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Instructional Technology - International Education - Wellness

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Shifting from PD to Personalized Learning

January 13, 2022 / / 0 Comments

This past week I listened to Dan Taylor and John Mikton’s  The International Schools Podcast, in which John interviewed my old podcasting partner Jeff Utecht and his current podcasting partner Tricia Friedman. Listen to the episode as they cover various interesting issues, including professional development (PD). Jeff and Tricia are consultants and PD providers, so they shared many helpful insights on this topic.

What caught my attention was when Jeff noted that we need to move away from the term “professional” development and toward “personal learning.” His statement reminded me of our Ed Tech Co-Op podcast’s episode entitled “Personalizing PD” in 2015. Jeff and I discussed multiple pathways to support educators’ professional learning. Our big takeaway was, yes, build in a system for individualized and personalized learning not just around professional learning but also around personal non-job focused learning. It really was a good and helpful episode, if you ask me, so take a listen. What we said in 2015 is even more relevant today when the pandemic’s conventional practice of bringing in consultants for face-to-face learning is limited.

I wrote Jeff after listening to the podcast, saying that I have no idea where the field of professional development is today. Still, I had a couple brain-pops that might help educators think about their learning. First, we know the term “personalized learning” has been a buzzword for some years regarding student learning. I have covered this topic in my blog on a few occasions. I also developed a section on the Web Resources for Learning website dedicated to helping students design what I call their personal learning system. On that resource page, I mention that educators also develop their own personal learning systems. I think educators would see the connection when one says the term professional learning network or PLN.

Network means being connected to resources and others, while system means how to make the connections and on what topics. So as students might have subject area, information gathering, curation, etc., categories of their Personal Learning System, educators also do the same with their PLNs. An elementary teacher’s “system” might cover subject areas, instructional methods, assessment techniques, etc., along with the tools to reach out to resources and thought leaders while also sending the teacher’s ideas to others in the network. Many tools are social networking but can also include web resource sites, podcasts, blogs, and other information sources that can be curated.

Helping teachers see their learning as networked and part of a system might help them visualize whether they have a PLN or not; they might want to shift from thinking that their school is the leading provider of their professional learning. And as Jeff and I spoke about on the podcast, we need to move away from siloing our learning into professional versus personal. Many folks have their social networking and information resource providers mixing in professional and individual learning. I find that I get a lot of ideas around education by reading and listening to thought leaders who are not educators.

Another idea is to think about how you learn. We discuss how students learn, including which modalities might help support differentiation. We also talk a lot about student agency, including helping students better understand how they learn. So as is often the case, we can apply what we are doing with students to ourselves. 🙂 Look to enhance your agency by thinking about the variety of ways you learn as you look to develop or recalibrate your PLN. I am reminded of a blog post I wrote entitled “How Do Adults Learn?“. It might provide some insights as it was based on current research.

So if you have a PLN, you might have reached out to your instructional coaches, librarian, and possibly some other teachers, significantly those fluent with social networking tools, to help you build your network. If you don’t have a PLN and want to further personalize your learning, you might want to reach out to these folks for content and connection tools to get you started.

Speaking of Jeff, Tricia, John, and Dan, you really should look to follow them on Twitter and/or other networking tools where they are present to add them to your PLN.

Photo by Clint Adair on Unsplash

 

Wellness App – Another Example

January 3, 2022 / / 0 Comments

I have mentioned the idea of schools working with MS/HS students to design and create a wellness app for their community. Schools could hire a company to do the work, but what a missed opportunity for real-world project-based learning for coding students.

To paint the picture a bit more, here is a mock-up of what the user interface of a  wellness app might look like with this app prototype focusing on the H of PERMAH.

Photo by William Hook on Unsplash

Instructional Coach for Wellness

December 29, 2021 / / 0 Comments

A couple of years ago, I asked a friend at one of the international educator recruitment agencies if schools were recruiting wellness coaches. He replied that yes, they were, and it can be a role separate from being a counselor or possibly a PE/Health teacher.

It has been on my mind what a job description for a wellness coach might look like, so I did a web search for “elementary wellness coach.” Here are the first results that came up with a brief descriptor of what the positions seem to be about.

  • School Wellness Program – It seems to be a nutrition-oriented program.
  • What Is A Wellness Coach – Working with groups, mindfulness, and mental health support.
  • Wellcoaches | School of Coaching – They provide a coaching manual to help one become a National Board Certified Coach. Digging a little, I found this board-certified position for healthcare professionals working with patients and clients.

