Instructional Strategy – Lessons Learned

Category: Instructional Strategy (page 1 of 16)

Photo & Audio Documentation to Support Wellness

In previous posts, I mentioned the importance of documenting one’s wellness efforts. Specifically, I wrote about recording to reflect upon exercising our character strengths within each of the PERMAH pillars. This process includes taking photos of, recording a short video, and/or voice recording descriptions of our wellness actions/activities to then be added to a school-developed wellness app or if there is a commercial Positive Psychology app that offers this functionality.

Other options include uploading the wellness in action photos, videos, and/or audio descriptions to one’s portfolio and/or to a wellness journal with provided reflection prompts if the school offers either as part of their wellness program for the community. I say community to include students, staff members, and parents. The bottom line is that, yes, we need to understand the principles of wellness. Still, even more importantly, we need to be actionable with our wellness knowledge to live and reflect upon that knowledge in our lives.

Drilling down on this documentation process, one tool we can pull from our wellness toolkit is the smartphone/tablet that is ubiquitous in our society. Whether you are engaging your strength of creativity to come up with a nutritious smoothie recipe within the H of PERMAH or you are in a flow state writing a poem within the Engagement pillar, you can take a few seconds to snap a photo and/or record a quick voice description of your action(s) to later go into your wellness app, portfolio and/or journal.

One specific documentation effort can be part of your periodic or daily gratitude effort. Whether taking what I call a “beauty break” to take in something beautiful in your environment and/or simply thinking about a person, event, experience, etc., that brings forth grateful thoughts and emotions, you can record that moment at the moment via your device.

We definitely want to stay in those mindful moments, so the recording should be limited to a very short interruption so we can remain in the experiential state. The shadow side of this process is getting caught up in recording instead of experiencing. And, of course, if one extends the sharing to social networking, there is the positive of community support and of potentially bringing beauty into the lives of others which is countered if the effort is intended for the sake of digital likes instead of simply enjoying the P of Positive Emotions that can accompany the wellness moments. 😉

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More PRIME Instructional Strategies

May 25, 2021 / David Carpenter / 0 Comments

Here are a couple more PRIME instructional strategies for your wellness teaching toolkit>

Wellness Partners – How about introducing the term “wellness partnering” (i.e., coaching) as a technique that students can apply to support each other using their knowledge of character strengths? In applying this strategy, students will need lots of time and practice with their strengths of Emotional and Social Intelligence to be helpful partners. Active listening lessons can be a good starting place to help students see themselves as coaches. As you design and implement this strategy, one helpful approach can be the act of students working together to write wellness prescriptions for in-the-moment responsive needs and a wellness plan to be proactive in preparation for upcoming events.
Wellness Prescription Writing – Your students probably don’t know what a doctor’s prescription pad is, so the first step will be to teach them what it is. The next step for classroom integration is to develop ways to have students write wellness prescriptions for themselves and the class as a whole when they see a need. You can print out your class-designed wellness prescription pad that can be as simple as just having “Wellness Prescription” at the top, or you can build in some scaffolding with PERMAH and/or Character Strengths listed with checkboxes that need to be applied. Prescription writing can be a very “sticky” tool/idea in your student’s minds as they, in time, can call out responsively to in-the-moment class events to state, “we need to write a wellness prescription for this!”.

Images: Students | Prescription

Wellbeing Planner-Diary

May 15, 2021 / David Carpenter / 0 Comments

I have written a lot about either purchasing or designing and personalizing student planners/diaries to support the living and embedding of Positive Psychology into the lives of our students. Planners are a PRIME instructional strategy for wellness and integration.

The folks at the Institute of Positive Education are out with their 21-22 PEEC diaries (planners). They look to be nicely scaffolded to help students further engage PERMAH and the Character Strengths in their daily practices.

Previous Posts (includes my school’s wellness blog):

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Prime Instructional Strategy – Character Strength Cards

April 21, 2021 / David Carpenter / 0 Comments

Multiple pathways exist to create and use character strength cards in your classroom. A starter set could be the definition cards you purchase or create for instructional use. You could also try to demonstrate how to “exercise” the strengths. Another approach is, over time to have students make their thinking visible for each strength by creating their own cards. They could draw a picture of the strength on one side and, on the other side, write their definition and examples of application. The Institute of Positive Education provides cards with activities that students can try.

One whole class integration strategy is to state that it is time to engage the strength of proactivity as a class when planning is needed for upcoming activities, events, etc. The teacher can use digital or physical character strength cards for the class to review to choose which ones they will need to engage in the upcoming activity/event.

