Being an online teacher can be both rewarding and challenging. While it offers the flexibility of working from home and a broader reach to students worldwide, it also comes with its own set of stress factors. In 2023, as the world continues to digitize, the number of online teachers will likely increase, and so will the pressure to excel. In this post, we will look at some stress management techniques to help online teachers stay sane and healthy.
1. Prioritize Time Management
Online teaching requires meticulous planning, preparation, and execution. To minimize your workload and maximize your productivity, develop a routine that helps you stay organized. Create a schedule that balances your teaching workload and personal life commitments. Make sure you allocate enough time in your day for relaxation, exercise, and self-care. Setting limits on work can ensure you have enough energy to teach effectively.
2. Avoid Overworking
Online teachers often have to work outside normal working hours and weekends to accommodate students from different time zones. However, consistently overworking without taking time to rest can lead to burnout, fatigue, and diminished productivity. To avoid this, ensure you have a set work schedule that includes regular breaks and days off. When you are not teaching, avoid checking your email or working on your laptop to keep the boundaries clear.
3. Find a Support System
Online teaching can be a lonely experience, especially when you work alone in your home office. Reach out to other online teachers or join online communities where you can share common challenges and success stories. Many online teaching platforms offer peer support groups, mentorship programs, and professional development resources. Take advantage of these opportunities to expand your network and alleviate stress.
4. Practice Stress-Relieving Activities
Stress can take a significant toll on your physical and mental well-being. Engage in stress-relieving activities such as meditation, yoga, or deep breathing exercises to calm your mind and release tension. Taking a daily walk outside or performing simple stretches can also promote relaxation and reduce anxiety. Creating a calming workspace with soothing music and comfortable furniture can also help you relieve stress.
5. Continuously Improve Your Skills
Online teaching technology is constantly evolving, and to stay relevant, you need to regularly develop your skills. Developing new skills through courses, workshops, and reading can boost your confidence and performance. Continuous learning can lead to new opportunities that can alleviate some of the stress of online teaching.
Conclusion
In conclusion, stress management should be an ongoing process and not a one-time solution. By prioritizing time management, avoiding overworking, finding a support system, practicing stress-relieving activities, and continuously developing your skills, you can stay healthy and productive in your online teaching career. Be kind to yourself, and remember that a little self-care can go a long way in reducing stress.
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As learning becomes more software-driven, and cognitive offloading becomes more frequent via apps like ChatGPT and Google Bard, we are sure to see ‘soft skills’ (i.e., those skills unique to humans which cannot be replicated by computers) become more important for students to master.
Colin Salmon, Head of Faculty for Technology and Life Sciences at The City of Liverpool College, has this to say about AI and soft skills:
I think one of the biggest misconceptions about AI is that it will overtake soft skills such as creativity, critical thinking and emotional intelligence and, while AI can replicate certain tasks, it cannot yet replicate the human touch or the level of creativity that is required in many industries.
Colin Salmon, Courtesy of FE News [Accessed April 2023]
Today, I’ve invited Jessica Robinson, educational writer at The Speaking Polymath, to share her insights and tips for getting the creative juices flowing with your students.
Introduction to Creativity in Students
Creativity involves breaking out of unexpected patterns in order to look at things in a different way.
Edward De Bono
Creativity helps students use their imagination to their fullest. It helps them to learn new things by opening doors to new thoughts, emotions and expressions. This is the reason why it is important to foster creativity in young minds so that it can improve their future prospects. A student’s learning experience is enhanced when they put their own creativity into a subject, lesson, task or project.
Every student develops skills that reflect their own set of creativity. When they learn subjects using their creativity, it helps them to:
Make learning fun
Work upon their emotional quotient (EQ)
Manage stress
Boost critical thinking
Improve communication skills
Let us discuss the 5 best ways educators can foster creativity in their students.
5 Best Ways for Educators to Foster Creativity in Students
#1:Engage students in activities that encourage creativity
In order to foster creative thinking, teachers need to engage students in activities that promote creativity. Though these activities, teachers should guide students to develop and improve their creative skills such as problem solving, innovation and communication skills through inquiry-based learning.
Let us consider an activity that fosters creativity in a student in the early years. Teachers can ask students to make different structures using building blocks. Students can bring in their creativity and make something that isn’t commonly made by students of that age. Teachers can tell students to creatively think upon the uses of the structures they have made.
Teachers can boost creativity in students when they actively engage students in learning activities. In addition to the above, other activities such as storytelling, writing poetry, generating musical ideas, completing the incomplete figure to create new figures, etc., also help to expand creative thinking skills.
These activities can help students to become more mindful and conscious of their creative skills in this manner. Teachers who encourage such innovative solutions foster creativity and flourish a genuine output. It is a teacher’s role to brainstorm a students’ mind in a positive way to foster curiosity and view varying perceptions and their impacts thereof.
#2: Think outside of the box
There is no denying the fact that the role of teachers is to encourage creativity in the classroom by allowing varying ideas to be welcomed and discussed. Allowing students to think outside of the box, beyond boundaries might help them in deciphering something unusual and new. But also, it is important to know that creativity is a skill that not every student is born with. It is the role of a teacher to help a student discover such capabilities. There are various methods to do so.
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One method is where a teacher can challenge students by questioning them about the dynamic aspects of a topic and how outcomes can vary with changing inputs. Each aspect (input) could foster different levels of creativity in a student and help the student to engage in innovative learning methods that would be useful to develop problem solving skills.
A What-if Analysis can be an excellent way to foster creativity in students. A teacher can ask a student, “What if the prices of your favorite pizza in the market increases?” or “What if Covid persisted for a longer period of time? How would it have affected your education?” Pondering upon the asked questions, students would automatically start thinking over it, considering their own creative sense. Henceforth, it would encourage students to have a growth mindset and improve on their own personality traits.
3. Give constructive feedback
To give students the right direction for initiating creative processes, it is important for educators to provide them with constructive feedback. Appreciations and criticism, both form an integral part of feedback. It forms a great tool to induce ideas into a student’s mind.
Educators can relate giving constructive feedback to students with a Pareto analysis. The Pareto principle emphasizes on focusing on the 20% of work needed to achieve 80% of the output. Educators can foster creativity by letting students know which activities form the major portion that can help to deliver maximum output. With this belief, students can focus more on the 20% to achieve a lucrative output, through an educator’s valuable feedback.