I went through several more results and found nothing connected to K-12 education and the role of a wellness coach. I did one more search for “high school wellness coach.” The first result was how to get a college degree in wellness coaching. The degree seemed to be oriented to only working in the private sector.

I thought more about my being hired a few years ago to help design and implement a wellness program at an international school. I was told that my background as an instructional coach for technology and as a school counselor, along with my experience in curriculum writing, was why I was hired for the position.

Upon arriving at the school, my natural inclination was to connect with the three instructional coaches in my building. I saw myself as a change agent who would work to facilitate curriculum planning meetings to integrate the principles of Positive Psychology into the regular classroom curriculum. While I did have periodic meetings with the counselors in the other buildings and the school psychologist, it was clear that their roles were the normal and conventional ones of working to support student mental health and behavior issues, specifically for students who were struggling with potential deficits. The wellness coaching aspect of my school counseling position would be to help support the wellness of all students and staff and, in my mind parents helping them engage their character strengths within PERMAH to hopefully thrive. And yes, at the same time, I would do my regular counseling duties of supporting students struggling socially and/or emotionally.

My next step was to review the International Society of Technology in Education (ISTE) standards for coaches which had guided me previously in my work. The ISTE coaching standards definitely feel like a better fit as I work to think about what the job description and possible standards might look like for wellness coaching in K-12 schools. I also reviewed the American School Counselor Association (ASCA) school counselor standards.

Here are the ISTE coaching standards, which line up directly with almost any coaching of teachers, whether it be in coaching reading, writing, STEM, etc.

  • Change Agent
  • Connected Learner
  • Collaborate
  • Learning Designer
  • Professional Learning Facilitator
  • Data-Driven Decision-Maker
  • Digital Citizen Advocate

I think going forward that I might write individual blog posts on each of these standards and how they, in my mind, fit the role of wellness coaching. I will also see if I can get my hands on any wellness coaching job descriptions from some international schools.

Supporting Post> Counseling Job Description

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Well-Being Daily Practices

December 9, 2021 / / 0 Comments

I am finishing a class entitled “Self-Care & Well-Being for Helping Professionals,” taught by Dr. Mark Thurston and Mary Elizabeth Lynch at George Mason University in Virginia. Dr. Thurston gave us a choice to choose from three well-being practices to apply each day for a couple weeks. He used the term “consciousness discipline” to describe the process of applying them. They are protocols that you probably have tried or heard about. Dr. Thurston presented them so clearly that I am sharing them here.

  • Each morning when you get up, write down three positive expectations for the day; and at the end of the day, write down three things for which you are grateful which happened in that day just ending. We can think of this option as “brief journaling for optimism and gratitude” (BJOG). For the morning-time positive expectations, let them be things around which you have some control. For example, don’t pick “I expect it will not rain today” or “I expect my boyfriend will be in a good mood.” Instead, you can like positive things you expect yourself to do (such as “I will work on my homework without distractions for two hours”) and things that are more internal about attitudes and emotions (such as, “I will remain patient even when unexpected, annoying things arise”).
  • Each day for the week, try your best to talk about other people only in the way you would if that person were present to hear what you are saying about him or her. We can think of this option as a way to cultivate greater self-awareness about social relationships and be compassionate in how we think about and talk about others. We could call it the “compassionate social intelligence” discipline (CSI).
  • Try to make eye contact with others throughout the day as you listen to them and talk to them. Allow this action to be an expression of your full attention to them. It’s a way to reinforce seeing and caring about others.   We could call it “paying attention with eye contact” (PAEC). (I can see extending this protocol by trying to be a full-on active listener moving beyond just eye contact. Another extension that compliments this process is engaging in Active Constructive Responding (ACR) along with my strategy of acknowledging – validating – celebrating when others share with us.)

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Photo & Audio Documentation to Support Wellness

December 6, 2021 / / 0 Comments

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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41 Questions to Support Your Digital Wellness

October 20, 2021 / / 0 Comments

I ran across a thought leader who posted 41 questions to help his readers unpack their relationship with technology. The author is L.M. Sacasas, and here is his post. NY Times podcaster and journalist Ezra Klein dives deep with L.M. Sacasas to unpack several questions with exemplars. It is an episode really worth listening to.

