Students tell me about their Social and Emotional Health

Our school surveys students with a platform called Panorama.  We get results on how much students have "positive feelings," or "challenging feelings," or "access to support," or thereabouts.

I showed each class the whole school results on the 3 social indicators and their own worst (lowest) specific indicator--aggregate data, no individual results, and asked the social committee to lead group discussions with their class.

The discussion template is the regular font (below).  The patterns of response are in italics.

Overall, I think this conversation was a helpful use of this information from Panorama.

Social Committee meetings with whole class     

Review the results on the board.  (Whole school results from Panorama, and their individual class results on ONE of the three social “measures” from Panorama.)

Overall, how did your small group respond to the  results?

This was intended to get the groups to consider the results and discuss them.

Which of the 5 Panorama questions (on the board) did they think was most important?  And why?

Various--safety, motivation, loneliness, fear were common

What ideas did the group have for improving positive feelings at school?

• More after school clubs/groups; or more teachers interacting with students

• Easier access to more counselors (several responses)

• Better access to teachers/staff to talk (several responses)

• Destigmatize the idea of going to the counselor

• Meet and Greet–especially for those whose Panorama results show disconnection…

• Lunch with counselors (the elementary school in the district had a program to do this)

• Reading time, to make people calmer

• Work against judgment

• Mental health days

• Longer recess

• More positive reinforcement, time to just take a break and relax at a certain point in the day

• Keep bathrooms clean

• Be happy, think positive, encourage others

• Hug, be kind

What else besides what’s covered in these questions does the small group want to report about the results?

Loneliness is an issue that seems to come up more than once…

Surveys aren’t a good way to find out how we’re doing… (different permutations on this)

What do I see here?

Plenty of students can seriously engage in considering their own situation and what they think they need. At the same time, their view is also skewed in ways unique to their own life situation and perspective. Just like we all do.

Students also have interesting and worthwhile suggestions for ways we could respond. For that I'm grateful. The school has varying capacities to do each of the things the students suggest, but there's plenty to consider.

The very process of having this conversation was a bit helpful. Some students were emphatic about the need to have some adults they can trust. I'm hopeful this conversation contributed to greater trust.

Surveys aren't a great way to learn about the students, they report. I suspect they're right. The questions are kind of frustrating. "In the last week, how often have you felt...angry, sad, lonely, etc., or happy, eager, etc." Students will point out that you don't know what that week might have been like for students. That's true, but with an n of 700, you figure the high and low results wash out. I'm frustrated with not knowing anything about the nature of the emotion--where it came from, how intense it is, whether the student feels like s/he can navigate it, etc.

As one student put it, yeah, we're irritated, but leave us alone and we'll solve it.

So some great insights, and the biggest one might be that I as one person and the school as a particular kind of institution are both fairly limited in the capacity to do as much as we might wish we could.

Why school is mentally and emotionally taxing

 

This is an amalgamation of many ideas.

First, the Window of Tolerance is a widely used idea in the therapy world.  You read a summary in the graphic.

The Window of Capacity is my own creation--as far as I can tell--which is also reviewed in the graphic.

The Zone of Proximal Development is a pedagogy idea.  Your intellectual growth occurs when you are pushing yourself into new ideas and work--out from what you can do on your own, to what you can grow into with some help and support.  I contend that your effective ZPD isn't too terribly far outside your capacities.  You can't conjugate verbs in a language you don't even know.  You start with phrases like "Hello, it's nice to meet you" before you try to master the 12 major verb tenses (in English).

The Stop Light is a visual representation of the Zones of Regulation idea.

Some observations...most of which need further development.

• The height of the (psychological) window reflects the intensity of issues you can navigate; width of the window reflects how long you can manage. At least, I'm going to use that! I don't know if clinicians use that width bit, but that's important in school, as we try to manage a number of students at one time.

• We can do work that enlarges the windows–i.e., you can practice psychologically tolerating more; you can practice skills and deepen intellectual capacities.

• Can work to navigate from (Zones 1 & 2) back within the window.

• Zone 3 needs different resources.

• Hyperstimulated needs calming responses–mindfulness, breathing, body awareness, responsive relational engagement, break as necessary.

• Hypostimulated needs mindful movement, syncing with others’ movement.

• The Psychological and Intellectual Windows are different; you could be in different conditions or statuses.

• Your status in a window can change day to day, or even minute by minute.

• The windows affect each other.

School–

• Activities and work are at the edge of the window (the Zone of Proximal Development)–asking you to grow the Intellectual Window of Capacity.

• Activities and work will be more effective if you are in the Psychological Window of Tolerance. Indeed, if we could somehow superimpose the windows, in some transferable than your Window of Capacity, you're probably not going to be able to get even near to your ZPD and will have a hard time learning that day.

• Better if your Intellectual Window is encompassed by your Psychological Window–the Intellectual Window is smaller and within the boundaries of the Psychological Window.

• Your Intellectual Window will not likely be larger (for long) than your Psychological Window, for, if you are asked to go to the edges of your Intellectual Window which is outside the confines of your Psychological Window, you invoke Psychological dysregulation.  Likewise, if you’re in some measure of dysregulation (in your Right Brain, as they say), you have difficulty functioning effectively in your Left Brain.

• Unlikely to sustain being outside of both windows; unlikely to be very effective in stretching your Intellectual Window when outside your Psychological Window

• Some students might have moderate to strong reactions when pushed outside Intellectual Window (too long)

• So, optimally, students are within their Psychological Window of Tolerance (or navigating back in, from Zone 1), and practicing skills right around the boundary of their Intellectual Window of Capacity.