The concept of constructive learning from educators helps in providing the right guidance to students for constructive learning and training methodologies.
There are 3 constructive feedback techniques that teachers might use in classrooms for an effective study environment:
Feedforward – As coined by Marshall Goldsmith. While feedback focuses on past events, feedforward is the antonym for it. This approach helps educators or teachers to describe the correctness of future probabilities to a student with respect to the current solution of processing information. The main aim is to let a student know beforehand the adversity or favorability of their current performance and take their creativity in the right direction.
DESC – Elaborating the abbreviation, DESC stands for describe, express, specify and consequence. It defines valuable feedback as elaborating to a student the reason behind what could have been done to improve upon the given solution. This fosters a way to diligently assess a student’s creative performance and establish effective standards to calculate the positive and negative effects of that performance.
What & Why – This is the simplest of the above methods that can easily be applied in classrooms. Explaining to students, or asking them to explain, the What and Why ofa situation or outcome could enhance creativity.
#4: Promote the sharing of ideas
Sharing concepts in the classroom can broaden the range of viewpoints of the audience on a certain topic. Teachers should encourage such a classroom environment as it increases students’ productivity. It simultaneously fosters a competitive environment as each student is given a voice to shed light on their own creativity and spread it to others.
Instead of having a feeling of being judged and afraid of criticism, teachers encourage students by guiding them to increase their scope of improvement.
Sharing techniques used by teachers in classrooms to promote creativity are mentioned below:
Think-Pair-Share– Brainstorming of ideas in pairs, writing those ideas and later sharing them with the entire class helps to indulge in and accept different perspectives and fosters creativity.
Sticky-Note Storm– Thinking out of the box in small groups within a stipulated period of time helps to activate the brain cells and generate as many answers as possible.
Quiz, Quiz and Trade– This activity is very good in engaging students to be as creative as they can. Teachers hand out cue cards to students and students exchange and circulate them to their peers. At last, whosoever is left with the number of cue cards gets to put in their creativity and answer those questions.
#5: Put breaks into routines
It is usual for students to feel lethargic with the same monotonous routine in their daily life. This situation has a direct impact on their creativity because creativity decreases with repetitive and unexciting methods of learning.
Teachers who acknowledge this bored atmosphere again and again in their classroom environment, can find ways to foster creativity in their students by not teaching in the same way, continuously.
Teachers can do something different from their routines and increase students’ creative thinking skills.
Conclusion
To conclude, creativity is one of the most important aspects of a child’s development and needs to be integrated in children from a very young age. Hence, it becomes the responsibility of the educator to foster creativity in children at a young age. That being the case, the above given tips can effectively help educators in making their students more creative.
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As your children’s high school career nears its end, achieving good grades becomes ever-more important. There’s a lot at stake, in particular, the range of colleges from which they can choose after graduation. And with the cost of a college education being so high, excellent grades could be worth money in the form of bursaries and sponsorships. Even kids that don’t want to study further need to work hard. If a high school diploma is to be their highest educational achievement, it will be with them for the rest of their working careers.
While being a pushy parent can be counter-productive, keeping your children motivated in their final years of high school can be a challenge. Try the following strategies to improve their chances.
#1: Get Help From a Private Educational Counsellor
Can you offer the right guidance for your child to get into top colleges? Chances are, you need an inside edge. Going Ivy College Consulting works with your children to help them map out their future for themselves, choosing the right courses and the right elite colleges to set them up for success.
If going ivy isn’t on the cards, career counselling can still be enormously beneficial. Having an impartial third party to talk to about their future helps your children to feel more in control of their future learning and career paths. With a future they decided for themselves to look forward to, the chances of giving their final years at school their best effort becomes more likely.
#2: Be Supportive
Parents want to see their children embarking on a secure career. Sadly, this can lead to conflict and a lack of motivation at school. For example, your daughter says she wants to study drama. You’re horrified and suggest accounting instead. With your support for what she really wants to do being absent, how motivated will she be as her final high school year draws to a close? Will your support for her exam preparation make a difference?
If you think your child is making a risky career choice, tell them about your concerns by all means, but never withdraw your support. Your aspiring drama student will open several career paths through her studies. For example, if she isn’t able to become a movie star, she can still apply her skills to teaching theatrical skills to kids. Whatever happens, remember that it’s up to your children to choose their careers, and not up to you.
#3: Give Them Time
Although you feel that choosing a future career is an urgent matter, your high schooler may not feel ready to commit. Let’s be fair. A school student has no experience of the working world, and may not have found his or her passion yet. Some kids need to spend a year or two in the working world before they discover what they really want from a career. Push too hard, and your children might end up studying something they committed to on a whim only to find that it isn’t really for them.
By all means, provide opportunities for them to explore possible careers, but make it clear that you aren’t pushing for a big decision just yet. When they find a career they can fall in love with, you’ll be ready to support them. Until they find their path, you’ll still be there for them whenever they need you. Apply too much pressure, leave your child with the impression that it’s about you and not about them, and they might decide the whole thing is a nasty business and start underperforming at school.
Strike the Balance
We all have ambitions for our children, but ultimately, their future is up to them. Although you may not be sure that your children are making the right decisions, your role is that of wise counsellor and ardent supporter. It can be difficult, but the decision maker in this instance is your child. Opposing their wishes or pushing too hard will be counter-productive. Help your child to build a vision of his or her future that’s all their own.
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Teachers are expected to demonstrate high competency in a range of skill areas. Some skills that may come to mind are personal organisation, classroom management, behaviour management and confidence in the use of educational technology. One skill that may not immediately come to mind, however, is leadership: yet this is vital, as teachers are required to be good leaders of their students (and, sometimes, other teachers). Today, I’ve invited Mitch from Destination TEFL, Bangkok, to to share his tips on how to be a good leader in the classroom.
Truly great teachers must also be leaders. By devoting time and energy towards developing leadership skills, along with technical teaching skills, teachers can make a profound impact on their students that transcends the information they teach.
Leadership seems to be a bit of a buzzword these days, but maybe there’s a reason for that.
