based on topics, grade levels, schools within a larger district, demographic groups, or any other ways to bring students and families with shared experiences and challenges together to reflect and debrief. 

2: Community Affirmation Pinterest Boards 

While designed as a social media and image-sharing platform, Pinterest is a wonderful virtual healing space that can be used to build community affirmation. Create classroom community affirmation Pinterest boards where students and their families can post inspiring quotes and images that can serve as peaceful inspiration. Post a link to the Pinterest board within your classroom LMS. You could even share new postings with your class each Monday to start the week off in a positive and uplifting way.  

3: Voice-Recorded Reflection Domains  

Sometimes students and their families want to share their thoughts, but not in a live space. With reflection, it can take time to gather thoughts and prepare to speak aloud. In these cases, making available voice-recorded reflection domains on a platform such as VoiceThread can allow students the space to think about the challenges they are facing, and share with the larger class community. Classmates and teachers can respond to the reflections with advice, words of support, and further affirmation.  

4: Synchronous Caring Sessions 

It is always good practice to bring the entire class community together as one. Consider holding quarter live synchronous caring sessions using a virtual conferencing tool such as Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, or whatever platform is available at your school. Each class community member can finish statements such as “I care about ...”, “Caring about others has made me …”, “Caring to me means…”, “I feel cared for when….”     

Virtual healing spaces have the ability to bring together students, teachers, and their families in times of unrest and serve as environments in which reflection, calm, and community can be nurtured and thrive. Consider offering your students, their families, and yourself the space to heal and renew. 

If you would like to incorporate mindfulness activities, check out our article 5 Mindfulness Apps and Websites for K-12. 

• 5 Mental Health Tips for Educators During the Pandemic
• How Mental Health Days Are Being Scheduled at Schools

Students struggle with digital disruptions affecting everything from their health to sleep to school performance. Schools can help families understand that there are solutions to these problems. Taking everything away from children when distraction becomes destructive is not a viable long-term solution as it can result in kids finding their own ways to steal moments to be connected, further exacerbating the problem.

Understanding the influence of a child’s online world can also provide a refreshing antidote. If you can't beat them, join them…?

This sounds contrary to conventional wisdom. Yet consider that there are digital mechanisms that students can leverage to redirect and reinforce their focus. 

Students want to focus but the temptations interrupt their best intentions. Accessing these digital strategies affords teachers ways to show students alternatives that work.

Reversing Digital Disruption Strategy 1: Binaural Beats 

Binaural beats allow students to wear headphones, and within minutes, access their high cognitive potential, focus, and engagement. This is a powerful reversal of the digital disruption that teachers and parents groan about, throwing their hands in the air in frustration.

How and why binaural beats work:

Optical illusions are so powerful, they can trick your mind in good and bad ways. Think of a virtual reality ride or VR headsets. These fool our senses so convincingly, we can feel as if the sensation is really happening, even when we know it is not. Binaural beats act in the same powerful way and can be positively constructed for children.

Binaural beats present an illusion caused by listening to two tones that send signals at slightly different frequencies, in each ear. The difference in frequencies generates a third perceived tone -- a rhythmic beat. Here is the cool, scientific part: neurons throughout the brain deliver messages at the same rate as the imaginary beat, causing physiological responses based on the beats effect. Creating a focused beat sets in motion a cognition that nourishes our senses. That is virtual reality at its best!

Binaural beats can offer different pulses for different effects, based on the kind of brain waves being channeled. A quick summary of those types and effects of each:

• Delta pattern: operate at a frequency that elicits a deeper stage of sleep 
• Theta pattern: contribute to improved meditation, creativity, and sleep in the rapid eye movement (REM) phase of sleep 
• Alpha pattern: encourage relaxation 
• Beta pattern: help promote concentration and alertness 
• Gamma pattern: promote wakefulness 

A balance of theta and alpha pattern wave brain flow seems to provoke the best state of mind for students to be primed with a focused and motivated mindset, ideal for learning.