Just a few thoughts.

Thinking about the 2 windows helps me visualize what might be happening for individual students on any given day.

Trying to make sausage!

The Committee Self-governance process is moving along nicely.  

That's not to say that everything is happening the way I wish it would in all the classes.

Several different "issues" can arise.  In fact, each of these has.

One is that the committees don't fully understand their writ.  Asking the Rules and Discipline committees to "create expectations and help us generate the self-discipline to live up to and within them" is a tall order.  They and I are still plumbing the depths of what that means.

Another is that the members don't fully recognize how the committee process works.  Or maybe I should say "works," the quotes signifying variability in the processes that different committees construct in their interaction.  I remember the first time I was on a committee...I didn't really understand the dynamics and the unspoken parameters of how the whole process went.  I'm happy for them to navigate that as they go.

A third issue is that some members aren't taking their duties as seriously as they need to.  That, of course, pervades the reality of committee life.  Interestingly, this disengagement tends to be worse later in the day.  More brain exhaustion leads to less energy to undertake activities we don't fully understand...?  No doubt.  Addressing this involves good old-fashioned classroom management. 

A fourth issue is that the committees have limited authority.  Everybody knows that I'm still responsible for what we do and how we run the class.  The Curriculum Committee, for one, is making our calendar more than they are creating or even managing content.  My goal here is to let them have a hand in--and thereby see--a process that requires flexibility and responsiveness, both of which demand patience and resourcefulness.  

A fifth (and final only in the sense that I'm going to stop) issue is the committees have limited capacities.  The Social and Data Committees, for instance, can have aggregate information about the class, but not about individuals.  For instance, when I do a "Today, I am [Green, Yellow, Red, Blue]" check-in, I can only tell them aggregate results.  What they can do with that is somewhat limited.  So, besides hoping these committees can contribute to self-governance, I also hope they recognize some of the complexity of the social dynamics in our room, and thereby have and help encourage greater patience in the process of interacting with each other.

I'm pleased with how this has gone.  These issues are a lot like pedagogical and management issues that routinely arise in every classroom.  We're just managing them a little bit differently now.

So far, so good.

Governing still isn't easy--Or, how I learned to love what the end of the Cold War reveals about teaching middle school!

In November 1989, citizen protesters smashed the wall separating communist East Berlin from democratic West Berlin.  The authorities, who until then had suppressed those citizens and their protests, could no longer sustain the repressive authority that maintained the actual wall.

And the breaking of that physical wall heralded the end of the metaphysical wall that protected a most oppressive and authoritarian system from its people.  While some social scientists rushed to the judgment that history was over, that particular system of authority was indeed history.

Within months of that, the Cato Institute (if I remember correctly) sponsored an essay contest in which they asked respondents to write on the issue of "how free the former Soviet bloc countries could be," or thereabouts.

I did not write an essay for that competition, but I distinctly remember thinking that they were at the freest in the moment when they had breached the wall.  Thereafter, their visceral and practical freedom would have to regress to the mean--as statisticians say.  Germans and Germany--not to mention the rest of the bloc-- could not persist in the exultant sense of freedom that came in the delirious destruction of that symbol of tyranny.

Some morning, not far off, they'd all awake and remember that there was a country to run.  Somebody would need to govern, somehow.

One thing I know, as a political scientist, is that governments coerce--if we would all naturally and spontaneously do the things that need to be done, we wouldn't need government.   The key questions, then,  are how much, in what ways, and with what accountability they do that coercing.

At some point--and it turned out to be quite soon, the newly liberated countries faced this difficulty.  More than 30 years on, those societies have had different experiences and records with the fundamental issue of how best to govern themselves.

Teachers face a similar difficulty in their classrooms.  They have a view toward the things that students ought and need to do--socially and academically.  And students don't naturally and spontaneously do all those things.  

So, some coercion happens.  Teachers do some imposing of order, by their authority.  And the same fundamental questions arise.  

What is that coercion like?  What are the limits and the instruments of accountability for that coercion?  

This year, I am inviting students into the process of self-governing.  Our room is not democratic, but it is what political scientists call "participatory"--each member of the community has a role and a path toward engagement in the process of governing the community.

In this way, I am hoping that students will "buy in" to the process of creating and sustaining our collective order.  Along the way, I think there will be some practical lessons about the difficulty of living together well.  

In other words, this activity won't be easy, because the processes we are trying to execute are complicated.  Not to put to fine a point on it, we are trying to run a "society" of 25 people, and while not as complex as a whole country, the nature of the problem is similar.

We don't all agree on the best routes to the goals, which we don't all even see the same way in the first place.  

So far, this committee leadership of our community has been a good experience.  Students are mostly "leaning in" to the whole thing.  And as much as they do, we have begun to experience some of the same difficulties that societies have.  

My role as "governor" has transformed into one in which I help the governed find paths toward better execution of the governing process they have themselves have created, and in that way hope they generate better outcomes--of the academic goals, which they know they must pursue.

This work is fraught...for both me and the students.  I'm not sure exactly what they'll come up with, and they're not exactly sure what they need to do (because they still feel some confusion navigating what they're "supposed" to do...but don't really want to.)

Personally, I think middle school has its own special difficulties in all this.  They are not elementary students, more of whom naturally want to please their teacher.  And they're not high schoolers, who have a growing sense of purpose and the self-awareness about how to pursue it.

This post has been a (tiresomely?) long musing on what I think has so far been an interesting, fruitful and edifying process.  I can't be sure all the edification has been precisely what I wish it would be...but that's because I still want to be governing my way.

All that to say, governing--societies or middle school classrooms--isn't easy!