Just take a look around. In government, the corporate world, and yes, in education too, our world seems to be suffering from a lack of leadership. We have a surplus of bosses, managers, and influencers, but not enough true leaders.
But together we’re going to change that.
The classroom is your domain, one place in the world where you truly can make a difference. You may not be able to fix the government, or even the overall culture at your school (toxic bosses tend not to take feedback well), but you can absolutely change your classroom and, in so doing, your students’ lives.
Here’s how to do it.
What is true leadership?
In order to become great leaders in the classroom, we need to really nail down what leadership actually is. And more importantly, what it isn’t.
Good leadership is NOT:
Being right all the time
Never making mistakes
Making all of the decisions
Always being strong, confident, and outgoing
Surprising, right? Many of the usual stereotypes we have about leadership (ones that many leaders today try a bit too hard to represent) aren’t actually what leadership is about at all.
True leadership, especially in a classroom full of students, is much more nuanced and, honestly, more accessible than many are led to believe.
In contrast to the list above, true leadership in the classroom looks a lot more like:
Being human, and acknowledging mistakes
Letting your students make decisions, and teaching them to make the right ones
Being the best version of yourself, not fitting into boxes
Focusing on empathy and emotional intelligence
Real leadership is about putting others first, and doing your best to help them become the best versions of themselves they can be. As teachers, this is something that probably sounds familiar to us!
So now that we know what leadership is, how do we grow in these areas and incorporate them into our classroom?
Becoming a leader in the classroom
The first step in becoming a better leader is to know that you can!
People are conditioned to believe that you are either born with leadership qualities or not, and this is true for something like being naturally outgoing. But that’s not what great leaders are really made of.
“An AMAZING book for teachers!”
Emotional intelligence is something you can work on. Taking responsibility and acknowledging mistakes is something you can work on. Becoming the best version of yourself is something you can work on.
Real leadership is accessible, and it’s accessible to you.
All becoming a leader in the classroom takes is recognizing areas you want to grow in as a leader, focusing on developing yourself in those areas, and (most importantly) finding opportunities to implement what you’re working on in the classroom.
You listen to their advice and start doing things like labeling your emotions, practicing empathy, and opening yourself up to feedback. The more you do this, the more you notice your sensitivity to other people’s emotions increasing.
Now it’s time for the most important step: bringing it into the classroom!
What better group of people to practice empathy and emotional intelligence with than your students? You start looking for root causes of misbehavior, and the emotions that underlie them. You teach your students to become aware of their own emotions, and the emotions of their classmates. Most importantly, you provide an example of how to do this.
Congratulations, you have not only become a better teacher, but you’ve also become a true leader. You are now impacting your students not only through what you teach them, but how you teach them.
You’re no longer just teaching them about English, now you’re teaching them about life.
Final thoughts
Becoming a great leader, and a great teacher, takes time. It isn’t something that can be done in one semester: it’s an ongoing process of self-discovery and self-improvement.
However, as people teaching abroad, we’re no strangers to this process. Living and working abroad is a journey of self-discovery, finding new and exciting pieces of yourself in different contexts and cultures, growing in ways you never thought possible.
Leadership in the classroom is another one of those ways, and it’s an area of self-improvement that will end up changing not only your own life but the lives of others.
At the end of the day, that’s what teaching is all about!
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According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, at least 14 million tons of plastic end up in our Earth’s oceans every year. Campaigns such as Keep Britain Tidy and the Project Learning Tree aim to inform young people about the environment and the harm that single-use plastics can cause. However, despite these excellent projects, much, much more still needs to be done to bring this critical issue to our students’ attention. Today, I’ve invited Kat Sarmiento (content writer at Katreena’s Content Studio) to share her tips on how to educate children about the dangers of single-use plastics, along with advice on how to utilise sustainable alternatives.
Single-use plastics are a modern convenience, but how much is that convenience costing the environment? The manufacture, spread, and waste of single-use plastic are a major environmental issue that has been talked about yet remain unsolved.
People still openly burn plastic waste and use single-use plastics even when they can not use such things excessively. It has been the great efforts of dozens of organizations to phase out single-use plastics in the industry and replace them with more sustainable options.
Decarbonization always starts on an individual level. The individuals most affected by a toxic environment are the youth who have to grow up in it. But now the question is, where can the youth start on the mission to reduce plastic waste in the environment?
Why Is It So Difficult To Enact Change?
One of the most deceptively simple tasks you can do is actually the hardest. Most people don’t even realize how much plastic and paper they waste. On an individual level, think of how many water bottles you have thrown away in your life.
Whatever the number is, it is most likely too much. Now multiply that number by the population of the globe. This is why it’s so difficult to reduce plastic waste. Most people aren’t even aware of the fact that they are wasting plastic.
Although big strides are being made in reducing the use of single-use plastics in many developed countries, it’s a different story in less fortunate places. Many people fail to consider the necessity of single-use plastics in these areas because of how cheap they are to produce.
Not to mention, the lack of education on the negative effects of pollution is still a real issue. More efforts should be made by local governments to teach their citizens about the effects of excessive waste. Eco-friendly practices, especially the ones discussed in this article, should be commonplace and enforced.
How To Reduce The Impact of Single-Use Plastics
Truth be told, the efforts of the individual do very little in the grand scheme of things. However, it’s important to uphold these practices and share them with as many people as possible.
The more people learn from your example, the better your chances of making a difference. Here are some of the practices you should follow:
#1: Start Reusing More Often
While you cannot stop the production of single-use plastics on an individual basis, you are still capable of going against its intended purpose. Single-use is just a suggestion, not a feature. Things such as plastic bags, cups, bottles, utensils, and food packaging should be repurposed in some form.
The concern with single-use plastic is less about the material itself than the excessive use of it. Plastic wouldn’t be such an issue if there wasn’t so much of it all around the world. However, many supposed single-use plastics are quite handy as use for containers and makeshift tools.
Just make sure the types of plastic you are reusing don’t start leaking the chemicals used in their creation.
#2: Replace Single-Use Plastics With Sustainable Options
That being said, switching to more sustainable materials is not a bad idea. Whenever possible, look for cost-effective alternatives to the usual functions you use single-purpose plastics for:
Instead of having them bag your groceries, ask if you can have them put in cardboard boxes instead. Cardboard boxes are much less impactful on the environment and offer far more utility in a home.