Considering that listening to binaural beats for several minutes can induce the sweet spot for learning, it is surprising that we do not use these more in classrooms as an effective tool to reverse the harm of digital distractions, and allow students to gain a sense of high cognitive learning, on the spot.

Reversing Digital Disruption Strategy 2: Blue Light Screen Protectors 

A second challenge that can be remedied is the saturating effects of blue light caused by high cell phone and computer screen use. Overexposure to blue light alters circadian rhythm in ways that throw off a child’s natural resting state. This confuses the brain as blue light mimics the brightness of the sun, causing the brain to stop producing melatonin, a hormone that gives your body cues to sleep. This is a large part of why students are not sleeping well enough. Sleep is critical to focus, alertness and energy.

The use of blue light blockers has not been well documented yet. But there is evidence that reducing blue light exposure helps bring the body to a normal chronology, providing the rest necessary for young minds to be better primed for the next day.

By implementing these two remedies, we can help bolster student focus and energy. It is worth the time and effort to share, teach, and reinforce these as ways to remedy the disruptions caused by digital exposure.

Where do I start?

• A resource such as this one can help kids regain their focus quickly through binaural beats
• This resource offers what to know and to look for in blue light blocking screen protectors for phones and computers

Remember, we have solutions to digital disruption. Students (and adults) can prime their focus on demand, and can leverage blue light blocking technologies. Indulging in alpha-theta states and restoring rested minds translates to focused minds. Leveraging these two simple strategies will go a long way for our students.

• How to Quiet the Hyperactive Hive Mind in Schools
• How Deep Work Supports Student Wellness

With the lingering effects of the global pandemic, coupled with myriad instances of civil unrest, K-12 students have been through a great deal over the past two years. While academic learning is at the crux of teaching, we as teachers must also focus on the social-emotional needs and wellness of students. 

One way to address this is to offer students opportunities to engage in mindfulness practices. According to Mindful.org, “ Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us.” 

Here are five mindfulness apps and websites for K-12 students and teachers.

1: DreamyKid  

Dreamy Kid offers a comprehensive platform of mindfulness and mediation tools for students ages 3-17. Content on Dreamy Kid can be accessed through a web browser as well as a mobile application. One of the unique aspects of Dreamy Kids is the diverse category offerings that range from supporting ADD, ADHD, and anxiety, to healing activities and guided journeys for teens. For teachers who want to incorporate Dreamy Kid into their classroom, an education program is available. 

2: Calm 

The Calm app offers a robust suite of online mindfulness resources focused on stress management, resilience, and self-care. One unique feature of Calm that is relevant to K-12 students is the 30 Days of Mindfulness in the Classroom resource. Included are reflection questions, scripts, and a plethora of mindfulness activities. Even if you are not familiar with mindfulness strategies, there is a Self-care Guide for Teachers. The self-care guide includes calm tips, images, blog postings, planning calendars, and links to videos. 

3: Breathe, Think, Do with Sesame 

Geared toward younger learners, Sesame Street offers the Breathe, Think, Do with Sesame app that is designed to help children de-stress. Within the app, a variety of scenarios are offered with video clips that learners move through. Additional resources and games can be accessed once the learner has completed the prerequisite activity. Activities are offered in both English and Spanish.  

4: Headspace 

The Headspace platform offers a series of sleep, meditation, and mindfulness resources and activities. Educators are welcomed to Headspace and supported through free access for K-12 teachers and supporting staff members in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia. Resources for how to care for yourself as a teacher are available, as well as mindfulness tools for your students. If you would like to delve deeper into specific topics, categories include: mediation; sleep and wake up; stress and anxiety; and movement and healthy living.  

5: Smiling Mind 

Smiling Mind is a nonprofit based in Australia that offers a mindfulness app developed by educators and psychologists. The app has strategies that support students’ social and emotional well-being, and it offers a series of strategies and techniques specifically designed for children.  Teachers and parents can order care packets too. Also, if you are an educator in Australia, there are additional professional development opportunities along with indigenous languages resources. 

