Caring for Student Wellness

Wellness is often described as the measure of a person’s mental and physical health to characterize their overall well-being (GoodTherapy, 2015).  This means that to keep the health and wellness of our students in the forefront of our minds and actions will be important in our classrooms.  How could we expect to educate a whole student if their overall well-being is not attended to first?  We know from decades of research that a student cannot even engage in learning if some basic and psychological needs are not met (Burton, 2012).  A focus on wellness can allow learners to have these deficiency needs met and real learning to occur.

Depending upon the source there are six to nine types or dimensions of wellness that we can consider when designing our classrooms and the lessons we teach.  According to Madeline Weilgus (2016) there are eight that we can use to guide our strategies for keeping students healthy and well.  To help she has created the great Wellness Wheel infographic below.

Here are some ideas for each of the dimensions of wellness that we could use in our classrooms.

Physical Wellness 

Take time often in class to do short physical brain breaks or movement videos.  There is a strong connection between movement and cognition (Jensen, 2005).  You can have students set their smart goals by miming or acting them out to a recorder or even just take a walk.  You can also include drama or role play into your class day to connect movement to material or play small games like tossing a ball to practice spelling or vocabulary (Jensen, 2005).   Also consider taking time for snacks and make sure all your students are getting the food they need.

Emotional Wellness

The key to emotional wellness is naming your feelings.  Naming and expressing your feelings tends to diffuse their power and lessen the burden they can create for you.  In other words “Name it to tame it” (Schwartz, 2015, para. 11).  Taking time in class to talk about emotions and work through them may be tough, but worth it in the long run.  Maybe a chart can help for students that have a hard time with this or are constantly angry or upset.  Teachers can also model the behavior by telling students when they are feeling something as well.

Spiritual Wellness

A great way to support your student’s spiritual wellness is to ask them big questions.  Wiggins and McTighe (2006) would probably call them essential questions, but helping students to contemplate big subjects with no real answer can be invaluable.  Also, including project based learning in connection to volunteering would be a great step for students (Weilgus, 2016).

Social Wellness

In general this means forming and cultivating healthy relationships (Weilgus, 2016).  Allowing students time to make connections and friendships will be of great importance for this to happen.  In addition, consider using classroom covenants to set ground rules and restorative justice techniques to teach students how to repair relationships.

Intellectual Wellness

This is what teachers do best!  Making students into life-long learners by differentiating material so that each student can find their zone of proximal development or their Goldilocks Zone should be incorporated into our lessons (Anderson, 2016).  Keep challenging students to do just a little more than they thought they could do.

Environmental Wellness

We can live sustainably in our classrooms as well.  Make your space a place your students want to be to increase their environmental wellness. When you are setting up your room, consider how and where students will sit and participate.  In fact Jennifer Gonzales (2018) gives several great ways to design your classroom in her article 12 Ways to Upgrade Your Classroom Design.   Also consider learning outside or in the spaces you're learning about if possible.

Occupational Wellness

Although this is more geared toward adult wellness, exploring your likes, dislikes, talents, and downfalls through trying new jobs is something you can do in your classroom.  Have students try out new jobs or institute a classroom economy where students get paid for cleaning or even teaching.  Try producing a video each month and editing it with online video software like WeVideo.  Some students can write, some can act, and some can be backstage.  Trying new jobs will be fun and help students to be curious about future life and goals.

Helping our students be safe, secure, thoughtful, and kind will be big steps in keeping them healthy and well.  It will also make your classroom a more calm and wondrous place for your students and you.

References

Anderson, M. (2016). Chapter 1. The Key Benefits of Choice. In Learning to Choose, Choosing to Learn. Alexandria, Virginia: ASCD. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/116015/chapters/The-Key-Benefits-of-Choice.aspx

Burton, N., M.D. (2012, May 23). Our Hierarchy of Needs. Psychology Today. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201205/our-hierarchy-needs

Gonzalez, J. (2018, March 18). 12 Ways to Upgrade Your Classroom Design [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/upgrade-classroom-design/

GoodTherapy. (2015, August 28). Wellness [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/psychpedia/what-is-wellness

Jensen, E. (2005). Chapter 4. Movement and Learning. In Teaching with the Brain in Mind, 2nd Edition. ASCD. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/104013/chapters/Movement-and-Learning.aspx

Schwartz, T. (2015, April 3). The Importance of Naming Your Emotions. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/04/business/dealbook/the-importance-of-naming-your-emotions.html#:~:text=Noticing and naming emotions gives,even the most difficult emotions.

