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One of the Best Ways to Teach Kids About The Stress Response + Their Brains

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Help your students manage stress better by teaching kids about the stress response & their brains. Includes fun stress response lessons ideas.

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Strategies for fostering relationships with middle and high school students starting on the first day of the school year and then growing them all year long.

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Teacher establishes routines, procedures, transitions, & expectations for student behavior - Ex 1

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Teacher establishes routines, procedures, transitions, & expectations for student behavior - Ex 6

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Teachers have long known that feeling safe and secure in school helps students focus their energy on learning. And the research bears that out: A 2018 study found that when teachers deliberately foster a sense of belonging by greeting each student at the door of the class, they see "significant improvements in academic engaged time and reductions in disruptive behavior."

Edutopia covered that study last year, and we've shared many other ideas from teachers for ensuring that every student in the classroom feels like they belong.

Some of the activities below take less than five minutes. They're divided up among the grades, but many can apply across all of the years from kindergarten to 12th grade.

Elementary School

Shout-Outs: This is a quick way for students to celebrate each other for doing a job well or for attempting something difficult. Shout-outs can be incorporated at any point in a class. First-grade teacher Valerie Gallagher of Providence, Rhode Island, rings a chime when she wants to get the class's attention to ask who has a shout-out.

"It's not just me as the teacher saying, 'You're doing well'-it's a way for them to interact with each other and celebrate positivity," says Gallagher.

Friendly Fridays: Elizabeth Peterson, a fourth-grade teacher in Amesbury, Massachusetts, uses Friendly Fridays as a simple way for students to lift each other and themselves up. Peterson has her students write a friendly, anonymous note to a classmate, practice using positive self-talk, or use storytelling to give a peer a pep talk.

Sharing Acts of Kindness: Fifth-grade teacher Marissa King, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, shares two activities that encourage kindness. In the first, the teacher gives students secret kindness instructions, such as writing an anonymous note to a peer who is struggling in one of their classes.

The second activity revolves around noticing others' acts of kindness: When a student sees a peer tidying up in the classroom, for example, they can post a thank you note on a shared digital "kindness wall." Both activities coach students to be kind to their peers in the hope that they'll begin to practice kindness unprompted.

Middle School

Paper Tweets: To build community in her seventh-grade classroom, Jill Fletcher of Kapolei Middle School in Kapolei, Hawaii, created a bulletin board modeled on Twitter. Students use a template to create a profile, and they enlist at least three followers-a friend, an acquaintance, and someone they don't interact with much.
Courtesy of Jill Fletcher
When the class does this activity-which takes about 45 minutes to set up the first time-Fletcher has them respond to prompts about their current mood or new things happening in their lives, and then their followers respond.

Class Norms: Bobby Shaddox, a seventh-grade social studies teacher at King Middle School in Portland, Maine, has his students develop a set of norms for themselves-adjectives that describe them as a community of learners. Having students come up with their own norms creates "a pathway toward belonging for every single student in that class," says Dr. Pamela Cantor, founder of Turnaround for Children.

"Instead of a top-down list of rules that a teacher gives a class, these are words that we generated together," says Shaddox. "It helps us own the behavior in the classroom."

Group Salutes: A moment shared between two or more students at the beginning or end of an activity, a Group Salute is a teacher-prompted interaction that is a quick, low-prep way to cultivate community. The shared gesture can be physical-like a high five-or social-a teacher could ask students to express gratitude to their group members.

There's some interesting data supporting this idea: Researchers found that NBA teams whose players touch the most early in the season-high fives, fist bumps, etc.-had the best records later for the season.

High School

Morning Meetings: Morning meetings have long been a staple of elementary classrooms, but they can help students in all grades transition into class. Riverside School, a pre-K to 12th-grade school in Ahmedabad, India, uses a version of morning meetings at every grade level as "a pure relationship-building time." Bonding exercises led by teachers or students include physical or social and emotional activities, or discussions of sensitive topics like bullying.

Appreciation, Apology, Aha: As a quick, daily closing activity, students gather in a circle and share an appreciation of one of their peers, an apology, or a light bulb moment. The teacher models the activity by sharing and then asks for volunteers to speak.

"Those types of appreciations and community recognitions can go a long way toward building bonds," explains Aukeem Ballard, an educator with Summit Public Schools in the San Francisco Bay Area.

"A low-stakes thorn might be 'I feel tired.' Yet many students choose to share more personal items, like 'My thorn is that my dog is sick and I'm really worried about her,'" writes Alex Shevrin Venet, a former school leader at a trauma-informed high school.

Snowball Toss: Students anonymously write down one of their stressors on a piece of paper, crumple it up, gather in a circle, and throw their paper balls in a mock snowball fight. When that's done, they pick up a snowball and read it aloud.