These mindfulness apps and websites can support humanizing educational experiences while helping students cope with the ongoing mental health crisis. As students are seemingly always engaged on tech devices, introducing mindfulness, meditation, and de-stressing practices through the use of edtech tools may provide a pathway for students to self-reflect, center calmness, and become less overwhelmed with other environmental forces impacting them. 

• SEL For Educators: 4 Best Practices
• Former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera: Using Poetry to Support SEL

In December 2021 principals everywhere found themselves scrambling to provide assurances to their communities while investigating an increased number of security threats. I was one of those principals, and have become alarmed, not as much by the threats, but by the misinformation being fed to our communities. 

Consider that school communities are already taxed by the seemingly never-ending pandemic. Add unsettling news and we are instantaneously brought over the edge. An increase in toxic groupthink amplifies these problems. 

I have researched and written about the negative effects of social media distortions, and propose time-tested practices for school leaders and their communities to embrace. For example, start by presenting convincing evidence of truth, and help people reclaim an objective lens. Help them see that misinformation is the dangerous product of an online feedback loop, with algorithms designed to drive more inaccurate news content, further fueling our confusion and concern.

While increasing school tragedies expose the harshest societal realities, an event is still far unlikely to occur. Reinforcing ways to fight online misinformation begins with a recognition of the damage caused, and formulating strategic ways to address panic and anxiety. 

These challenges disrupt school communities, so we must find ways to make schools restorative sanctuaries for learning. Recognition starts with identifying the toxic groupthink as a hyperactive hive mind that impairs everyone.

The Hyperactive Hive Mind in Schools 

The hyperactive hive mind is groupthink at its worst. It is inflamed by the destructive forces of digital disruptions. 

While school violence causes devastating tragedy, students have a far lower chance of being harmed in school than almost any other risk they face. This includes traveling to and from school, catching a potentially deadly disease, and suffering from a life-threatening injury through interscholastic sports. But the hyperactive hive mind fools us into believing the risk is far greater.

Why?

People are emotionally connected to their children, and that causes us to override practical thinking and logic. We assess the prominence of a school shooting, based less on the probability and more on the nature of the experience. Scientists refer to this as the awareness heuristic: a mental shortcut we rapidly make to measure the expected chance of something too big for us to understand. These shortcuts are often grossly inaccurate, catalyzed by primal thoughts that are the enemy of higher cognitive processing. Social media aggravates this. In fact, a Twitter study confirms that false information travels so much faster than facts that the frequency occurs fully six times faster.

No wonder school communities endure hyperactive hive mindset. We are inundated with misinformation, and filtering through this can be overwhelming. How do we overcome this and find a path to truth?

The Answer

Consider two interconnected paths to provide protective solutions: internal (within school) and external (beyond school walls).

Internal: Shield learners and staff within schools in ways that allow them to engage the frontal lobe for higher thinking while protected at school. The climate leaders commit to cause a lasting impact on a child’s experience. Fortifying a school community with the structures to nurture the kind of learning that creates engaging interactive experiences is the answer.

Numerous models promote learner-friendly, comfortable environments. For example, New Jersey’s Positive Behavior Support in Schools System is a positive behavior incentive program for individual students and schools. Evidence-based programs should be inclusive and integrated in all communities.

External: Focus on teaching students and families about outside traps we are prone to, and how to find escapes.

Students are away from school for two-thirds of their day. Educators have little control over what students are exposed to, and how to manage the many obstacles and confusion they encounter. This is especially true of negative content and misinformation. 

A best practice is to teach self-regulation strategies. Our work assisting students and families in managing the constant distractions and alarming news cycles includes a strong commitment to simplify this information.

Also highlight for families reliable, evidence-based truths. Unveil this, and the statistical probabilities highlighted previously. Teach students and families alternative habits. 

Teaching Focused Empowerment in a Distracted World 

The Benign Disinhibition Effect

Use social media to initiate positive social media experiences, something referred to as the benign disinhibition effect. Positive, supportive, and monitored groups who aid one another anonymously offer a safe and confidential place to seek support. 

These are searchable online, and having access to such a group offers an alternative that is healthy for online engagement, similar to the effect of anonymous, in-person support groups.

