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Key points
- Teaching well-being skills like gratitude can significantly enhance students' overall development.
- Positive psychology offers practical tools educators and families can easily incorporate into daily routines.
- Building a classroom culture that values character strengths can help students celebrate each other.
- Simple practices like daily meditation can foster a positive and supportive learning environment.
by Patricia Wright, Ph.D., MPH
It is the end of August. Even though I haven’t worked as a public school educator for years, this month on the calendar still feels like it is time to “get something started.” I remember getting my class list and planning my curriculum for the first few weeks of school. I would call students and their families before the school year started and ask to meet so that the first day of school wasn’t our first day of meeting each other.
I look back on these years with fondness (and a few memories of the exhaustion that is inevitable with teaching!). The wisdom of having a few years of personal and professional growth since those days also creates some perspective about what I could have improved. Looking back, I realize my students could have used increased focus on developing the skills of well-being.
As I look back, one of my “hopes” is that today's teachers know the importance of prioritizing and providing direct instruction in the skills of well-being. Happiness and well-being can be learned, but learning requires instruction. I could have done a better job providing direct instruction on the skills of well-being, including gratitude and mindfulness (Stockall & Blackwell, 2022), and prompting students to experience higher rates of positive emotions and leverage their character strengths.
As an educator, academics were often the focus. The Individualized Education Programs would be full of academic goals and objectives, and my district would provide the curriculum materials for math, reading, science, etc. My classroom always supported autistic learners, so I spent significant time teaching language and communication. Some of my students used spoken language, and some didn’t. I would create communication accommodations and adaptations to improve student participation.
I moved from teaching high school to teaching middle school in my fifth year of teaching, and I immediately realized that a big part of my job was to support students in learning how to engage with each other. Middle school is such a pivotal time for developing the skills of empathy and conflict resolution (Blakemore & Mills, 2014). These skills were emerging in my students, and I realized I had the opportunity to shape their development.
I remember developing specific Peace Lessons—what I called them back then. These lessons were activities that I made up to support students in learning about collaboration and kindness. I had already stopped teaching by 2015 when the Every Student Succeeds Act (2015) was passed, including legislation to support Social-Emotional Learning (SEL). Seeing SEL legislated into the public school curriculum makes my heart sing.
As much as I liked to create and teach my Peace Lessons, I have to admit that they weren’t my school's primary focus. My principal never asked to see my lesson plans for this work as he did for the academic skills I was teaching. Since I had to create my lessons, I didn’t have a set curriculum to follow and discuss with my colleagues. This has changed now with organizations like Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), which is working to create a world where children and adults collaborate and advocate for improved policies and practices to promote well-being.
Hindsight is always 20/20, but if I could provide insight to my younger self, I would increase my focus on teaching well-being skills in my classroom. Yes, academics are important, but well-being is more important.
I knew that students needed direct instruction in these skills, but I wasn’t sure how to provide this instruction. The field of positive psychology (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000) was just emerging, and positive education (Seligman et al., 2009) wasn’t even in educational practice when I was teaching. We now can do better.
If I could do it over, here are three things I would do every day in my classroom:
- I would find two times each day to engage in a short meditation, and I would provide direct instruction to my students on the value of meditation and how it helps us achieve a flourishing life.
- I would have a list of character strengths (Peterson & Seligman, 2004) in my classroom and ask every student to "strength spot" one of their classmates each day.
- At the end of each day, I would model and practice the skill What Went Well. I would ask each student to write down one thing that went well for the day. I would then take three of those and put them on the classroom whiteboard for all to see the next day.
I would expand my work from intermittent Peace Lessons and become a special educator who focuses on well-being.
References
Blakemore, S. J., & Mills, K. L. (2014). Is adolescence a sensitive period for sociocultural processing? Annual Review of Psychology, 65, 187–207. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115202.
Every Student Succeeds Act, 20 U.S.C. § 6301 (2015). https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/1177
Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Character strengths and virtues: A handbook and classification. New York: Oxford University Press and Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Seligman, M. E. P., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000). Positive Psychology. American Psychologist, 55(1), 5.
Seligman, M., Ernst, R., Gillham, J., Reivich, K., & Linkins, M. (2009). Positive education: Positive psychology and classroom interventions. Oxford Review of Education, 35(3), 293–31
Stockall, N., & Blackwell, W. (2022). Mindfulness Training: Reducing Anxiety in Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Early Childhood Education Journal, 50(1), 1–9.