Alternatively, bring your own cardboard boxes and eco-bags. Eco-bags are one of the handiest grocery things you can have.
Instead of buying plastic cups, just shoulder the admittedly less enticing washing of extra glasses. There are several cheap reusable cups in the market that you can look around for.
Store your lunch in jars or bento boxes instead of Ziploc bags.
#3: Push Organizations To Value Eco-Friendliness
For a more significant dent in the use of single-use plastics, the best thing students can do is make their voice known. Kids, teens, and young adults are huge demographics for many companies.
If enough of them start caring and demanding products that maximize recyclability and reusability, companies will have to listen. The businesses to start with should always be on a local level because the transport of plastic goods is just as intensive as using it.
Also, push for businesses to consider the impact that end-of-use products have. They should have professional recycling or disposal plants on call for their waste.
Schools are also subject to this. Encourage your school to go green by doing all of the above in their daily routines. Schools often go through a lot of single-use plastics, especially in cafeterias.
Another great way to reduce both environmental impact and printing costs is to print only what’s necessary. For example, some events hand out paper cups with custom-printed logos that won’t last the day. Instead of doing that, just encourage students to bring their own thermos or tumblers.
Kat Sarmiento
Kat is a Molecular Biology Scientist turned Growth Marketing Scientist. During her free time, she loves to write articles that will bring delight, empower women, and spark the business mind. She loves to bake but unfortunately, baking doesn’t love her back. She has many things in her arsenal and writing is one of her passion projects.
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I’ve made the point before that parent’s are our allies, not our enemies. It’s important to foster productive relationships with the parents of our students so that our learners feel fully supported in their education. How exactly do we foster those relationships, though? This week, I’ve invited Kat Sarmiento to share her thoughts on how to keep parents on our side.
Kat Sarmiento
Parents and teachers share the same goal: to ensure that students have the most excellent educational experience possible. In a study by the National Committee for Citizens in Education, one of the best approaches to creating a positive learning environment is encouraging parents’ engagement in their children’s school lives.
Teachers who focus on involving parents see a profound change in their classrooms. Parental involvement begins at home, with the parents providing a safe and conducive environment for learning, experiences, support, and a positive outlook about the importance of education.
Parents actively involved in their child’s education provide the home support and knowledge that their children need—not just to accomplish assignments—but also to develop a lifelong love for learning.
Given that the importance of parents’ help in a child’s learning is beyond dispute, how can teachers work effectively with parents to help their students?
#1: Open reliable channels for communication
In a parent-teacher relationship, frequent two-way communication is essential so parents can stay updated on what is happening at school. At the same time, inform teachers about the important things concerning the child.
A common mistake amongst teachers is not communicating enough or only getting in touch when there’s already a problem. It is best not to wait for situations to arise before reaching out. Teachers need to interact frequently and positively with parents to build a relationship before facing any roadblocks. Especially with today’s technology, teachers can do weekly reviews and quickly update parents on what’s going on in the classroom.
It is critical to identify the best communication tools, develop messaging plans early in the year, and maintain consistent communication throughout the year. Maximize video conferencing apps, messaging boards, emails, social media, memos, newsletters, phone calls and find out what works best.
#2: Be collaborative
If communication is frequent, then collaboration will be easier.
A collaborative approach means that parents participate in the school’s decisions and work together to enhance the students’ learning and development.
Parents are well aware of their child’s lifestyle, developmental history, and interests. At the same time, teachers know how they can best guide and help their students perform in school.
Parents and teachers collaboratively sharing knowledge will go a long way to support a child’s growth and academic success. It includes relating what a child learns at school with what they learn at home.
The goal is to create a partnership in which teachers and parents share expertise to provide the best education for the students. Reciprocal respect, sharing of planning, and decision-making responsibilities are the essential components for true partnerships between parents and teachers.
#3: Encourage learning at home
Parents should support after-school learning by talking positively about school and teachers, creating a supportive home environment.
This form of involvement includes parents assisting their children with homework or taking them to a museum. These activities foster a school-oriented family and encourage parents to be involved in the school curriculum.
Activities that encourage learning at home provide parents with information on what children are doing in the classroom and how to help them. Research shows that parental engagement is associated with increased productivity and academic achievement in many ways.
Participating in a child’s education shows that parents values their learning. The more help and guidance a child feels at home, the more effectively they will learn at school.
#4: Build a trusting relationship
In many respects, the first interaction between a teacher and a parent is the most crucial. During this time, a rapport is established, and trust can begin to develop.
Trust is a crucial component of any successful partnership. Teachers must maintain a trusting, private, open, and honest relationship with parents and ensure they always have the students’ best interest at heart. At the same time, parents should be confident in the competency of the teachers who are professionally involved in their children’s education.
#5: Make the curriculum transparent
Part of keeping parents informed is letting them know what their children are learning, how they are processing it, and how it will help their child succeed.
One way to do this is by conducting workshops for parents to inform them of the school curriculum and remind them that they are still their child’s most important teachers.
The bottom line is that education is a critical stage in a child’s growth and development. When parents and teachers collaborate as a team, children learn more effectively. And like any team, parents and teachers have one goal: provide the most incredible learning environment for children to promote their physical, emotional, and intellectual well-being.
Kat Sarmiento
Kat is a Molecular Biology Scientist turned Growth Marketing Scientist. During her free time, she loves to write articles that will bring delight, empower women, and spark the business mind. She loves to bake but unfortunately, baking doesn’t love her back. She has many things in her arsenal and writing is one of her passion projects.
We welcome you to join the Richard Rogers online community. Like our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter for daily updates.
Resilience is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as “the ability to be happy, successful, etc. again after something difficult or bad has happened”. Resilience is an important life-skill for children to acquire whilst at school. Reach Out Australia, for example, states that “When students feel like the outcome won’t affect them negatively, they are more likely to try new and more challenging things in the classroom. Being able to learn from mistakes and challenges in a place where they feel supported and encouraged will build their confidence, self-belief and resilience.“Today, I’ve invited Jessica Robinson, educational writer at The Speaking Polymath, to write thisexcellent blog post describing seven ways to cultivate student resilience in the classroom. Enjoy!