Diminish Comparison Effects

Many well-known figures address comparison traps by exposing the real version of themselves online. They are closing the fantasy gap of a perfect persona who students feel they cannot compare to. It is wonderful to see famous individuals share their vulnerabilities to empower others to feel okay about their own imperfections.  

Inhibit Bad Online Behavior

Teach children the damaging effects of misbehavior online. Online history is easily uncovered by colleges and potential employers through searchable, archived databases. Helping learners recognize that behaving badly online is never kept secret enables them to avoid going down that path before it’s too late.

Remember Online Feedback Loops Make Us Less Intelligent

Help students see that negative social media engagement has an adverse effect on their wellness. In fact, it drives them to be less intelligent, which has a harmful, and potentially long-term damaging effect on their aspirations and dreams. Using on and offline tools, such as ambient noise, journaling, and gratitude practices, are all methods to fight against the detrimental effects of the hyperactive hive mind and, in turn, individually harmful impacts.

Consolidating these ideas into a framework and implementing these practices can result in groupthink being shifted into productive flow rather than a hyperactive hive mindset.

Students and families need to understand the benefits of solitude and a tranquil absence from the relentless echoes of online rants. Learning to harness this time instead in more constructive ways yields productivity dividends that are remarkably more positive. This enables whole schools to empower themselves to thrive, rather than suffer.

• How Deep Work Support Student Wellness
• SEL For Educators: 4 Best Practices

Mental health days are becoming increasingly common as school districts across the country are getting creative about finding ways to give educators and students much-needed time to relax and recharge. 

According to Burbio, a tracker of school district websites, there have been more than 3,140 school closures for student and teacher mental health days. 

Recently, some districts extended the Thanksgiving holiday break. Others worked mental health days into the schedule earlier while others have added mental health days to the calendar for December. 

Why Mental Health Days at Schools 

Brevard Public Schools, one of the largest school districts in Florida, recently used two unused “hurricane days” to extend the Thanksgiving break. 

“We're hearing from teachers and principals and all of our staff that it's been a really difficult year,” says Misty Belford, School Board Chair for Brevard Public Schools. “They're feeling much more burnt out than they typically would at this time of year. We're seeing escalating behaviors in students. And so it just seemed to make sense to give everybody that downtime.” 

Staffing challenges that have plagued schools across the nation also played a role. “Shortages are definitely contributing to the burnout,” Belford says. 

The Port Huron Area School District in Michigan recently designated December 10 as a mental health day for similar reasons. 

“Our Superintendent has been conducting listening sessions with all staff and students, and after hearing from them, he felt strongly about the need to provide a mental health day,” says Keely Baribeau, director of community relations at Port Huron Schools. “Teachers are still balancing supporting students who are in their classrooms daily while simultaneously supporting students who are quarantined or isolated due to COVID.” 

These stressors extend to students as well. “Students are still working on building stamina to attend school all day, five days a week, and fill the gaps of information they missed over the last year-and-a-half when their instruction was impacted by virtual and hybrid learning,” Baribeau says. 

Making The Time Off Work  

When Brevard Public Schools began exploring the possibility of extending the Thanksgiving break, Belford’s first concern was childcare for those who would need it. “I immediately reached out to our Parks and Rec department and said, ‘Hey, if this were to come to fruition, would you guys be able to [set] up camps?’ which they typically do during school breaks for that Monday and Tuesday, and they very graciously agreed to do so.’” 

However, providing an alternative childcare option was only one of the logistical challenges. Arrangements had to be made with food service staff to provide families who rely on school meals with extra food on the Friday before the break. Dual-enrollment students who generally take a bus from their high school to college classes needed help arranging transportation. Sports events had also been scheduled for the mental health days and the district let the athletic directors at each school decide whether to postpone or continue with those. 

Fortunately, these challenges are ones that Belford says administrators in her district and elsewhere are fairly familiar with because of their long experience dealing with weather events of one kind or another. “We have a lot of the things in mind that need to be considered,” she says. 