Wielgus, M. (2016, October 5). The Types of Wellness. Seattle Pacific University Blog. Retrieved from https://digitalobby.spu.edu/wellness/2016/10/05/the-types-of-wellness/

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2006). Understanding by design (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Climbing the Teacher Continuum

I am in a somewhat exciting role at my school in which I get to see every student.  Throughout a week this year, I will get to visit each class at each grade level.  Since my lab is too small for an entire class to be in with proper social distancing, I will be visiting classes and working from a cart.  This isn’t ideal, but I do love the fact that I get to create such a small footprint in what we sometimes forget is a student, not a teacher space.  Removing a teacher’s desk is a great way to remove the hierarchy created by a teacher’s space and a student’s space and in essence gives every student a front row seat (Sutor, 2015).  I am excited to see and feel how this works with differing grade levels and students.  

However, for this post I wanted to think about the third grade classes that I will be seeing this year.  I decided to think about this grade specifically because I know that the students in that grade are a very diverse group.  There are several levels of mastery in the grade and at least a few students that fall into the category of high need or gifted.  With such a wide range it will be a challenge to make sure that my lessons and units are differentiated and personalized.  What is my role in providing personalized learning to this grade level using Colorado science standards and technology standards from ISTE?

To answer that I must know where I am on the continuum of educators engaged in personalized learning.  Zmuda and Thompson (2018) lay out four categories of educators within a personalized learning system in their free ebook How to Leverage Personalized Learning in the Classroom that are helpful in defining where I am at, and where I need to go.  The four categories shown in the graphic below are (a) Lecturer, (b) Instructor, (c) Facilitator, and finally (d) Coach.   

I believe that I am in the instructor tier at this moment.  I often use a mini lesson and then let students do independent practice in the form of a problem or project based learning activity.  This is a sufficient place to be, but I would like to move up at least one step this year by striving to become a facilitator.  Moving up these steps isn’t an overnight process and teachers need to make purposeful, scaffolded changes to move upward (Zmuda & Thompson, 2018).  If by the end of the school year, students have input into instruction and have a wider range of choice in their learning with me, I would count that as a solid win.

One way to accomplish this shift from instructor to facilitator is to incorporate a rotation model into my teaching (Zmuda & Thompson, 2018).  This is fantastic to hear since I have been planning on using a mix between a lab rotation where students would rotation to stations in set order and an individual rotation where they would have more choice in the order they complete a playlist of stations (Blended Learning Universe, n.d.).  My goal is to start with more of a lab rotation model, providing rotations that the third graders will complete in order.  Since I have to be wary of students using shared materials or interacting in groups that are not socially distanced, I believe that I can do this through the use of Google Classroom and hyperdocs or student playlists.  As third grade students, they may have had some choice in their primary grades, but not as much as opening the gates on individual rotations for the first part of the school year.  As they become more comfortable and as I scaffold learning around how to use the rotations, I can transition the students to a more individual rotation.  This can include choice in what stations they do and even creation of stations as well. 

Part of this model will be gathering data on students to group them appropriately surrounding content.  My place in this will be of utmost importance.  I will need to collect data about each student and will be able to do this in three important ways.  The first is that I will need to communicate with the classroom teacher.  This sounds like a no-brainer, but it is important to note.  It will be important to get IEP and testing information from teachers as well as any narrative information about how students are doing in and outside of school.  Knowing that a student is having a bad day because of a quick check-in with a teacher will be invaluable and ultimately my responsibility to ask the teacher.  I will also need to gather informal data based on things like entrance and exit tickets.  I will be giving a student survey within the first week to learn about student interests as well.  In a more formal way I can collect data from project rubrics and from formal pre-assessments as Zmuda and Thompson (2018) suggest.

I am excited to work with this interesting and diverse set of third graders this year.  As they are transitioning from a primary grade and getting more independence, I hope to use choice and involvement in content creation to reinforce a positive experience of it.  As their independence and involvement grows I will also be taking steps to become a true facilitator for my students. 

References

Blended Learning Universe. (n.d.). Blended learning: What is blended learning? Retrieved from https://www.blendedlearning.org/models/#stat

Sutor, C. (2015, January 30). The Rise Of The Student Footprint In 21st Century Learning Environments [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://www.integrusarch.com/2015/01/30/rise-student-footprint-21st-century-learning-environments/ 

Zmuda, A., & Thompson, J. (2018). How to Leverage Personalized Learning in the Classroom. Retrieved from https://info.freshgrade.com/hubfs/eBooks_and_Whitepapers/FG-PL-PDF-1.5.pdf?hsCtaTracking=bed942d8-65b8-4d86-9b16-4f7edbbec13d|c56989c4-019b-4ea5-aef7-c6effc4accf9

Creating a Safe and Supportive Classroom

In order for students of any background to learn, they must feel safe and supported (Parrett & Budge, 2012).  Although this may sound simple, that may not always be the case.  Students may live in chaotic home environments, may be experiencing homelessness, may be food insecure or many other things.  62% of children have physical symptoms related to stress caused by various sources like not getting enough sleep, overstuffed schedules, media saturation, bullying or teasing, and academic pressure (Shaw, 2015). In order to create a space where learning can happen these two aspects must be addressed by us as educators.  So how do we make our classrooms, as Goodwin and Hubbell (2013) would call them, oases of safety, positivity, and support?