41 questions are a lot to go through as they really provoke and push one to pause and contemplate the influence of technology. But I think it is worth considering how we, as educators, can use the questions in our class discussions on digital wellness. I also can see bringing the questions into individual parent meetings, workshops, and the school parent portal.

Families can pick questions to discuss during family meetings. An excellent connection is to bring in the family mission statement listing the values of the family to see how they can be incorporated into answering the questions. It would take a series of meetings, of course. Still, the time spent not only helps family members think deeper about how technology affects them, but the question-answering and reflection time also is an excellent model to help individuals stop and go through the reflection process about several influences upon their lives.

Most of the questions can be adapted to be understandable for Middle and High School students. One blended learning approach is having the students respond to the questions outside of class, recording their answers using an online discussion tool to get some sharing going before class. Once in class, students can work in groups to share their responses and possibly develop scenarios of specific tech tools to document how they answer the questions.

And just as with the parents, if you previously did some work with students on values clarification, you could do a separate lesson with students looking through the lens of their values to see how much their tech use lines up with their belief system.

It would take some time to choose and adapt the questions that elementary students can answer by doing junior versions, possibly with some scaffolding that includes real-life examples.

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Student Journaling with Big Life Journal

October 20, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Student journaling to reflect on school subjects and/or unique ideas is a powerful and proven tool. Several of my posts cover this topic of student journals/planners. I recently ran across a company called Big Life Journal that provides journals based on SEL and aspects of Positive Psychology. I will be ordering copies to review but what I am seeing on the website looks good regarding the prompts, topics, and templates that can help students grow their self-understanding while adding “tools” to their personal wellness toolkits.

An essential part of my working with parents is to give them parenting materials that include strategies and templates to put them in the role of a life coach for their children. Hopefully, the Big Life journals for elementary and middle/high school students can be a helpful addition to my parent coaching toolkit.

Our Wellness Team could design educational materials and workshops to help parents use journals to support their children’s coaching. I could see my subsequent school purchasing copies for all students or promoting the idea of parents buying the books. I could also see using the parent portal wellness section to house the tutorials and the community wellness blog to post weekly strategies for using the journals.

Another approach could be to go through the school wellness program to have classroom teachers in the elementary assigning tasks in the journals for students to do in class and/or at home, depending on how the school uses the journal. My vote would be for home use with a possible teacher/parent partnership as a big part of the effort to grow parent understanding of how to support their children’s emotional, social, and general wellness growth.

Again, I don’t have a copy of the book, but I wonder if they have a digital wellness and/or citizenship section. I think these topics would need their own book as they are related to emotional and social well-being but are more in applying one’s emotional and social intelligence character strengths.

My current parents are very open to parenting guidance on wellness, the use of technology/media, and how their children interact with others via technology. I wonder if Common Sense Media has some form of workbook/journal for at-home use.

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Designing A Staff Wellness Program

October 13, 2021 / / 0 Comments

I continue to very much enjoy my class on wellness through George Mason University. My professor, Dr. Thurston, recently gave us the following task, which falls very much within my wheelhouse. Hopefully, my next school will already have a wellness program in place. If not, my write-up can be a starting point for me to put forth a proposal not constrained by the word count for this assignment. I also would, in PosPsych fashion, not focus on the negatives but rather look at how to help all community members flourish.

Assignment: Imagine you are the director of professional development for a large, K-6 public school. Burnout has become a significant issue for your school. The principal has asked YOU to develop a program  1) to help prevent burnout for teachers and  2) to help those teachers who are already experiencing burnout to find resilience and bounce back from it. The principal wants your support and training program to especially 1) promote mind-body wellness and 2) cultivate a renewed sense of meaning in being a teacher.

A Professional Development Plan to Prevent Burnout

As the director of professional development here at our school, I am writing to you as our principal, requesting your feedback and ultimate approval of a personal and professional learning program for our teachers designed to support and enhance their mind-body wellness while also focusing on our teachers who are currently experiencing burnout. I will offer some background information about negative factors affecting the nature of being in a helping profession. But the main thrust of this proposal is to provide learning opportunities to enhance physical health and mind-body wellness using the tenets of Positive Psychology which we introduced to the staff at the end of last year. With your insights and guidance, we can review some programmatic offerings for a sustained year-long effort to further support the wellness of our professional learning community. 