A Mental Health Day or Two Goes A Long Way  

While a day or two off can’t eliminate all the stressors of pandemic teaching and learning, a brief break can help. The first day back from the extended Thanksgiving break, Belford already noticed a difference in the district office. “Everyone looks so much more relaxed than before the break,” she says. “Our administrators, our district staff, our faculty and staff at the schools, our bus drivers, our custodial staff, you name it, they were all ready for a break. And students were very appreciative as well.” 

Port Huron Area School district has not yet held its Mental Health Day but its addition to the calendar has been greeted with enthusiasm. “Staff, students, and families have been very grateful for the day to get caught up, rest, and spend time with their families,” Baribeau says. 

• Using Technology to Address Student Mental Health
• SEL For Educators: 4 Best Practices

Deep work is one of those mysterious talking points we assume should be part of our learning environment but we may not know quite why, or more importantly how to get kids there. 

We live in a loud world. A lot of "noise" surrounds us, and not the kind that blares in our ear. Rather, there are a tremendous amount of distractions all around us, from phones to social media to the latest crisis or drama unfolding, and this is the enemy of deep work. After all, deep work is defined by Cal Newport as the “activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limits.”

It may seem obvious that gaining a state of deep work focus is valuable because tasks get done, but the value far exceeds simply checking off a to-do list. Consider that deep work is highly satisfying because of the tremendous sense of accomplishment associated with it. This is far more significant because the anxiety and stress brought on by being distracted away from deep work is both so tempting and so detrimental.

A profound sense of accomplishment is a major contributor to the human condition and a monumental antidote to anxiety, stress, and trauma. I have written about this (Leading Schools Through Trauma) and outlined both the cost of trauma disrupting fulfilling work, and the ways around it. 

Here are some quick, stackable in-class interventions that can help your students (and you) break through the disruptors of deep work and back on track toward highly rewarding accomplishments.

Coffee Talk 

I have a confession: As I compose this story, I am listening to background coffeehouse sounds on my headphones. The reason? Listening to coffeehouse sounds puts me in an intensely focused state; one that sets the stage for finding that sweet spot that distracts me away just enough from the unimportant external stimuli (i.e. my phone pinging) and toward brain waves (alpha and theta) concentration that strike a perfect equilibrium for high focus and deep learning. 

Tonal sounds are a quick and effective solution to in-class options that promote the kind of motivation perfect for learning and pushing above a current level of understanding. You can find coffeehouse sounds anywhere on the internet, such as YouTube; these are ideal for having students fulfill independent or whole-class work focus.

Breathing for Optimal Learning 

Since anxiety is the enemy of optimal learning states, reducing stress and the effects of trauma are the ideal counterpoint. Various breathing techniques are available and I recommend the 4-7-8 method. 

When we breathe deeply and systematically, we activate stretch receptors around the diaphragm linked to the parasympathetic nervous system; this is especially true with the 4-7-8 method because we pause for 7 seconds in the slightly stretched position for a stronger rest-and-digest effect. Visually following this is beneficial for learners needing a quick minutes-long fix, at sites that show the learner the expansion and shrinking happening.

Social Media is Everywhere 

Accepting that social media is integrated actively into the lives of our students, as well as for us adults, means we should not try to avoid it or try to teach students to ignore it. The likely outcome is that you will be ignored! 

Instead, help students understand that negative feedback loops in social media are detrimental to concentration levels that induce deep work, and satisfaction. In fact, social media makes us less intelligent if we do not recognize the dangers of negative consequences. 

Teach students that social media can act as a support network in certain ways, such as an Instagram study demonstrated, helping young women properly discriminate between fantasy highlight reel images and the reality that others share with their own imperfections. This is empowering, and allows learners to step away from the powerful negative narratives that tax their minds beyond their sense of accomplishment and success.

Employing one or more of these techniques that support deep work will help students become more successful, motivated, and well adjusted. In an era where we are surrounded by distractors that tap our most primal and destructive thought processes, this matters even more. See students succeed due to technology support, not in spite of it!