“When we learn how to become resilient, we learn how to embrace the beautifully broad spectrum of the human experience.”
Jaeda Dewalt
Life is a beautiful adventure that has its ups and downs. Unexpected things happen in this world and within moments your life turns upside down. Take the example of the pandemic: one day, suddenly, we got to know about a virus that had infected masses of people in China and within days the virus spread to multiple countries of the world. It caused wide-scale casualties, governments imposed lockdowns and the sad ‘new normal’ began.
Sudden events that happen in life can make you realize how important it is to be resilient. If we are resilient, we can withstand the storms that come our way and emerge victorious. During our days in quarantine, as I spent this trying time with my kids who were feeling anxious, I realized that the pandemic is a big challenge, especially for children. They are facing such difficulties at a very young age in their lives. This experience motivated me to start cultivating resilience in my kids. Every day, I make them engage in different activities that can empower their resilience. Watching them become emotionally and mentally stronger has motivated me to also work on cultivating student resilience in the classroom.
Here, I am going to share some effective strategies that have helped me turn my kids into more resilient beings. I have started using these strategies with my students too and I hope that you’ll also use them to help your students cultivate strong resilience.
#1: Make children engage in activities that challenge them physically
This is one of the best ways that have helped me cultivate resilience in my kids. Anything that challenges them physically, helps them gain confidence in themselves, their abilities, and their body. This self-confidence gives them the strength to bear difficulties in life with courage. So, you should try to make your students engage in activities that challenge them physically. You can make them play new games that require more physical as well as mental efforts and help them develop confidence in their physical and mental capabilities. As far as I am concerned, I make my students participate in different kinds of races to challenge their physical capabilities and scavenger hunts with challenging quizzes to help them develop confidence in their mental capabilities. Moreover, I also tell them to not compete with each other but strive to become a better version of themselves. Believe me, this tactic really works.
#2: Help them inculcate confident and influential body language
Do you know that your body language and your feelings are interconnected? Yes, this is true.That is why, whenever you are sad, you sit or stand with a hunched back, look down and your smile fades away. This is an example of how your emotions impact your body language. In the same way, your body language also impacts your emotions. You can use this connection between emotions and body language to help your students become more resilient. You can help them learn body language techniques to regulate their emotions. For example, power posing in a confident way can help your students face challenges with courage. To know more about power posing and the benefits of influential body language, you can watch the Ted Talk by Amy Cuddy. Further, you can also read different books and watch videos on Body Language to help your students inculcate confident and influential body language.
#3: Make them engage in creative pursuits
According to one study published by Colin G. Deyoung and Paul J. Silvia in the Journal of PositivePsychology, creativity encourages positive emotions that can unlock our inner resources for dealing with stress and uncertainty. This implies that we can help kids develop a strong resilience in an interesting way by making them engage in creative pursuits. If a child loves painting, you can let him express his creative self through painting for some time every day. If a child loves dancing, you can let him express his creative endeavors through dancing. By engaging in their favorite creative pursuits, your students will develop strong resilience over time. Along with this, they’ll also become happier and calmer versions of themselves which will ultimately help them become more resilient in life.
#4: Create a gratitude ritual and practice it together
‘Gratitude’, we have heard this word a lot and we have also received the advice to expressgratitude from many influential people. But, we often feel that expressing gratitude cannot do us enough good as it is a very simple practice. We think that we need to look for something better and so on. But, believe me, we have been wrong whenever we have thought this way. I have seen tremendous positive changes in myself and my kids by following a gratitude ritual for the past two months regularly. We are happier, more optimistic, and therefore, more resilient too. Moreover, research also shows that gratitude can help us rewire our brains towards positivity. So, you should try to create a gratitude ritual and practice it with your students. A simple gratitude ritual is to write down three things that you are grateful for every day. You can try this one or create your own gratitude ritual.
#5: Help them build meaningful social connections
The American Psychological Association wrote in its resilience report, “Many studies show that the primary factor in resilience is having caring and supportive relationships within and outside the family.” When you have supportive relationships in your life, you feel safe and protected. You know that there are always people you can count on whenever you get faced with any problems in life. This knowingness gives you the strength to withstand the challenges that come in your life. This implies that we can help our students build strong resilience by encouraging them to cultivate meaningful social relationships with others. We can help our students build strong friendships with each other and cultivate good relationships with us as well as other people from the school staff. This way, we can teach our students to form meaningful connections with people and boost their resilience.
#6: Make them engage in healthy risk-taking
The development of self-confidence is crucial for us to cultivate strong resilience. You can help your students become self-confident by making them engage in healthy risk-taking. For example, if your students are afraid of dogs, you can bring a little puppy and encourage them to play with it. No doubt, they’ll feel a little afraid in the beginning but then, after playing safely with the puppy, their confidence level in their abilities to take risks will increase. As a result, they’ll cultivate a strong resilience over time.
#7: Teach them some coping mechanisms to calm themselves under overwhelming situations
If you have the ability to help yourself calm down even under challenging times, you naturally have strong resilience. You feel confident about yourself and know that you can handle yourself even in difficult situations. So, you can help your students develop a strong resilience by teaching them some coping mechanisms to calm themselves under overwhelming situations. Belly breathing, focusing on the sounds that are happening around us, and feeling deeply are some simple coping mechanisms that help us calm our nervous system under challenging situations. Furthermore, you can watch YouTube videos to learn about belly breathing and then you can teach this calming technique to your students.
The pandemic has taught us that we should help children develop a strong resilience right from their childhood. It is only in the presence of a strong resilience that they can face any challenges that life throws at them and emerge victoriously. Furthermore, as teachers, we can help our students cultivate a strong resilience through the different ways mentioned above. Now, I wish you all the best, and may your efforts to help your students develop a strong resilience bear fruits.
An ardent writer, Jessica Robinson, works for ‘The Speaking Polymath’. She uses this platform to weave her magical words into powerful strands of content and share with her readers.
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The ability to read is possibly the most important skill that students should master whilst at school. It is so important, in fact, that a simple Google search of the phrase “The importance of reading for students” brings up hundreds of millions of hits (around 717 million at the time of writing this article, to be exact).