Background:

Let me start with some research by Dr. Cary Cherniss and Dr. Thomas Skovholt that deals with helping professions and the factors affecting burnout. Both authors highlight the importance of caregivers knowing about factors affecting potential burnout and how to prevent it. 

Dr. Cherniss shares several conclusions regarding reasons for burnout with stress, institutional struggles around workplace bureaucracy, societal expectations, and not feeling supported as being a few primary drivers. The research shows that these factors lower caregiving professionals’ initial idealism and belief in the meaning of their work, possibly then leading to more self-protection, lowering expectations for clients, and having less energy devoted to work. 

Dr. Skovholt’s work centers on the importance of meaning, building resilience, and the factors that do and don’t sustain the professional self. His research shows that experiencing a sense of meaning and purpose ebbs with giving professionals when they don’t feel they are making a difference in their work. He points out that helping professionals can control the advancement of their expertise and the quality of their relationship with their clients. However, they don’t have control over their clients taking steps to make needed changes in their lives. Dr. Skovholt stresses the importance of balance in work/personal life and the unhealthy nature of overly attaching to one’s clients. 

 

Program Development: 

Step 1: I propose that we start our wellness program with a full-day whole-staff kickoff introduction to our PD plans for the year. A primary focus of the first PD session will be to share information about what it means to be in a helping and meaningful profession that comes with challenges to the point of possible burnout. I can see us doing a thinking routine like Compass Points to have table groups respond to the italicized statement I just listed. 

After plenty of discussion and sharing table responses to the thinking routine, we provide information from the research by Dr. Cherniss and Dr. Skovholt. We would move from the negative factors affecting teachers into a problem-solving mode to understand what makes teaching meaningful. We would also look to decrease stress and stop potential burnout by offering several of Dr. Skovholt’s support strategies (see below for examples listed under PERMA(H) – Meaning).

Everyone’s homework will be to take the VIA Character Strengths survey. We will give a due date for everyone to complete the survey and notice that we will have a mini-workshop prepared for teams to discuss and build an understanding of the strengths. We then finish the day by reintroducing Positive Psychology to the staff, emphasizing how we will use the PERMA(H) construct and the Character Strengths as our vehicle for learning about and applying wellness principles to our lives. 

Step 2: A natural tendency is to emphasize the needs of those who are struggling, as in our teachers who are already experiencing high levels of stress, anxiety, and in some cases, burnout. Going forward, I propose we take a constructive and empowering Positive Psychology approach that offers wellness information and support strategies to all of our teachers, moving everyone to a more mind-body solid sense of well-being with the knowledge that some will start their learning in more challenging situations. 

Thus, we build on our introduction efforts from last year around well-being based upon the Positive Psychology “exercising” of the Character Strengths, the PERMA(H) pillars stressing the importance of the meaning and positive emotions in the lives of caregivers, and the value of life satisfaction with a focus on mindfulness as a tool among to help our staff flourish. 

Just as we differentiate for our students, I propose that we offer added support for those with more needs while giving everyone a menu of strategies to individualize their wellness planning and implementation efforts while also working with their grade level and specialist (i.e., art, PE, library, student support) teams. Teachers can work independently and with their teams with the option of having a “wellness buddy” for reflection and motivational purposes. It will be up to you to decide how much attention and which teams might need to work on their wellness, especially regarding relationships and functionality. 

This hybrid approach would include the development of a “Wellness Learning Portal” to provide background information on Positive Psychology and other aspects of mind-body well-being. The site would be organized at the top level around the PERMA(H) pillars, including strategies on how to engage the Character Strengths within each PERMA(H) pillar offering staff members a construct to organize their thinking and actions towards enhancing their well-being. 

We would offer designated individual and team-protected time to work on activities listed within the portal. We would gather feedback as we proceed to design whole staff reflection and sharing times as we progress through the year. The emphasis, though, would not be on all staff PD sessions. 

I propose starting with a life satisfaction survey and a resilience inventory to get a baseline of where everyone stands now. We can then give each instrument at the end of the year to measure the effectiveness of our efforts. The results can help our counselor/wellness coach quickly move to work with individuals dealing with burnout to help them create wellness plans and to receive ongoing life coaching. 

We can offer a few specifics within each PERMA(H) pillar through our portal. A theme for each pillar is to ask our teachers which character strengths they can dial up within each pillar to further enhance their wellness.   