• Former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera: Using Poetry to Support SEL
• SEL For Educators: 4 Best Practices

Poetry can support social-emotional learning as it connects with students in a profound way, says former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera. 

“Poetry is a free space,” he says. “It's your internal free space in your mind, your feelings, the words you use, and you imagine it with images and landscapes. Your heart is boiling or heating up or flaring or volcanically wanting to explode. The poem is there for you; it'll contain that fire.” 

Within that free space, students have a chance to delve into trauma and other serious issues on their minds. “They talk about rape, they talk about suicide,” Herrera says. “Poetry then is the place, you can just open that mountain of fire, and write it and speak it and present it. And then we hear and we feel it. And it's a great way to find healing.”  

Herrara, who was U.S. Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, will be the keynote speaker at NYC DOE’s Beyond Access Forum: Moving Forward Together on November 2. The virtual event, which is open to all educators, will run 8 a.m.-2:30 p.m. ET. 

The child of migrant workers, Herrera is an alum of UCLA and Stanford University, and obtained his MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. During his keynote, he will share a poem aimed at inspiring educators and their students.

“I want to uplift people's lives in whatever way I can,” he says. “I'm not Mighty Mouse -- I'm Minnie Mouse, I'm Micro Mouse. But I do want to help in whatever way I can, or inspire in whatever way I can.” 

His poetry collections include 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border: Undocuments. He has also created work for children, including Imagine and Jabberwalking, and much of his outreach work focuses on connecting poetry with young people. 

More Than Words on Paper 

As Poet Laureate, Herrera helped to launch “Wordstreet Champions and Brave Builders of the Dream,” a program in partnership with Chicago Public Schools. The effort saw Herrera connecting with nearly 40 English teachers to help expand their perception of what a poem was and how it could be created. In one exercise, teachers faced each other in two rows and talked, while other teachers walked between the rows writing down snippets of conversation they heard and then using that as the basis of a poem.

“We cut up paper, we used colors, we stood in lines, we shouted at each other, we walked through these little tunnels of people talking like little gauntlets. We painted things and made symbols,” Herrara says. 

The educators then brought these ideas and energies back to their district. 

Herrara also coordinates the Laureate Lab Visual Wordist Studio at Fresno State, which is also geared toward pushing the boundaries of what constitutes a poem. 

“It comes from the whole idea of not being so squashed into a small space talking about poetry. As I have taught through the years, students come into the creative writing program, wherever I've been, and they want to do art also. They're painters also, and they're writers, but there's no way for them to paint in their creative writing courses,” he says. “They want to merge writing and painting, and writing and sculpture, writing and dance, writing and performance. And all that is kind of pushed aside usually in a traditional creative writing workshop.” 

This philosophy also applies to mediums increasingly popular with students today such as social media.

“Poetry, like every expressive form, is multi-dimensional, but we just seem to have things in little boxes,” he says. “We can dance a poem, we can collage a poem, we can YouTube a poem. And we can do simultaneous expressive formats; playing jazz on the corner, doing YouTube at the same time, drawing and dancing at the same time.” 

A Way of Learning About the World

No matter what form a poem takes, it remains a form of personal expression, which is why it’s such a powerful medium for students, Herrera says.

“It’s a perfect place to express all that because it's so personal. What you get with poetry, it's just one hundred percent, one thousand percent, personal. It's the real you talking, it's not the school you,” he says. “So it's total expression, personal yes, but it also provides a possibility of new thinking and a new way of seeing things.” 

This can help students learn more about the world and themselves as well as help educators understand their students. Herrera says a good poem might cause a teacher to say, “Oh, I have to look at this issue differently now. I have to look at young people differently now because we hear a new thinking.” 

Herrera’s work is also steeped in respect for the teachers we find in all walks of life, from parents to guardians as well as the professional educators in our lives. “It's good to support our teachers because without teaching we have nowhere to go,” he says. “We are lost.”

