By Luke Parker & Sierra Hunter
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writers
The Problem
School has always been stressful. Stress and anxiety are as much a part of the high school experience as awkward dances, pimples and Friday night lights. Students were introduced to new stresses over the past year as they spent countless hours in virtual classrooms during the COVID-19 pandemic. They couldn’t see their friends in person. They weren’t physically with their teachers or school support staff.
While researchers can’t make a conclusive link to the pandemic, a November report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed a dramatic spike in emergency room visits last year related to young people’s mental health. Between April and October 2020, ER visits for the 5-11 age group increased 24 percent, and visitors 12-17 increased 31 percent. According to the CDC, young people reported feeling stressed, anxious, panicked and experiencing signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.
“When you are in the virtual learning setting, you feel very alone,” said Stephanie Dix, a guidance counselor at Dayton Oaks Elementary School in Howard County, Maryland. “The biggest challenge we’re seeing are students who are really missing that social piece.”
Across the world, students are feeling both the academic blow of virtual learning and the social jab from a calendar year filled with canceled events and distanced friendships. A German study found that 65 percent of children and adolescents felt school was more exhausting than before COVID-19, and that 40 percent were now experiencing a reduced quality of life.
Teachers everywhere are stuck navigating not only the pandemic’s disruption to their own curriculum but its effect on their students. Somehow, between the learning curve of hosting online classes and readjusting their teaching styles, educators must also find ways to create stress-relieving environments for their students.
The Solution
Dix, a guidance counselor at her school, introduced a social-emotional learning (SEL) curriculum in 2018. She could not have anticipated how necessary it would become.
SEL helps teach children different ways of understanding and managing their emotions. By developing students’ self-awareness, self-management, social-awareness, relationships and decision-making skills, teachers provide a space for students to be compassionate when expressing and listening to their feelings.
Dix introduced SEL with“Mindful Mornings” through the school’s weekly televised news program in 2018, her first year at Dayton Oaks. With the entire student body watching, she walked through simple breathing and mindfulness exercises students could complete in their chairs without interrupting their learning.
Positive feedback from staff members meant teachers were given the option to incorporate SEL into their lesson plans. In 2019, with administrative support at the school and county level – including the advocacy of superintendent Dr. Michael Martirano – 15 minutes of SEL was implemented into the daily master schedule of all Howard County elementary schools.
The first year of full SEL in the curriculum was cut short by the pandemic. During the scramble to transition online, teachers relied heavily on mindfulness exercises and stress-reduction activities to help students.
Jameelah Jefferson, a first grade teacher at Dayton Oaks, introduced her students to virtual learning by having them create their own online materials. Her kids would build and share PowerPoint presentations letting their classmates know what their lives looked like during the lockdown. From there, Jefferson would play a Guess Who-like game with different students’ fun facts, while the rest of the class had to pin down who she was talking about.
Jefferson knew she needed to adapt her teaching. For example, while the virtual classroom hardly impacted teacher read-alouds, a lot of partner-based communication activities were halted. Jefferson instead encouraged her students to message each other through Canvas, the school’s learning management system where kids not only have the ability to talk with one another, but reach out to staff members as well.
Dayton Oaks, like many schools across the country, is now doing hybrid learning — with some students in person and some still learning from home. SEL continues to be taught in a big way.
The county’s SEL curriculum, Caring School Community, provides teachers with resources and lessons addressing SEL’s five foundational social skills. For their daily 15-minute blocks, teachers are free to implement whatever activities they’d like with their homeroom students. That flexibility also allows staff members to gauge the needs of their students and make informed decisions about how best to maximize their SEL time.
Jefferson, for instance, schedules at least two additional “brain breaks” a day – quick pauses from academic lessons to check on and recharge students – on top of her regularly scheduled SEL lesson.
“We’ll take a minute when I notice they’re getting kind of antsy,” Jefferson said. “And do something a little different to get them to [keep going].”
Jefferson’s jungle-themed classroom has a variety of activities and resources for students. Sanitized fidget toys are available to offset restlessness; a yoga spinner game makes poses interactive; and flexible seating – with yoga balls, cushions, and wobble stools spread throughout the classroom – softens the learning environment.
A schoolwide favorite is GoNoodle, an online program that motivates students to get active to combat stress. While instructors have the option of evaluating class effort, competition is not the point of the site. From yoga to dancing to “jumping like the bunny,” GoNoodle aims to boost confidence, build compassion and enhance focus through a library of games and exercises that require teamwork and quick bursts of energy.