Positive Emotions – Offer a list of activities and character strength engagements that lead to positive or those that can lead to uncomfortable emotions. Provide guidance in choosing positive experiences that lead to positive emotions by offering the Positivity Self Test. Provide research on the power of positive thinking and learned optimism. Journaling is a helpful tool for this pillar. 

Engagement – Offer an inventory that helps teachers reflect on which activities under which circumstances deepen their engagement in their activities. Include background information on experiencing a state of flow. We can offer an array of mindfulness techniques, including meditation. I could see setting aside a portion of one of our staff PD sessions to share the science-supported benefits of mindfulness and misconceptions while also taking a deep dive into the core elements of intention, attention, and attitude. 

Relationships – Offer articles on the importance of relationships for well-being, including the research on inhabitants of blue zones worldwide. List strategies to help build active listening and Active Constructive Responding (ACR) communication skills. We can offer a full menu of team-building and wellness activities.  

Meaning – Take a deep dive into articles on helping professionals and the importance of self-care while finding meaning in one’s work. Design an activity to engage staff with the four needs for meaning by Baumeister and Wilson (i.e., purpose, value and justification, efficacy and autonomy, and control).

We would then offer strategies to sustain one’s professional self. Here are a few strategies offered by Dr. Skovholt.

  • Distinguish between idealism and realism
  • Take care of yourself first – As told on airplanes, first put on your oxygen mask and then that of your child. 
  • Seek balance while at times dealing with negative self-talk around feeling selfish for taking care of your needs
  • Setting healthy boundaries for yourself.
  • Build a support network and look for opportunities to mentor others which gets at the R in PERMA(H)
  • Maximize successes
  • Find ways to bring play into our lives

Accomplishment – Providing ways to set goals and engage a Growth Mindset comes into play along with the strengths of resilience and perseverance. 

Health – We can offer physical and mental support strategies in our wellness portal, including diet, fitness, sleep, and a further focus on whole-body wellness. 

Step 3: Another delivery instrument for our wellness program is creating and implementing a wellness plan by individuals and possibly by teams. The wellness plan would include setting personal wellness goals. Here is a family wellness template that can be adapted for our purposes. 

Step 4: Connecting to our other initiative to integrate wellness principles into our classroom curriculum, I propose that all staff members make one of their professional goals to increase their knowledge of Positive Psychology to be ready for our student wellness program implementation.

 

Final Thoughts: 

This staff member wellness program outline is a starting point for us to build from. I would like to form a wellness team of interested staff to fully design and implement the program. 

 

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A Well-Balanced Whole Child Parent Resource

October 5, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Parent education is a primary focus of my counseling and life coaching. As mentioned in previous posts, I am a big believer in schools providing their community with a parent portal offering all sorts of school information, wellness, parenting guidance resources, and a vibrant parent education workshop program.

I recently listened to an excellent educational episode by one of my favorite podcasters. The episode will definitely go into the parent portal of my next school. 😉

The podcast is The Genius Life, hosted by Max Lugavare. The episode is The Genius Life #180: Parents, Listen! What Sugar and Technology Are Doing to Your Kids; Treating ADHD and Sensory Challenges Naturally | An Interview with Nicole Beurkens, Ph.D. Max and Nicole don’t just focus on struggling children; they provide a well-balanced approach to raising healthy children.

Nicole provides common sense guidance around what children “ingest” from food to media to sleep. As a believer that our American food system is at the root of many struggles for young and old, I appreciate her science and brain-based approach to the value of healthy food, which fits nicely into the H of PERMAH.

Nicole’s website offers resources to provide further parenting guidance. She also is a podcaster with her The Better Behavior Show which I am now listening to.

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Wellness Dashboard

September 14, 2021 / / 0 Comments

I often wonder if I am making any sense in this blog and my web creations. Well, it turns out that at least one of my ideas has been around for a while, like many ideas. A case in point is the idea of thinking about one’s well-being using a dashboard to visualize where one stands.

I previously wrote about helping students self-reflect on their wellness status by using PERMAH in a dashboard fashion. I mentioned the possibility of designing and developing an app to support this effort. There are several self-care apps out there, for example, focusing on emotional status to help one reflect to set a baseline for the day.

I found mention of a wellness style dashboard in the book Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, professors at the Stanford d. school. They use the term “Health – Work – Play – Love Dashboard,” with health, work, play, and love being their main categories of living life.

The dashboard for them is to offer a visual starting place to begin designing one’s life.

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