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Implementing Wellness Skills
Support the Health & Wellness of Your Students, Families, Staff, and Educators
Help students develop important wellness skills like stress management, resilience, and empathy while learning to build a safe and affirming culture within your school community. Learn More -->
Research shows that Wellness Skills have many positive outcomes including:
- Increasing students’ academic achievement
- Improving students’ prosocial behavior in and out of the classroom
- Providing 21st century life skills
- Empowering teachers’ self-efficacy
To help schools and districts implement Wellness Skills, RethinkEd has three key tips:
Tip 1: Recognizing the Positive Impact that Wellness Can Have to Transform Education
Research-based data makes it clear that quality wellness skills programs provide the tools to increase teachers’ effectiveness and students’ academic and social outcomes.
Prioritizing wellness skills learning is essential to help students reach their full potential. Wellness Skills provides the tools to be successful in the 21st century by developing skills that:
- Promote critical thinking
- Develop creativity & effective communication
- Improve collaboration within the academic content
Tip 2: Promoting Collective Teacher Efficacy to Address Challenges
Implementing wellness skills learning effectively requires a collaborative approach from a team of educators who support each other.
This can be built by establishing intentional professional learning communities, or PLCs, with an aim toward building Collective Teacher Efficacy.
Tip 3: Creating a Safe and Caring Classroom to Access the Learning Brain
Cognitive science indicates that to learn, the brain must feel safe. To feel safe and able to learn, students must understand themselves and feel connected to their peers, their teacher, and the content.
Building connections within the classroom supports students in accessing the learning brain, making it easier to engage in the excitement of learning and persevere through its ambiguities and challenges.
Grade 3: Improving My Focus
Focus is the ability to direct one's attention and ignore distractions. Having the ability to focus helps students learn and achieve goals. A lack of focus affects the brains ability to listen, memorize, reason, solve problems, and make decisions.
With many things competing for our students' attention, it is important to teach them how to focus. With practice, the brain can be trained to focus better and for longer periods of time.
Grade 7: From Problem to Solution
Negative emotions such as frustration, anger, and embarrassment can signal a problem. Developing the skills to solve a problem empowers students to view problems as challenges to overcome.
There are five basic steps to solving any problem. Students learn these steps using the acronym STEPS. 1) State the problem; 2) Think of solutions; 3) Evaluate the solutions; 4) Pick a solution; and 5) Step up! Try the solution and reevaluate as needed.
Grade 10: Everyday Resilience
Resilience is the ability to manage and recover from daily setbacks and adversity. While self-control, focus, problem-solving, and goal setting can help students manage many situations, some situations can't be controlled.
Resilience is the inner resolve that although a situation may be out of the students' control, they can control how they perceive and respond to it. Resiliency is a skill that can be developed through developing positive relationships, managing one's emotions, becoming more autonomous, and accepting challenges as opportunities to grow.
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