Safe Classroom

Michael Rhod,  a teaching artist and arts-based community organizer (1998) says a safe space is "A working environment where participants feel comfortable playing and honestly sharing their thoughts and feelings” (p. 5).  This is in the context of theater and improvisation, but it can be applied directly to any working environment like a classroom.  One great way to have students honestly share and feel comfortable to play and be themselves is the use of a classroom covenant for acceptable behavior.  It is important to be clear and that your students are clear about what behavior is acceptable in the class (Goodwin & Hubbell, 2013).  A classroom is a group enterprise that works best when both teacher and students interact with one another in ways they have agreed upon in advance (Haskins, 2015).

A class covenant can be created the first day.  Students and teacher gather around a large paper and go over how they will agree to behave in the class.  When I create a covenant with classes, I like to start with the basic PBIS tenets that they see in our whole school.  Ours are being safe, respectful, responsible, and kind.  Those are so broad that I ask students to give examples of how to do these things for our covenant.  These items become the main points of the covenant.  It is also important to remind them that it is not the same as a class contract.  A contract has an easy out clause, meaning if you break the contract it is over.  A covenant however, doesn’t work that way.  If you break a part of the covenant, you and the group have to work together to get you back into the covenant.  That is my favorite part about covenants, they focus on getting back in and not pushing out.  What better safety net is there than that?  The students and I sign the covenant signifying that we agree and understand that it can be changed when needed.

Supportive Classroom 

Good, comprehensive support in the classroom uses a needs-based approach and the mindset of doing whatever it takes to make students successful (Parrett & Budge, 2012).  This may sound a tad radical, but “whatever it takes” has to be the bottomline for student support.  If kids are hungry then feed them; if kids are dirty then wash them; if kids are tired then find a way for them to rest.  Without these basic needs fulfilled, teaching is a losing battle to a student’s survival instinct.  This is especially true as some of us head back into classrooms amongst a pandemic.  My goal for this year is basically making sure the students are physically and emotionally healthy.  If they learn about science and technology along the way, great.  

In the meantime there are some practical things that we can do to create supportive classrooms for students.  Here are some suggestions from Parrett and Budge (2012) for doing just that:

• Understand the influence of the student's life situation on learning.  Take the time to get to know each student’s situation so that you know what supports are needed.

• Foster a bond between you and the student.  This means taking time to create relationships with students, setting high expectations, and providing tools to support these expectations.

• Create Advisory groups and smaller learning environments.  Create small groups of students that meet regularly with their mentors or advisors, maybe you or another staff member.

• Create links between school and home, teachers and families.  Make sure that you are communicating with families not just about problems, but successes.  The more you know about students' lives outside of school, the more you can support inside.

• Focus on Trust.  Trust is “...the essential building block in the positive relationships that foster authentic school improvement” (Parrett & Budge, 2012, para. 57).  The translation: do what you say you will and expect the same of students.

If we as educators can create safe and supportive spaces for students so much of the work will be done.  That doesn’t mean it is easy, but it is worth it.

References

Goodwin, B., & Hubbell, E. R. (2013). The 12 touchstones of good teaching: a checklist for staying focused every day. ASCD, McREL International.

Haskins, M. E. (2015, March 4). A Classroom Covenant. BizEd. Retrieved from https://bized.aacsb.edu/articles/2015/03/a-classroom-covenant

Parrett, W. H., & Budge, K. M. (2012). Chapter 8. Fostering a Healthy, Safe, and Supportive Learning Environment: How HP/HP Schools Do It. In Turning High-Poverty Schools into High-Performing Schools. ASCD. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/109003/chapters/Fostering-a-Healthy,-Safe,-and-Supportive-Learning-Environment@-How-HP~HP-Schools-Do-It.aspx

Rohd, M. P. (1998). Theatre for Community, Conflict and Dialogue: Hope Is Vital Training Manual. Heinemann Press.

Shaw, G. (2015, August 27). 10 Reasons Your Child Might Be Stressed. WebMD. Retrieved from https://www.webmd.com/special-reports/kids-and-stress/20150827/what-you-can-do