"The idea is that we're moving around. We're able to have fun, laugh, scream, be loud, and then have that discussion about stress," says Marcus Moore, an advisory leader at Urban Prep School in Chicago.

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These community-building ideas for the classroom can help teachers ensure that students in every grade feel like they belong.

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Inclusive Alternatives to Behavior Charts - Inclusive Schooling

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Dr. Julie Causton & Dr. Kristie Pretti-Frontczak creating inspiring & innovating PD to districts. It is possible to create joyful and inclusive schools where all students flourish!

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Morning Meetings: A Daily Strategy for Teaching Social and Emotional Learning to 1st Grade Students

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Making the Most of Morning Meeting: Articles: Indiana Resource Center for Autism: Indiana University Bloomington

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Circle-time, or morning meeting is often a valued component of the school day. Educators view this as an important time to address social skill development, as well as to introduce and review academic concepts.

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Behaving With Cowley - Classroom Routines

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Independence in Literacy Centers for Kindergarten

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Independence in Literacy Centers for Kindergarten

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The Daily Five: Fostering Literacy Independence in Pre-K and Kindergarten

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The Daily Five: Fostering Literacy Independence in Third and Fourth Grade (Virtual Tour)

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Transcript

Literacy Coach: Now I'll talk about the Daily Five. This is our literacy framework that we're using for independent work.  Now the first component of the Daily Five is Read to Self, where the children self-select a book that they have chosen that has meaning to them, that they can read, and that they enjoy.  The second component, is Read to Someone, where they'll sit with a partner elbow to elbow, knee to knee.  They take turns reading, or they'll read to each other.  The third component is Listening to Reading where we have the children sit at a computer, they listen to reading on one of the many sites that we have that they listen to storybooks on, or they can listen at our listening center.  The fourth component is Work on Writing, They can write about whatever they choose to, it's not structured, if they want to write a letter someone, they can do that, or they can write an adventure story, or it's their choice.  They can make their own books, they can make their own stories and share them with each other.  And the fifth component is Working with Words.  The children find interesting words, they use them from the word wall, they make games, they play games with words, they take letters apart, mix them around, make new words, and share their new words with each other.

Teacher: As part of our Daily Five routine the student select books for Read to Self and Read to Someone. Each student is giving a book bin at the beginning of the year. We then visit the school library as well as the classroom library and each student selects books that are good-fit books, so these books are at their level and they are also interesting for the students. In some of the book bins students have decided to use a work collector. The word collector is a smaller representation of our chart for expanding vocabulary. And while they're reading their books, their good-fit books, they can come across interesting and exciting words that they can add to their word collector, and then they would use their word collector as part of their writing.

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BALANCEDLITERACYDIET :: index :: Balanced Literacy Diet

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Literacy Coach: Now I'll talk about the Daily Five. This is our literacy framework that we're using for independent work. Now the first component of the Daily Five is Read to Self, where the children self-select a book that they have chosen that has meaning to them, that they can read, and that they enjoy.

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Literacy CAFE for Independence in Reading at 1st Grade

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Literacy CAFE for Independence in Reading at 1st Grade

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Literacy CAFE in First Grade: Fostering Independence with a Menu of Strategies (Virtual Tour)

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Putting Students in Charge of Their Learning

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Giving students choices and the means to assess their progress fosters metacognition and independence.

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When feedback originates with students, they can assess their current understanding and see what they need to do to improve.

Cavan Images / Alamy Stock Photo

The trigger for feedback is often when students complete a teacher-assigned task and then receive comments that ask them to make changes. Students typically revise their work for the sake of boosting their grade. Feedback in these cases has limited impact, since the teacher told students what to fix. In Visible Learning: Feedback, John Hattie and Shirley Clarke recognize that feedback is most valuable when it moves from student to teacher. High-impact feedback begins and ends with the student. It also takes off when it builds on student strengths: What are students close to mastering?

Feedback can be hard to receive when someone is telling you what to change. In a TEDx Talk, Sheila Heen explains that feedback can be difficult because we want to be accepted for who we are right now. According to Heen and Douglas Stone, three types of feedback include evaluation, coaching, and appreciation, and focusing on those can help teachers put students in the driver's seat.

Evaluation

Evaluation tells a student where they stand in comparison with grade-level peers typically through a letter grade or score. To put students in charge of evaluation, they should be the first ones to score their work.

For example, in English class, students can use a standards-aligned checklist on writing an effective argument to self-assess. After they get their score, they select an area of interest (and strength) to improve upon-this combination increases student motivation. Next, students use a tool like this SMART Goals Handout to customize a goal based on their self-assessment. The SMART handout asks the student to consider who can help as they work toward their goal. When the student reaches out to the teacher for any support, talk focuses on the goal with the evaluation as evidence. Evaluation feedback in this way moves from student to teacher.