An example could be in planning for a field trip. Students could share their thoughts, visualizing what the field trip will involve, from being together on the bus to meeting guides at the site to asking questions to have their lunch packed… So besides being proactive and taking personal responsibility for one’s behavior, the students can list several character strengths that they will need to engage individually and as a class. 🙂

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Strength Coaching

March 24, 2021 / David Carpenter / 0 Comments

I have been working with a fourth-grade student who is really in touch with his emotions and self-understanding. Several of his character strengths are very developed, and he uses them frequently. So lots of upsides, but there are times when he leans into the shadow side of the strengths of leadership and teamwork. This led to some concerns from his teacher.

This student is a prime example of a bright and developed person who probably doesn’t get noticed as much as students struggling with academics and/or behavior needs. This is where having a wellness program that teaches all students about character strengths and PERMAH comes into play. 🙂 All students, not just those with struggles, deserve support from teachers and counselors (life coaches) to help them thrive.

Here is the Strength Coaching template that we used to review his current use of some strengths while planning for new ways to exercise them.

Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

Virtual School Pedagogy – Oldies but Goodies

February 12, 2021 / David Carpenter / 0 Comments

Note: My international school is just starting virtual school for the current school year, so we are now just experiencing what many schools have been doing for most of the year. I posted the following to our Wellness blog.

I hung up my instructional technology hat a ways back, so I can’t offer the latest tools, tips, or techniques that many of our staff use in their virtual learning delivery. I can offer pedagogical strategies that have worked in the past and can definitely be supported through technology to enhance learning in virtual schools.

Concept/Mind Maps

Concept/Mind maps help students make their thinking visible, primarily when representing connections between ideas, events, topics, etc. Concept maps also can be used as collaboration tools.

An excellent way to use concept maps for virtual learning is to use an online provider like Mindmeister. Students can share their Mindmeister concept maps with you to access their thinking, especially for formative assessment of their understanding as the unit of study progresses. Virtual collaboration is supported if you partner with students or place them in groups to work together to use mind maps for multiple purposes. Here is a mind map template for essential questions one teacher provided his students. Look at a blog post describing how students used concept maps to answer the essential questions for their units of study at a couple schools.

Learning Activity Types via TPACK

Several American professors came together in 2010-11 to organize learning activity types (LAT) into nine subject areas supported by technology. They published articles about their efforts. Here is one. They provide research-supported pedagogies in their Learning Activity Types website hosted at the College of William & Mary School of Education. They apply the TPACK construct for planning purposes. Look to their website by going to the left side menu to select from the nine learning activity-type disciplines. The supporting technologies are from 2011, so adapt ones that still exist today and/or find the latest iteration or replacement tool that best supports each pedagogy. Image Source

Multimedia Essays (Media Mashups)

Writing essays is one of the most precious skills that we teach our students. But sometimes, our students can benefit from an alternative learning experience and assessment that engages the full range of their ICL skills. We can differentiate and add complexity to the standard writing process by having students create multimedia essays where they “mash up” various sources of media to communicate their thinking. At the time, a William and Mary doctoral student describes her work with multimedia essays in this podcast. Image Source

Personalized Learning System (PLS)

Students (and teachers) use technology to access information, to make meaning, to create and communicate their learning via a personalized set of resources for learning… a “go-to” 24/7 technology and information access toolkit – a Personal Learning System (PLS).

We guide our students to work as architects designing and maximizing their “learning flow” (think of the term workflow) while also engaging in time management techniques to increase efficiency and purposeful productivity. Self-directed and growth-minded students use devices, apps, Web tools, and information sources, putting themselves in charge of their learning. Here is a web resource describing what a Personal Learning System can look like and a planning document for students to work with. Image Source

Sketchnoting (Visual Note-Taking)

Our students live in a media-rich world. They think in images, video, and sound while constantly making neural connections. The creation apps on phones, tablets, and computers offer students pathways to draw, audio record, insert images/video, and embed hyperlinks to information sources, all personalized. This is where visual note-taking comes in. We can expand note-taking choices beyond text recording into multiple modalities by guiding students to use mind maps, colors, shapes, images, and digital grouping by dragging and dropping objects and connecting lines to record their thinking. Image Source

The Six Thinking Hats

Edward de Bono created this approach to decision-making and problem-solving that guides users to think in terms of types of thinking and perspective. We can apply them for individuals and groups of students to use as they process information. Here is a helpful overview and a teacher’s application in her classroom. Image Source

Thinking Routines

In the book Making Thinking Visible, Ron Ritchhart, Mark Church, and Karin Morisson help readers understand the power of thinking routines to help students process big ideas and make their thinking visible. Teachers routinely use the thinking routines in their regular face-to-face classes. One can also choose from a variety of technologies to also use in virtual school. Here is a dated web resource on the supportive tools one can use. However, the application of the routines is sound. If you are new to the routines, you can review an article by Ron Ritchhart and David Perkins entitled Making Thinking Visible. Also, look to go through the Harvard Project Zero Thinking Routine Toolbox. Image Source

