Discoveries of a Teacher Counselor

Insights about working as a teacher /counselor in an international school that need sharing.

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APPS for Student Wellbeing

In bringing student wellbeing into the classroom, I began looking at apps to support my advisory work. There were so many, frankly, that it was overwhelming! So, instead of letting that get in the way of moving forward, I brought my Grade 5 students on board to help out, experimenting with different wellness apps throughout the year with the following evaluative goals:

Ease of use in the classroom

Student preference and sense of immediate benefit

Independent use outside of the school setting

The result of this work has been a list of apps across the areas of mindfulness, emotional regulation and yoga. It is certainly not a comprehensive list, there are just too many and more being developed everyday. Instead, this a list of those that seem, at the moment, most appropriate and applicable for school and student use, up to Middle School. The list includes information regarding their owners/creators, costs, program options as well as links to Common Sense media reviews, should they exist.

From the hands on experience of and feedback from my students, the winners were Smiling Mind, Stop/Breathe/Think, SuperFit Yoga and Settle Your Glitter.

It has been wonderful to see students using these apps as tools for heir own wellbeing and balance. The next step, encouraging students to go to the apps, independently, as a way of managing day to day challenges, and connecting the use of these apps to balancing their 4 selves, the physical, emotional, social and thinking selves that work together within us.

I hope this list is a useful resource for teachers, parents and students alike. Until next time!

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Gratitude Project Activity: Reframing

I have had the pleasure to work alongside Emi Bojtar. With her love for mindfulness and learning beyond academics, we set out together on this Gratitude Project journey. One day, we were taken by the negativity of some students towards the many basic things in life they had; this became the inspiration for one of our gratitude activities.

Emi put together a slide presentation entitled, “How to be grateful for the things that bug us”. What followed were a number of slides comprised of an image and a reframing question such as:

I’ll be honest, it took the students a while to get started. We were just about to change tack when one student hesitantly put up her hand and asked, “If we have crumbs on the table or floor, doesn’t that mean we were fortunate enough to have food to eat?” And from there, it took off. Slide after slide the kids talked, shared and compared their reasons for seeing something positive in a daily chore or event.

As a follow up homework assignment, students were asked to create their own slide in a similar style. When all of the slides were in, we had a fun “go around” of each other’s slides, writing a comment on each slide about what to be grateful for given the situation on the slide. It was lovely to see the kids beginning to look beyond what bothered them personally to wow, this might mean something else if I look at it a little bit differently.

This was an easy and effective activity for kids. Not only did it allow for concrete practice in reframing based on their own daily lives, it also provided an opportunity for a home-school connection and the possibility of seeing the impact of this reframing in real time. I never asked parents if they saw their kids responding more positively to situations they didn’t like or didn’t want to do (like chores!) but I will make a point to next time.  

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Graphing Gratitude - The Grade 4 Gratitude Project in Action

Experiment set up done, it was time to get into the fun stuff, the activities for the kids. After a few weeks of discussing gratitude, help, care, compassion as well as recording three things almost everyday for which we felt grateful, the class graphed their responses. Categories were based on the students’ own three things lists; categories ranged from family, nature, health to toys and other material elements. Students choose the three things they seemed to be grateful for most often and we graphed these using post its. A simple and visual way for us to have a discussion about gratitude in our daily lives. 

All input posted on our wall graph and we began looking for patterns in our responses. It was immediately obvious the gratitude we felt towards family and friends and how grateful we were for our health. I was pleased that the bars measuring material elements were lower! I like to draw the conclusion that the gratitude work we did as an Elementary School the previous year was shining through here. 

Finally, I asked the kids to look for patterns or responses that were surprising to them. This was interesting! In doing so, one student remarked that she was surprised that although we feel grateful for our friends and family, we showed only one response for feeling grateful for the people around us at school. It was wonderful! And what a way to move into a discussion about why that might be and what we can do as a group in school to address that. Students took action. It was time to start noticing how hard school staff (in particular) and faculty work for us everyday. Soon we were learning and calling them by name and being conscious of saying good morning, please and thank you. Little things but I can’t help but feel that a little awareness, compassion and kindness to the staff was born that day. I was so proud of my class.

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The Grade 4 Gratitude Experiment - Setting the Scene

Having just worked on the scientific process in class, having our Gratitude Experiment take the shape of a “real” experiment, or at least as close as possible, seemed like a logical connection to and application of recent student learning experiences. The set up took a good couple of weeks!

We started with defining, brainstorming our personal thoughts and questions around gratitude. Then came the “research” which we conducted as interviews. 