Coaching

The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) establishes what a learner can do independently and what they can do with some support. Through self-evaluation and goal setting, this grows clearer as students try out their goals.

Coaching feedback is a reflective technique within the ZPD. The type of coaching that students need depends on their goals and the roadblocks they face. Many times, students may need coaching that does not directly reflect the content they're learning. For example, the student who wants to improve the clarity of their writing may need coaching in time management strategies, not writing itself. This student knows that their writing is too lengthy in lab reports and leaves the teacher digging for the answer. The teacher might coach the student to put a time limit on their work. Try out answering each question in a lab in no more than 10 minutes.

The use of time limits will reveal roadblocks with which the student can then receive some more help. For example, if they still can't get their point across in a concise way, they should note what happens in that time. They might be rereading without beginning the response. In this case, they need to reflect on their note-taking, reading skills, or activity level during the lab. Allow students to drive the coaching feedback in this way.

A tool to use during coaching is WOOP for Classrooms from the Character Lab. This will help students quickly retool their goal based on feedback.

Appreciation

Appreciation feedback helps students to develop a positive self-narrative. They first need to appreciate themselves. They should learn about the power of yet and the counternarrative. As they evaluate their work and set goals, students should practice adding yet to "can't do" thoughts: "I am not a concise writer... yet." Using the word yet feeds into the counternarrative of reframing the story they tell themselves. The inner voice needs practice in talking up the positives and reframing the negatives.

In Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel explain how learning something new changes the brain; thus, making mistakes is the pathway to advanced learning. The counternarrative moves from "I failed and am embarrassed" to "I learned something new and am stronger for it."

All Feedback Begins and Ends With the Learner

In Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, William Burnett and David J. Evans mention a sign that hangs outside the Stanford Life Design Lab that reads, "You are here." It's where we all begin when seeking feedback. Students need to look around and verbalize where they are now and then ask themselves these three big questions posed by John Hattie: Where am I going? How am I getting there? Where next? These questions can be posted above your classroom board or on your digital course page for students to use daily.

Feedback begins and ends with the learner. If you teach students how to use these tools, feedback reframe takes place by having the student sit in the driver's seat-they determine their current location, route, and destination, and where to go next.

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A Way to Increase Students' Independence in Learning

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When feedback originates with students, they can assess their current understanding and see what they need to do to improve. Cavan Images / Alamy Stock Photo The trigger for feedback is often when students complete a teacher-assigned task and then receive comments that ask them to make changes.

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How to Foster Metacognitive Skills for Independent Learning

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Academic Survival Skills Checklist handout

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concept maps and goal-setting to support the development of self-regulated learnin

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At some point in your child or student's life they will be part of a conflict. Teaching them how to address conflicts to reach a peaceful resolution is an important part of social skills development and maturity.

To get started, explain that there are various conflict resolution styles: passive, assertive, aggressive. Share examples of each of the styles, such as: a passive person may avoid eye contact or ignore a problem, whereas an aggressive person may resort to shouting or getting too close and raising their voice.

Talk through each of the resolution styles and encourage your students to consider how they address conflicts when they arise. Share how they can be more assertive while addressing conflicts rather than passive or aggressive.

Our educational consultants have prepared a learning module that educators can use to teach about conflict resolution. This module includes a PowerPoint presentation, activity sheets, homework samples, and an outline for the lesson. Give it a try!

The special education resources on this page were authored by Watson Institute's special education consultant, Andrea Morris, M.Ed.

Powerpoint Presentation:
Assertive vs. Aggressive PowerPoint Assertive vs. Aggressive Facilitator's Guide
Resource Materials:
Assertive vs. Aggressive Activity Sheet 1 Assertive vs. Aggressive Homework Assertive vs Aggressive Activity Sheet 2 Assertive vs. Aggressive Activity Sheet 1 Assertive vs. Aggressive Teacher Alert Assertive vs. Aggressive Assertive vs. Aggressive Mini Schedule Assertive vs. Aggressive Parent Note Assertive vs Aggressive Outline Assertive vs Aggressive Social Power Point card
Pre/Post Assessment

A pre and post lesson assessment is included in each lesson. Use of the assessment is an instructor preference. Many of the 'homework' pages for a lesson can be used as a pre/post assessment device alone or as part of the provided assessment. Each homework page can be checked by the instructor as well as the student.

Review all included pages of the lesson to determine what 'assessment' method will meet your needs. If the student is able to achieve a + in the majority of items of the pre-assessment, or if the student has been observed to display the skill topic of the lesson often, then the lesson may not be introduced or can be taught with a group as review and/or reinforcement.
Assertive vs. Aggressive Pre/Post Assessment
If you have questions or concerns about the Watson Institute's use of this information, please contact us.