WebQuests

WebQuests are a natural pedagogy for virtual schools because they’re already web-based. They connect inquiry and research skills to students working in teams using their communication skills to present their findings. WebQuests are online research expeditions built by teachers that put the students into roles to find information from selected sites and other resources as they attempt to solve a real problem and/or answer a question. The students in teams analyze, curate, and then use the information to create a learning product to demonstrate their understanding. WebQuests are NOT internet scavenger hunts with students just going through a list of links. True WebQuests have the students performing in the authentic roles of historians, economists, mathematicians, etc. The culminating project is usually a performance task in which the students present their findings while playing their roles or applying the learning to produce a product. Image Source

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A significant wellness connection for these pedagogies is that they engage students in PERMAH while exercising their Character Strengths. Collaboration amplifies Relationships with students using their strengths of kindness, leadership, and teamwork, to name just a few character strength applications. The process of creating definitely has students applying their strength of creativity within the pillars of Engagement and Accomplishment.

So how do we take these oldies but goody strategies and other current innovative and effective practices to spread them throughout our virtual school? One approach would be to form a virtual school design team in each division who become busy bees finding out what’s happening in virtual classrooms elaborating on ideas, and making connections to new approaches. They then cross-pollinate throughout the division and potentially between divisions. 😁

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Wellness Integration – Teacher as Designer

January 6, 2021 / David Carpenter / 0 Comments

How can you mix the Character Strengths and PERMAH pillars into your teaching and classroom culture? I recently did a workshop with the teaching assistants in the ES, working on designing some activities and using language as an integration technique. What other ways can we infuse our classrooms, sports fields, performance rooms, etc., with the tenets of Positive Psychology? We worked from the list below.

Activities
Standalone lessons from the purchased curriculum
Units of study integration
Use language of Character Strengths and PERMAH

Student Wellness Plans

November 29, 2020 / David Carpenter / 0 Comments

I have been doing my best to “walk the talk” this year regarding bringing Positive Psychology into my counseling. I have shared several ideas to bring strength-based counseling into schools via this blog, my school wellness blog, and my Wellness@ES resource site. My primary tool for taking ideas to action is through WOOP goal-setting and personal wellness plan creation. I also use the pictured whiteboard from my office with students, which lists the PERMAH pillars and the Character Lab strengths.

The process is a mixture of teaching, designing, and creating. When the student completes writing his/her wellness plan, he/she takes it home along with an educational write-up to give the parents background on Positive Psychology and the wellness plan. The student reviews the plan with the parents seeking their input and ways to support it.

My vision for a wellness program would have each student have a wellness plan to be designed and constructed at the start of the school year. The students would use the wellness section of their portfolio to list their plan, along with a posting of artifacts throughout the year showing their efforts and following through on their goals within each PERMAH pillar.

Character Strength of Emotional Intelligence – Instructional Strategies and Activities

November 17, 2020 / David Carpenter / 0 Comments

The following are instructional strategies and activities to help integrate the strength of EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE into the culture of your classroom. You can access these strategies and those for other Character Strengths at my Wellness@ES resource site and the wellness blog I write for my school.