• NYC DOE Beyond Access Forum Provides Professional Development Around Inclusive and Individualized Education
• AI Writing Programs Are Getting Better. Is That a Good Thing?
• Best Digital Resources for Teaching Poetry

In the T&L Honor Role podcast, Drs. Kecia Ray and Frances Gipson celebrate fierce and formidable women in education. Their guests are some of the most accomplished education leaders working today. 

In each episode, guests are asked how they take care of their health and wellness and balance the demands of leadership and other responsibilities. Some common themes have emerged. 

Most guests emphasized the centrality of health and wellness to their ability to be in service to others, noting that self-care fuels their work. The importance of sleep, good nutrition, and physical movement are central to self-care as well as music, laughter, meditation, and joy, particularly during this time of ongoing disruption.

Here is some of the wisdom they have to offer:

Dr. Tanzy Kilcrease, Bibb County (GA) Schools Chief of Staff. “Understand that self-care is not selfish. We can’t lead others if we don’t care for ourselves. As women and leaders we normally put the needs of others before ourselves at the expense of our health. I take time to reflect in the morning and evening, and I listen to my body. If you’re tired, rest. If you need a day, take one. It’s okay because the work is going to be waiting for you when you get back.”

Dr. Noreen Bush, Cedar Rapids (IA) Superintendent, the 2021 AASA School Superintendent of the Year. “Most of my life I’ve not been good at this. Quick snippets of daily joy is really what gets me going. I jam out on my song of the day in my car going to work. We have family dinner together every day. I focus on eating well and getting rest. I have accountability partners who hold me accountable for taking care of myself.”

Marie Izquierdo, chief strategy officer in Miami-Dade County (FL) Public Schools. “I like fitness and exercise quite a bit. I’m an Orange Theory advocate. It’s an hour I spend on myself. I love to read and sometimes binge on TV. Occasionally, I’ll take a mental health day to read at the beach or go for a long walk. I am a member of Chiefs for Change and there are so many women leaders there I admire. We turn to each other for support and advice about struggles that are unique to women.”

Dr. Danelle Walker Whiteside, first Black President of Austin Peay State University (TN). “I don’t really believe in work-life balance. It’s not 50/50. I’ve learned how to do work-life integration. I bring my family to university functions and my mom comes with us to help. Self-care is another issue. We have to give ourselves permission to integrate ourselves into our life. If I’m integrating everything, I have to give myself space to do it.”

Dr. Torie Weiston-Serdan, founder and executive director of Youth Mentoring Action Network (CA). “Self-care is a radical act. It’s new for me. I’m being more intentional about my time, and what I will and won’t do. I do 45 minutes of cardio meditation in the morning, and I’m working on eating the right kind of fuel for my body. And most importantly, understanding that if I don’t get to something today, the world will be fine if I do it tomorrow. It helps me make space for all the other things I do.”

Dr. Maria Armstrong, executive director of the Association of Latino Administrators and Superintendents. “Look at being present in the moment so you can enjoy it. Personally, I love to work out. It’s where I generate my energy and is the high point of my day. Once I’ve done that, I am ready to take on anything. Surround yourself with joy—friends and family. That’s the joy you have to make for yourself. You just have to make the time.”

Mónica García represents Board District 2 in Los Angeles USD. “I’m a learner when it comes to self-care and understanding that our best self is our whole self. Sleep cannot be underestimated, drinking water, taking a 30-minute walk, really understanding that you deserve it, and it will help you go your next mile. I believe in wellness. Schedule joy in your day. Surround yourself with people who feed your soul and, remember, you must be your biggest cheerleader, so you are clear about the ‘you’ you are building.”

Dr. Debra Duardo, superintendent of Los Angeles County Schools. “Now more than ever we need to practice self-care. This pandemic has put a highlight on mental health as our whole lives have been disrupted. I’ve been an avid meditator for over 30 years, so I meditate twice a day for 20 minutes. It gives me the ability to stay calm, to focus myself and not let the small stuff drive me crazy. I think everyone needs to find what works for them, whether it’s music, meditation, dance, sports, or the gym. It’s really important to find a balance.”

You can find more interviews of fierce and formidable women educators at Tech & Learning’s Honor Role podcast.