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Social Skills to Teach Conflict Resolution - Watson Institute

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At some point in your child or student's life they will be part of a conflict. Teaching them how to address conflicts to reach a peaceful resolution is an important part of social skills development and maturity. To get started, explain that there are various conflict resolution styles: passive, assertive, aggressive.

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Our most popular FREE resources for therapists, parents, and educators! Permission is granted for use in clinical or school-based practices only. Please

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The idea of implementing a social-emotional learning (SEL) curriculum into your school building or district may feel daunting. While all 50 states have social-emotional learning standards, oftentimes these standards don't include tangible steps for school leaders interested in cultivating a community of SEL in their school buildings.

Why Social Emotional Learning in schools?

Research tells us that both the physical environment and the psychological environment of a school building have an impact on student achievement. The physical environment of a school building includes anything from classroom size to lighting, to accessibility, while the psychological environment is related to classroom climate and student-teacher interactions. When we take SEL beyond the classroom we not only emphasize the importance of these skills, attitudes, and behaviors to our students but also increase the likelihood of mastery.

Let's explore five easy ways to start creating a community of SEL in your school now:

5 ways to create an SEL community:

1. Encourage teachers to incorporate into their lessons.

Some SEL topics include self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. It's helpful if teachers share the concepts and language they're using related to the topic with other staff members in the building, including specialty teachers. This will help everyone to get on the same page and use consistent language and concepts with students in their interactions.

2. Use morning announcements to promote relevant SEL topics.

Morning announcements are a great opportunity to spread awareness and provide reminders to students and staff about relevant SEL topics.

3. Make SEL fun and engaging for students.

SEL lessons don't have to be boring or static. Use videos, games, and small group activities to engage students and encourage their interactions with members of their classroom community.

4. Communicate with families.

Go beyond the school building and invite parents and guardians to participate in SEL with their kids. Sending home relevant goal posters is an easy and effective way to keep families informed about what their students are learning at school.

5. Utilize visual supports in the classroom and hallways.

Visual supports, like posters and bulletin board displays, are a fun and creative way to carry SEL concepts beyond the classroom environment and into the school community. Check out some of our free donwloadable Everyday Speech bulletin displays here:

Using SEL to create a community within your school building can help foster feelings of unity among students and staff. It can help create a stronger sense of collective identity that spans grade levels and includes every staff member and student in the building. It can help your school community feel as though they are a part of something bigger than themselves.

Related Blog Posts:

"Everyday Speech is easy to use and includes most topics that I discuss with my students with social language difficulties. The videos are the BEST! Easy to watch and for kids to relate to. They generate the best discussions."
- Ann-Marie Small, M.S. CCC-SLP

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How to Cultivate an SEL Community at Your School | Free Bulletin Boards

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The idea of implementing a social-emotional learning (SEL) curriculum into your school building or district may feel daunting. While all 50 states have social-emotional learning standards, oftentimes these standards don't include tangible steps for school leaders interested in cultivating a community of SEL in their school buildings.

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Mindfulness Resources for the MCPS Community

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Effective strategies to engage students in learning

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Behavior Specific Praise Practice (PBIS Teacher Training Companion Video)

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Behavior-Specific Praise: Elementary School Example & Non-Example

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Goal Setting and Self-Reflection for Students with Google Forms

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Goal Setting and Self-Reflection for Students with Google Forms

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Student Goal Setting and Reflection Using Google Forms

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Using Google Forms to Track Behavior Explanation

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Using Google Forms to Track Behavior Explanation

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Tracking Classroom Behavior Using Google Forms

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Restorative Justice & Peacemaking Circles - How to run a meeting like a Restorative Justice Talking Circle.

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I posted earlier on emotional room, ending that post with reference to Interactive Meeting Format, and a link to Moving Beyond Icebreakers, where I learned this term. The specific 6 part format they provide makes sense, but I modified it down to the four stages of Circle process, I know and love.

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How to run a meeting like a Restorative Justice Talking Circle.

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Talking Circles for Restorative Discipline

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Talking Circles for Restorative Discipline

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Talking Circles: For Restorative Justice and Beyond

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A
TT awardee discusses how Talking Circles empower her middle school students.

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Marzano Highly Engaged Classroom Materials

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Marzano Highly Engaged Classroom Materials

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The Highly Engaged Classroom Reproducibles

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The store will not work correctly in the case when cookies are disabled.

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9 Resources for Creating an Inclusive Classroom This School Year

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Here are nine great resources to help educators make their classroom more inclusive as we head back to school.