Active/Attentive Listening – One way to help our students make emotional and social connections with each other is to help them learn how to listen with attention. Design a listening protocol based on the tenets of attentive listening that fits the age of your students. Use this article and this one as a starting place with your design work to teach and embed active listening into the culture of your classroom. Look to integrate active listening into your Turn and Talk (Share) activities.
Atlas of Emotions – This atlas is an interactive tool that builds your emotional vocabulary. One strategy is to explore this tool using your projector to show your students the five universal emotions (anger, disgust, enjoyment, fear, and sadness). When you select an emotion, you are taken to a graph showing the intensity of variations in the emotion. A second strategy is to share the Timeline visual, which shows cause and effect when we are triggered to experience each of the five emotions and how we might respond. Another pathway to follow is the Response visual, which takes the emotion graph and shows possible responses. You can select each Response to describe what it looks like in action. It is definitely worth taking some time to explore this resource to come up with ways to use it!
Do You Feel Me? – Watch videos of elementary students sharing stories. Your students then guess the emotion(s) the presenter felt.
Drawing and Feelings – Sitting down to draw as an outlet to calm down when experiencing intense emotions and to express feelings are two ways that drawing can help students process their feelings.
Emotion Check-Ins – Possibly add check-ins to your morning meeting. Here is one technique of many.
Emotion Coaching – Use the steps of emotion coaching when students “flip their lids.”
Emotional/Feelings Thermometer – Download or create your own emotional thermometer to post in your room for the students to choose an emotion and their degree of feeling. Here is a helpful lesson.
Empathy as a Daily Habit – Offer ongoing activities such as random acts of kindness, “tuning into others,” the use of “I feel” messages, and active listening (teach and model) to make empathy a part of your class culture.
Extend Emotional Literacy – Adapt this lesson to the developmental level of your students.
Lesson Databases – Find lessons at the Heart-Mind Online resource site the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education provides. Find lessons at the Greater Good in Education resource site by the Greater Good Science Center (University of California – Berkeley).
Literacy Around Emotions – Think in terms of how you work to develop literacy skills and see if there are any applications for emotional literacy and self-understanding.
Mindfulness Activities – Design activities that help your students identify their physical and emotional states while practicing being present. Help students are present and aware of their feelings when interacting with others. Here is a video to introduce mindfulness to your students. Here is a lesson page with a few ideas. Positive Psychology provides research and a list of activities to try in your classroom. Smiling Mind provides PDF downloads of lesson ideas for the different age ranges of our elementary school. Scroll down to the bottom of the page for the links to the PDFs.
- Build in a few times during the day for students to stop, be mindful, and think about their emotions. You can announce the moments or possibly use a chime at set intervals or sound off randomly. Here is a digital chime. Choose from the many meditations for children at Insight Timer to take a longer mindful moment with your students.
- ReachOut.com (focus on MS and HS students) provides a few apps that can help students manage their feelings of anxiety and worry. Take a look at their main app ReachOut Worry Time. They have more apps at the bottom of the page.
Mood Meter App – Depending on your students’ age, use paper and markers to create a class mood meter and/or individual ones for personal use. The class version can be used for labeling emotions, scenario role plays, emotional check-ins, etc. Older students can create more of an app version using digital tools. Here is more information on the app.
Positive Self-Talk – Review and adapt the list of activities designed for adults and children to first teach the concept to then design lessons to grow positive self-talk in your students.
Practicing Emotional Intelligence – The article “How To Practice Emotional Intelligence” offers ten tips for your review to adapt to your classroom.
Random Acts of Kindness – Help your students understand the impact of doing kind acts towards others. The Random Acts of Kindness Foundation (RAK) is a helpful place to get resources. This website is loaded with ways to highlight and nurture kindness in our students. Start by setting up an account to download the free lessons organized by grade level or access them from this folder. Review other resources such as their kindness ideas database. Here is a list of 45 possible random acts of kindness.
Regulation Strategies – Adult-initiated Emotion Coaching | Offer the FCW questions of “What am I feeling? (use Mood Meter) What choices do I have? What do I want? | Breath Counting (e.g., breathe in count 4, then exhale count 6) Breath Shifting (e.g., one hand on our chest and the other hand on our abdomen noticing how the rise and fall with each inhale and exhale.)

Photo by Tengyart on Unsplash

Dual (Hybrid) Approach to Implementing a Wellness Program

November 11, 2020 / David Carpenter / 0 Comments

My focus for designing a wellness program and implementing it is to take an integrative approach. This approach has grade level ES and MS teams grade level teams and HS departments creating and collaborating with the counselor (wellness coach) to adapt the current curriculum delivered in units of study (i.e., LA, SS, math, etc.) to find natural integration opportunities for PERMAH and the Character Strengths. The same collaboration and design work go into choosing strategies that can embed wellness practices into the culture of the classrooms and advisories. My Wellness@ES resource site is filled with PRIME and SECONDARY strategies to support this integrative approach.

I also put forth a few ideas on collaborating to review the purchased SEL curriculum to teach the provided standalone lessons.

In my mind, this dual (hybrid) approach gives the teacher a vast toolkit for teaching wellness. In both the integrative and standalone purchased curriculum approaches, the teacher can proactively plan according to the developed scope and sequence of standards while being nimble and ready for just-in-time teaching when specific wellness needs are presented by the students.

So how might a school move forward using this dual (hybrid) approach? I sat in a PD session yesterday that offered the first steps of a model that one might use. The topic was health which our teachers are teaching within our units of study and through some standalone lessons. The grade-level teams worked with a spreadsheet (see below) that listed the standards with some criteria for the teachers to respond to. This audit will provide data to further develop the scope and sequence of the standards.

As you can see, the grade level teams were asked to designate if the standards are being assessed (planned for next year) and what they are teaching by quarter. If they are not teaching the standard, they check whether it is feasible to add the standard for the future. The teams went through this process for both integrations through super units (i.e., units of study) and standalone lessons using the provided spreadsheet for their respective grade levels.

Whether it be wellness or another subject area, it makes sense for teaching teams to have this opportunity to map out where they are and where they are going. I can see us using this protocol when we move forward with a wellness program at my elementary school.

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

Chart by Dan Keller

Lessons Learned

Instructional Technology - International Education - Wellness