Do your students love to read?
There are numerous benefits of reading: for adults and children alike. I could choose to spend the rest of this article describing those benefits, but I fear that I would be preaching to the converted. As teachers, we already know that reading is important. I hope you will permit me, however, to at least include my favourite quote about reading from one of my favourite actors:
For reading: there have been gazillions of people that have lived before all of us. There’s no new problem you could have–with your parents, with school, with a bully. There’s no new problem that someone hasn’t already had and written about it in a book.
Will Smith
So, we know that our students must learn to read. However, what’s equally important is that our students learn to love reading. And this is what I want to explore with you today: How do we get our students, or our children, to enjoy reading? How do we prevent reading from becoming a laborious, dull part of their schooling and instead turn it into to a relaxing and, dare I say it, exciting past-time?
Tip #1: Turn reading into a collaborative task (with a creative output)
Reading is all-to-often seen as a solitary activity, which is most unfortunate. Set up times, or clubs, where students can read to each other and perhaps generate some kind of creative output – perhaps building a model of what they’ve read (Design Technology), calculating and mapping the frequency of different words (Mathematics) or even creating the costumes the characters might be wearing (Textiles). When reading becomes an active process, students realize that there’s actually a lot of ‘juice’ one can squeeze from a book, or even a short segment of text.
Perhaps you could couple collaborative reading with a technological task too – such as creating a Minecraft landscape of the setting for the story, or even setting up a Google Site online journal of learning.
My award-winning book for teachers is a popular choice for teacher book clubs.
The possibilities for collaboration in reading, coupled with creative outputs, really are limited only by one’s imagination. In fact, you may wish to ‘crowdsource’ ideas from the children themselves, perhaps by using a worksheet/prompt like the one below:
Could this be a tool to help your students read collaboratively?
If you like the above tool, then you can download it as a pdfhere.
#2: Host reading and reading-related competitions and events
Some ideas to consider are:
Celebrate World Book Day by allowing students to come into school dressed as their favourite book characters. Perhaps offer special prizes for the best costumes, or even run a fashion show on the day. Award plus points/merits/whatever your school’s ‘reward tokens’ are for students who bring in their favourite books on the day.
Invite a local author to come into school to talk about their work. As an author myself, I know for a fact that the author will love the opportunity to gain some exposure, and if you ask politely you may even get some free, signed books for school out of it.
Run book clubs or events by genre – specialization can generate more interest in reading. Have a day for self-help books, one for non-fiction, one for animals – anything that the students are interested in.
Take the students to a reading-related place, such as a local library or actual location from a book. Students will often be unaware that these places exist in the first place, and their discovery may set in-motion some profound changes that result in a love of reading. My primary school took me to my local library as child, for example, and that place became my study-hangout in my teens. I just loved being surrounded by all of those books. It’s a feeling that’s very unique.
#3: Read with your students, and to your students, with passion
Get involved in all of the activities listed above. Join the collaboration groups, for example, even if only for 10 minutes at a time. Read topical news articles, extracts from books, quotes of the day or any materials that provide positive messages for students. Have a sign outside your door that tells students what you are reading at that time.
Bottom line – get stuck in yourself! Never underestimate the subliminal messages that students pick up on when they see us model positive behaviors.
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Parents and teachers have long been concerned about the mental health effects of excessive screen time on the children we care for, and teach. Oftentimes, we compare the lived experiences of modern day teens and young adults with what we went through at that age. Legitimate worries are attributed to questions surrounding disproportionate tech use – questions such as:
Are students today less fit and healthy than they were before the World Wide Web became mainstream?
What are the negative mental health effects of social media on adolescents?
Is there a causal link between tech use and mental health issues in teens?
Has technology usage increased the prevalence of mental health issues in teens?
The short answer to the last question is that there’s not enough evidence to suggest that tech use has increased mental health issues in teens – that, at least, is the conclusion of a recent Oxford Universitystudy. Unfortunately, however, the directness of this conclusion was lost on the BBC who made the unforgivable blunder of misrepresenting the study completely. Their headline shockingly reads‘Teens, tech and mental health: Oxford study finds no link’
To most professionals in education this BBC headline, and indeed the conclusions of the actual study itself, seem premature, inaccurate and potentially misleading given evidence that has arisen from other studies that aimed to investigate causal links between screen time and mental health issues in children, teens and young adults.
So, what was special about the Oxford study? Were the researchers even able to come to such a broad, valid conclusion in the first place? I will answer these questions via a series of bullet-points:
The sample size was large, with 430,561 teenagers and high school children being involved in the study
Only UK and US students were studied
Participants were aged 10 – 15 years old
The data was collected by MTF (since 1991), UndSoc (since 2009) and YRBS (since 1991). Only 40,000 out of the 430,561 students were from the UK.
Only 139,264 of of the participants were asked about their social media usage (because, of course, much of the data was collected before 2009, which is when social media became accessible via mobile devices).
So, basically, what have the Oxford team done? That’s right – they’ve taken legacy data, overwhelmingly biased towards the American demographic, and analyzed the results using some statistical tests. Apparently, this is enough for the esteemed academics at Oxford to come to the conclusion that “There Is No Evidence That Associations Between Adolescents’ Digital Technology Engagement and Mental Health Problems Have Increased”. The BBC takes this adulteration further by boldly stating that “There remains ‘little association’ between technology use and mental-health problems, a study of more than 430,000 10 to 15-year-olds suggests.“
A teacher’s perspective
I’m personally quite angry by the misleading messages that these inaccurate conclusions have transmitted to the masses. Anyone reading the BBC article, in particular, would think that there’s no need to be concerned about excessive screen time and social media usage in teens. The real story, however, is quite different:
ADutch studyinvolving 10,000 participants in Rotterdam concluded that smartphones are causing nearsightedness in children. This has also been backed up by studies and observations inCanada, AmericaandIreland.
The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health caused shockwaves in 2016 with the conclusion of itsstudy: that smartphone and tablet use correlates strongly with obesity in teens. Similar findings have come from a number of respectable sources, including a massive,global joint studybetween Stanford University and the American National Institutes of Health which was concluded in 2015.