GoNoodle also has deep-breathing exercises to sooth students. Many teachers at Dayton Oaks also have in their classrooms so-called calming zones, designated areas where kids can retreat and regulate their emotions.
Jefferson moderates her 15-minute block with an SEL wheel. A finger-shaped spinner on the blackboard selects a sock monkey with a student’s name on it, deciding which classmate will lead the day’s discussion. The wheel is titled “Our Learning Family,” and it’s a bond Jefferson tells her kids will last forever. A wall-of-fame in the back of the room has photos from all of her learning families, starting with her 2006 class from the year Dayton Oaks opened.
“We really do embrace that in my classroom,” Jefferson said. “We are a family. We help each other out, and we’re always going to be supportive of each other.”
Insights
Teachers and administrators at Dayton Oaks recognize that SEL is a drawn-out process.
“It’s a mindset,” said assistant principal Adrienne Williams-McKinney. “But it’s also a culture that you have to build over time. It certainly doesn’t happen overnight.”
Before jumping headfirst into lessons and discussions, staff members need to start off slow. The first several weeks of the school year act as a trial-and-error period, as teachers find out what works for different students. Early lessons on equity also dictate the need for patience, enforcing the idea that classmates have individual needs and that all of those needs are worth addressing.
Teachers have learned that SEL works best when equity is understood first.
“I think frontloading it at the beginning of the year with those types of lessons…is helpful,” Jefferson said. “We make those connections for them, give them those experiences so that later, when they’re in the moment…they understand.”
Equity has been a high-priority concept for the Howard County Public School System since 2017.
Satisfying needs looks different from student to student. This year, Jefferson is working with children with developmental disorders who also have a tough time communicating. For them, a “brain break” could be something like blowing bubbles or watching YouTube videos.
While there may be some pushback or jealousy from her other students, Jefferson says a quick callback to those early lessons eases tensions. The emotion is stifled, and in the end, it becomes a teaching moment.
“If they have that experience, then you can reflect on it later,” Jefferson said. “Sometimes it feels like I really should be teaching whatever the curriculum is, but at this moment, this is what we need to focus on, and it will be helpful later when those situations come up.”
Evidence of Effectiveness
Dix was able to measure the effectiveness of the “Mindful Mornings” telecasts from 2018. The survey responses that were recorded for the 2018-2019 school year from teachers and students proved promising. One hundred percent of teachers surveyed found the mindfulness moments to be beneficial for their kids, and 67 percent of students who completed the survey said they believed the practices improved their ability to learn.
Because of the pandemic, numbers have yet to be calculated since SEL’s entry into the master schedule, though Dix believes continued exposure will have a stronger impact on students.
While research on this subject is in its infancy, other studies have dedicated themselves to the impact of mindfulness learning on academic performance. A 2015 experiment, for instance, found that reading grades were significantly improved after exposure to a “mindful-based social emotional learning” program, and that incidents of disruptive behavior fell by more than half.
Likewise, the most telling evidence at Dayton Oaks is behavioral. In Jefferson’s classroom, for instance, deep breathing exercises or yoga stretches will often help calm students coming back from the playground or P.E.
“It helps to clearly identify that it is time to switch gears,” she said.
Teachers also see the impact of SEL in terms of their students’ behavior and compassion towards one another. When one of Jefferson’s primary learners has an outburst, for instance, their classmates “don’t even flinch.”
“We want them to be understanding, appreciative, just open individuals that aren’t judging each other because we’re different,” Jefferson said. “The kids feel that and they are definitely showing that they can be empathetic individuals at such a young age.”
Teachers and administrators hope that these skills and lessons will follow students throughout their academic careers, and eventually, into the real world.
Limitations
While teachers admit engaging kids in class and at home requires a bit of creativity, with SEL, most of the exercises – like GoNoodle, yoga, and meditation – are easy to translate between the online and in-person environments.
Even the problems facing activities that require extra preparation, such as arts and crafts projects, can be solved with clear communication to parents.
Yet not everyone buys into social-emotional learning. Dix believes this may be because students don’t feel an immediate reward from mindfulness exercises.
“Although, we encourage all students to give it a try, we don’t push it,” she said. “Our hope is that the continued exposure will help decrease the hesitation.”
But even if the kids don’t immediately accept the practices, having access to those mental tools means that they can be used whenever they do decide to accept them.
“We learn that the more we practice it when things are okay, the more likely we are to use it when we really need it,” Dix said. “It’s normal to talk about your feelings here at the school because we have that built into our day every day.”