Denise Pope 🇺🇸

The Well-balanced Student

Even before the pandemic, students faced stressors and overload that impeded learning and achievement. Now, those stressors are compounded by the stress of Covid-19 and other global issues impacting youth. This presentation highlights the stressors students face and offers a research-based SPACE framework for educators to consider as they strive to increase student well-being and engagement with learning in their schools and classrooms.

Spurningar og svör eftir fyrirlestur

Q1 What ways do you recommend to ensure that students come well rested to school and motivated to study, when they come from homes where parents have no rules and are not willing to cooperate? 

That is a tricky question. As an organization, Challenge Success does several parent education workshops and events each week AND we use social media to try to influence parents and families as well. If the parents have no rules, perhaps you can appeal to the students directly? We have used students to help run sleep information campaigns where they teach their peers the research on the importance of sleep, eating breakfast, etc.  You can see examples of sleep information and other student actions here: https://www.challengesuccess.org/schools/for-students/

Q2 What is necessary to change in schools in order to give students' well-being and self-empowerment more time and more weight?

Again, I go back to education. The E in our SPACE Framework is educating all stakeholders - the families and the school faculty and staff about the developmental needs of kids in terms of well-being. We do workshops for schools where we ask teachers to consider what is and isn’t working well in terms of promoting student well-being and engagement with learning - and then we ask them to use the SPACE framework to decide which category deserves the most attention right now. Are there any low-hanging fruit or easy wins that the school can attempt immediately - such as collecting some information from students on their health and sleep practices and if they feel a sense of belonging at school? We offer a quick “pulse” survey to check for these things - but you can design an easy and short survey in-house as well. Then, ASK the students and parents and teachers to weigh in about changes to the schedule (ie is lunch long enough for everyone to get through the line? Is there time for socializing with friends at school? Are classes too long/short for engaged learning to take place? etc).  You can also ask about the climate of care and make sure you have a strong Social Emotional Learning curriculum in place and that you are teaching strategies for stress reduction, etc.

Q3 What needs to be changed at school so that students come to study there but not just "be at school” waiting for it to be over?

Ask the students this question and you will get some terrific answers.  We have lots of ways to get at the student voice - especially in our book Overloaded and Underprepared. You can shadow students, conduct fishbowls, administer surveys, or do some informal polling to get at this answer. And don’t forget to ask faculty as well -- many of them have seen more students engage with learning when they make it authentic, when they vary pedagogy, and when they let students have voice and choice over what and how they learn.

Q4 How can the school system recognize different kind of success than the traditional one?

We spend a LOT of time asking kids and parents and teachers to re-define success. What does real success look like? Who do they know that is successful and what are ALL the different paths these successful people have taken over time? Some schools host panels of alumni that have taken really different paths to success. We also ask schools to re-think awards ceremonies (who are you rewarding and why? Who feels left out from these ceremonies?) and what are you basing your assessments on? Grades alone (which may lead to cheating and grade grubbing)? Are you looking at multiple ways to be successful in and out of school?