Sleep-deprivation is a common side-effect of smartphone and tablet addiction. Research from the Division of Cardiology at the University of California (San Francisco), for example, has found that the use of mobile devices near bedtime is connected with low-quality sleep.
However, these aforementioned studies focus on the physical effects of screen time on children: nearsightedness, obesity and sleep-deprivation. The Oxford ‘study’ focused on mental health issues, so what point am I am trying to make?
Do causal links exist between nearsightedness, obesity, sleep-deprivation and mental health in children and teens?
A number of studies have reported significant associations between obesity and poor psychological wellbeing in children but findings have been inconsistent. A 2007 study of 3,898 children from England concluded that “being overweight, rather than obese, had no impact on overall reported mental health.” However, “17% of children with obesity were above the suggested screening threshold for emotional problems“.
Perhaps the most obvious link occurs between sleep-deprivation and mental health, and numerous studies conclude that a causal relationship does exist. A 2013studyconcluded, for example, that “early sleep deprivation in childhood may result in long-term behaviour issues” and even that “sleep problems impact core symptoms of common neurodevelopmental disorders”.
Studies such as these seem to have been ignored by the Oxford team. Maybe, however, I’m making tentative links between mental health and physical problems, and then linking those tentatively to screen-time and social media usage?
Hold your horses, because there’s more.
Areportpublished by the Telegraph includes a headline is enough to stun any parent or teacher:
Children spend up to 10 hours a day ‘mindlessly swiping’ their mobiles, study finds
The article summarizes the findings of technological research into what young people actually do online. It’s thought to be the first time that technology has been used to analyse the mobile-device usage habits of children.
The findings are alarming:
Behavior is compulsive, with young people typically spending no longer than one-minute looking at any particular page of content before swiping to something else
Social media takes up hours and hours of teenagers’ free time
Children from ‘low-income’ households seem more prone to compulsive use of social media than others
Many children in the study admitted to falling asleep at night whilst on their phones
Many children admitted that they felt that their compulsions were “mindless” and “pointless”, but felt compelled to use their smartphones on a near-constant basis anyway because there’s a feeling of incompleteness or ‘losing out’ when the phone is not being checked.
Some children in the study felt the need to check their phones whilst actually being interviewed by the research panel
In many cases, children are spending up to 12 hours on their phones per day! Take this shocking example for instance (quoted from the Telegraph article):
Typical was Olympia, aged 17, who in one 24-hour period spent 3.3 hours on Snapchat, 2.5 hours on Instagram, 2 hours on Face Time, 2.4 hours on What’s App and 1.8 hours on Safari – a total of 12 hours.
I could go on to explore more sources to support the argument that social media usage, and screen-time, negatively affect the mental health of teens and children. I fear that this blog post would become a behemoth of statistics if I were to do that, however, so I’ll leave you with a few links to peruse yourself:
Ofcom 2017 ‘Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes Report‘. Amongst the key findings were the shocking revelation that 77% of 12-15 year olds play computer games for around 12 hours per week, and 99% go online for around 21 hours per week. The 2020 reportsuggests that screen-time has increased, with children using devices for a much wider-variety of purposes than in 2017.
A November 2020studyby the University of British Columbia found that “Longer screen time (more than two hours a day) was associated with lower levels of life satisfaction and optimism, and higher levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms.”
Overall conclusions
I think it was highly negligent of the University of Oxford to ignore the links that clearly exist between screen time and….
Nearsightedness
Obesity
Sleep-deprivation
Lower levels of life satisfaction and optimism[UBC]
Higher levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms[UBC]
As an influential university, Oxford should really have done it’s due diligence before releasing the paper. The message that has been interpreted: that no causal link exists between tech use and poor mental health, is just plain wrong. The BBC, also, should be held to account for their blatant dilution of the study’s findings: from “There’s not enough evidence to suggest that mental health issues have increased as a result of tech” (the Oxford conclusion) to “No link exists between teens, tech and mental health”.
If anything, today’s blog post has been an interesting expose’ of big institutions, and their overwhelming negligence despite their good public standing.
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The bell rang at 12.30pm to the typical sigh of relief from students who’d been sat in lessons all morning. Bustling through the corridors towards the school canteen, library, school field or some other designated ‘turf’ were the majority of my classmates at St. Richard Gwyn R.C. High School. I, on the other hand, had an appointment with my favorite teacher.
It felt like an easy journey to the German classroom. I was excited because I would be practicing my German oral phrases and responses with my teacher, who had been giving up a good portion of her lunchtimes for the past few weeks to help me become more confident and competent. She was always patient, and always willing to help.
Then, there was that time when my Biology teacher talked me through an end-of-unit test I had completed, so that I could know exactly where I had lost marks. I still remember the conversation word-for-word, almost thirty years later. I finally grasped some important concepts that day.
At the core of my good fortune to attend an outstanding school as a teenager was one most important thing: outstanding teachers. All of my teachers really cared for my wellbeing, and they often went above-and-beyond to provide me with extra tuition, or even to have one-on-one conversations with me to put me on-track, or to reprimand me when I had slipped up. Great teachers, I found, were more important than great facilities.
There are other factors that make a school outstanding, however. Even the best efforts of a team of outstanding teachers can be thwarted by the subterfuge of negligence, bad policies or even school culture. In this blog post, I will explore all of the key factors that work together to make a school outstanding.
#1: The school’s vision and missionare the starting points
A well-crafted mission statement that infuses everything the school does as a community can have a massive and profound impact on students’ lives.
At Saint Richard Gwyn, for example, our slogan was “Learning Together In Christ“. This phrase was spoken at every assembly, written in many school publications (such as the school’s weekly newsletter) and was reinforced by teachers during some of our lessons. I don’t think I and my peers fully realized the power of this collective action by the school back then, but that statement was actually having a dramatic effect on the way we saw the world, and ourselves. Whether you are religious or not, you can appreciate that this statement sent home a bigger message than just those four words:
At our school we learn together. Our focus is serious, and we help each other.
We have faith in Christ at our school. We are expected to follow the moral principles outlined in the gospels.
America’s Center for School Change has the following to say about a school’s Vision and Mission:
Developing the school’s vision and mission are two of the most important steps toward creating a successful program. Done well, they give clarity and direction for a school. A muddy vision or mission can help lead to continuing conflicts, and a school that has difficulty identifying priorities.