The “Research”:

Part 1 - Discussing and Defining Gratitude

As a class we defined and discussed the terms gratitude, thankfulness and appreciation. Students brainstormed questions around these words. Of interest were the subtle differences that emerged as the students began to explore possibilities, such as:

Should we be grateful all the time? and Can we be grateful all the time?

Do we need to be happy to be grateful? and Do we need to be grateful to be happy?

How does being grateful make us feel? and How does being grateful make others feel?

Part 2 - Interviews:

We were 20 students and 2 adults in the class. Our research took the form of interviews and armed with a table of questions, kids were given two 30 minute periods of class time to interview teachers, administrators and students. Outside of school time, they interviewed parents, siblings, neighbours, coaches, grandparents etc. to gather as many answers and thoughts as possible. As a last step, we invited our school director into class to help us out. Kids took turns asking the questions and for an hour he engaged with the students about the importance of gratitude in life, sharing his own views and experiences. As a new director, it was lovely to see students interact with and begin to get to know the new face at the head of the ship!

Part 3 - Our Guiding Research Questions

What a challenge! How to collate all the information and narrow down our questions to a more manageable and focused number? With all of the individual questions glued onto A3 papers, the kids made their way around the room, adding their research results:

From all of this information, students discussed and shared, compared ideas and made observations. In the end, we asked them all to stand near the one question they felt was the most important to them. A trend emerged; students clustered around questions that related to three key concepts: feelings, self knowledge and connections.

As a result we were able to narrow the field of questions to our final three that would guide the experiment itself:

How does practising gratitude help us to connect with people?

How does practising gratitude make us and others feel?

How does practising gratitude help us to know ourselves better?

Each student was then able to write his/her own hypothesis by answering the three questions above.

Part 4 - The Self Assessment:

Lastly, came the self-assessment. Part of my own personal reading revolved around assessments for gratitude, the how, the why, the if at all. It was interesting to discover that there is little research in the area of the use and applicability of gratitude measures with children. Along the way, I came across work by Froh; using his analysis of several measures for adults in children as my starting point, I chose to use the Gratitude Questionnaire - Six Item Form, or GQ-6, measure developed by McCullough, Emmons and Tsang. It is a short, 6 item, licart scale questionnaire which  made it easy to read and understand for the kids. We were able to score the questionnaire together and recorded our scores.

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Why GRATITUDE?

Simply put, because it forces us to take a step outside of ourselves. And when we step outside ourselves we can connect with others and the world around us and relationship building is key for all of us.

I often wonder how it is that with so much, some people may be left feeling lonely or feeling as though “more” is needed to be truly happy? What strengths do people facing adversity and challenge have that allow them to be resilient and seemingly happy despite their apparent suffering? These questions are not new or unique to me, I know that, but I began to wonder how to create opportunities in the classroom for developing curiosity in my students about the nature of gratitude, wellbeing and connectedness.

In 2014, I had the pleasure of attending the Greater Good Science Centre at Berkeley (Thank you ISB for sending me!). What a fantastic experience; educators coming together from all over the world to discuss the science of gratitude, compassion, awe, forgiveness to name a few. It was here that I met Brooke D. Lavelle and Vicky Zakrzewski. I connected with them once again for their thoughts on measuring gratitude and activity ideas for bringing gratitude into the classroom. I explored the Greater Good Science Centre resources on gratitude. I read and read. One view, that of Robert Emmons, struck a chord with me: gratitude is an “affirmation of goodness“ and a recognition of “the sources of this goodness as being outside ourselves (Emmons, 2010). This idea of gratitude and connectedness to others and the world around us was echoed by Brooke in our communications and conversations. Believing that healthy relationships promote both emotional and physical wellbeing, it seemed to be an interesting place to start.

And so, my Grade 4 Gratitude Experiment began to take shape. In the end, the experiment was tied to the idea of CARE for ourselves, others and the world and ran from January to June. Details of the experiment and what we discovered to follow shortly.

More resources on Gratitude you might find interesting:

Gratitude and Wellbeing - The Benefits of Appreciation (Psychiatry)

You can check out Brooke’s work into care and compassion here at Courage of Care

The Youth Gratitude Project

Making Grateful Kids from Psychology Today

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The First Go - Getting my bravery hat on

Well, here we go! I’m new at this writing thing so forgive the grammatical errors along the way. Hopefully, though, the thoughts and references you find are of interest!

I’ll be writing about many things of interest to me as an international teacher and school counselor. I might write a book review. I might write about some research. I might write about curriculum, tech or a class or school project. Who knows, I might find I end up writing about something I never thought I’d ever write about! We’ll see. For now, I’ll start with a class gratitude project I did with my grade 4 class last year. It was engaging, easy and incredibly interesting. 

Stay tuned for part 1 - Why Gratitude?