Center for School Change
I like that last part about “identifying priorities”. What does your school’s vision and mission and say about your institution’s priorities, and how well-embedded are those priorities?
Over the years, many educational scholars have stressed the importance of the school’s vision and mission, and how well those ideas are communicated and transformed into expectations. A classic amongst these scholars is William Rutherford of the University of Texas who, as far back as 1985, stated that effective school leaders need to:
have clear, informed visions of what they want their schools to become; visions that focus on students and their needs
translate these visions into goals for their schools and expectations for their teachers, students and administrators
So it would seem that simply having a vision and mission for a school is not enough to make a school truly outstanding. That vision and mission must focus on students and their needs, be translated into workable goals and be formulated as expectations for teachers, students and all staff members.
#2: Outstanding teachers make an outstanding school
A school’s best resource, by far, is the body of staff that comprise that school. Get that right and a school will usually be able to cope with the ebb and flow of daily circumstance in an effective manner. However, still to this day, schools are focusing far too much on teachers’ qualifications rather than experience, references and reputations, in my opinion.
This is the point where I’m going to have to speak bluntly and directly: an advanced degree does not make someone an amazing teacher; nor does a degree or qualification from a top university. Those credentials, actually, are meaningless in the context of determining one’s ability to manage behaviour, plan lessons thoroughly, teach with clarity and teach at an appropriate pace. Those qualifications may, however, allow a school to better market itself to parents and potential clients/customers (particularly in the private sector), but those qualifications never, in my honest opinion, determine a person’s ability to teach properly.
Teaching is a vocation: plain and simple. It’s a profession that one has to be built for, and one has to be passionate about in order to succeed. Experience has taught me that qualifications alone are not enough to determine a teacher’s suitability to teach. I, for example, have worked with a number of Oxford, Cambridge and PhD graduates over the years who were awful teachers who couldn’t communicate effectively with students and, in a significant number of cases, couldn’t teach at an acceptable pace or keep students engaged for long periods of time. On the other hand, I’ve also worked many such high-level graduates who were excellent teachers and helpful team-players.
Have you experienced the same in your time as a teacher?
My message for schools is simple: Focus on what the students and colleagues think of the teacher you’re hiring. Place more emphasis on teacher-portfolios and references – evidence of actual teaching ability – rather than the quality of a candidate’s qualifications.
#3: Effective systems make a school outstanding
Systems are like the glue that holds everything together. When a school has a clear vision and mission that’s backed-up by outstanding teachers and effective systems, everything then falls into place and runs smoothly (most of the time).
The most essential systems that schools need to have in-place can be remembered by what I hope is a useful acronym:C.A.R.S. – Communication,Action,Rewards andSanctions.
Communication systems need to be easy to use, and suitable for purpose. Schools that use the same system to communicate with parents, students, teachers and other stakeholders tend to experience better overall harmony than those that do not. Many schools, for example, choose to use e-mail for these purposes as it is a professional system that everyone can access. However, some schools (e.g. those in China) prefer to use a more real-time system for staff (e.g. chat apps like QQ and WeChat) and more traditional systems, like e-mail, for communicating with parents. Systems like this can cause undue stress to teachers, however, as it can be easy to miss messages posted within a chat stream. Teachers can also feel under constant pressure to respond, even outside of official working hours.
Action systems need to be workable. Teachers need to do things every day in a timely manner. Printing and photocopying, for example, should never be problematic (massive headaches are caused when printers don’t work, or when teachers are restricted to quotas, for example). Reports need to written via systems that are shared, and easy to navigate and access. Mock exams and internal exams need to be delivered via systems that make it easy for everyone to get their papers printed and organized in a timely manner. Timetabling needs to be seamless. Student locker systems need to be accessible and workable. The role of the form tutor/homeroom teacher within the school, and the systems needed to fulfill that role, need to be easy-to-use (a house system can often help with this). Registration systems need to be workable. Assessment systems and instructional software need to be carefully chosen and subscriptions need to be renewed on-time.File-sharing systems need to be in-place so that teachers can share useful resources with one-another.
Which action systems do you use in your school, and how could they be made to be more workable and accessible?
Rewards and sanctions systems – with emphasis placed more on rewards than sanctions. The consensus on the approach that should be taken is pretty clear in educational circles, and has been for some time. The UK’sDepartment for Education and Skills summarizes the key components of such systems best in my opinion:
Rewards, or positive consequences, are likely to encourage pupils to repeat the associated behaviour. Systems that emphasise praise for positive behaviour or regular attendance are more effective in motivating pupils to make appropriate choices. These appropriate choices contribute to a positive ethos in the school, thereby creating an environment for effective teaching and learning. . . . [S]anctions might be used only as a last resort, because using every opportunity to reinforce positive behaviour will have a greater and longer lasting effect than the constant use of sanctions for negative behaviour.
UK Department for Education and Skills, “Behaviour and Attendance Strand. Toolkit Unit 2. Key Stage 3 National Strategy. Everyday Policies: Rewards, Sanctions and Promotion of Positive Behaviour.” pp. 21. [Online] Available at: https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/5708/1/6c37a9499c7e75eaa76fd736c63ca731.pdf
In fact, it’s been known for some time that rewards work better than sanctions for promoting positive behaviour. The most notable foundational statement on this matter, for example, was made in the concluding text of The Elton Report (1989):
Schools which put too much faith in punishments to deter bad behaviour are likely to be disappointed
Outstanding schools always have the following elements in place:
A clear vision and mission that’s student-centered and easily translates into goals and expectations for students, teachers and all stakeholders
Outstanding teachers, with a proven track record of excellence in teaching (not necessarily academic excellence)
Effective communication, action, rewards and sanctions systems
Bibliography and references (in order of appearance)
W.L. Rutherford. School principals as effective leaders. Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 67 number1, 1985, pp. 31-34
UK Department for Education and Skills. Behaviour and Attendance Strand. Toolkit Unit 2. Key Stage 3 National Strategy. Everyday Policies: Rewards, Sanctions and Promotion of Positive Behaviour. pp. 21. [Online] Available at: https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/5708/1/6c37a9499c7e75eaa76fd736c63ca731.pdf
