15 minute read
Creating a Culture of Wellness at SCH
BY DEIDRA LYNGARD H'18
From left: Jazze Wingard '22 and Leslee Frye, Upper School psychologist, strike their favorite yoga pose during Mental Health Awareness Month.
Over the past few decades, anxiety levels have steadily increased in the general population, with anxiety now being the most common mental health concern affecting about 19.1 percent of the adult population.1
For educators, the last two years of COVID added additional and unprecedented stressors, including having to navigate an unfamiliar world of virtual and hybrid teaching; keeping students engaged and feeling connected while isolated in their homes; and juggling the needs of their own homebound families.
According to a 2021 RAND study of public school teachers funded by the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, stress rates during the pandemic were found to be higher among teachers than most other working adults. “My brain feels like a browser with 100 tabs open,” is how one teacher described her mental state.2
And students? A longitudinal study on anxiety by psychologist Jean M. Twenge from Case Western Reserve University found that “anxiety has increased substantially among children and college-age students over the last three decades.” The study cites a number of factors for this rise, including decreases in social connectedness and perceived threats from environmental dangers such as climate change, the global pandemic, and crime.
All this paints a worrying picture, with long-term implications for the well-being of our society. How does one school even begin to tackle such a huge challenge? But the need to do so is clear as stress and anxiety have a profound impact on productivity, performance, and potential. Clearly, schools have a role to play in helping their communities maintain all dimensions of their health.
A Commitment to Wellness
With the arrival of Steve Druggan as head of school in 2016 and his initiative to clarify the mission and values of the school, the goal of supporting students’ self-knowledge and potential was given new focus and momentum.
SCH asked itself what it could do to ensure a positive environment for personal growth and learning and reduce the stress that interferes with these goals. The answer: Create a “Culture of Wellness” to help faculty and students reduce stress, feel connected, and keep a positive perspective. This wellness culture would be grounded in the school’s mission, values, and strong sense of community; informed by its past initiatives around resilience and grit; and infused with the tenets of positive psychology (PP), developed in the late 1990s by nationally respected psychologist Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania. PP espouses an assetbased approach to mental health that focuses on people’s strengths and quest for meaning rather than simply the alleviation of suffering.
Students enjoy a day of pet therapy.
“We wanted to do this in a way that was not just, ‘Oh, here’s a happy hour or some other one-off activity,“ explains alumnus Frank Jackson '14, former Upper School Spanish teacher and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s master’s program in positive psychology. “We wanted to be really intentional, integrating it into all aspects of curriculum, DEI, professional development, activities, coaching, sports, etc., so that it becomes part of the culture of the school. Positive psychology is intended to be an organizing framework for what we’ve already been doing around our mission, values, resilience, and DEI work,” adds Jackson. “Not the start of something new, but a container—a common language—for what already exists.”
Building on Precedent
The ground for such an ambitious initiative had already been prepared. In 2013, under then-Director of Educational and Counseling Services Dr. Marisa Crandall, the school launched a resiliency curriculum for students based on aspects of positive psychology. Also at that time, a team of SCH faculty participated in a research group to study resilience and grit under the direction of Angela Duckworth, MacArthur Fellow and founder and CEO of the University of Pennsylvania’s Character Lab, which “advances scientific insights that help children thrive.”
Experts on children’s emotional and mental health were regular guest speakers at the school, including New York Times columnist Dr. Lisa Damour, author of Untangled and Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls, and Dr. Michael Thompson, author of The Pressured Child and Raising Cain, among others.
These initiatives and events helped create the fertile soil in which a more comprehensive wellness initiative would be planted.
The Work Begins
In 2019, Druggan, then-head of school, convened a faculty team to explore ways to integrate social and emotional learning into the curriculum. Yoga and meditation/ mindfulness classes that were offered to faculty began to make appearances in classrooms. The Physical Education Department, under the leadership of B.A. Fish, a long-time advocate of mental and physical health, began sending out regular emails to faculty with wellness tips and encouragement for staying healthy and balanced.
A new program in Middle School, AEIOU (awareness, empathy, inclusion, opportunity through differences, and understanding), was initiated to validate every student’s experience and identity and promote mental health. “By teaching children that feeling sad, angry, scared, or anxious isn’t inherently bad, it helps them use these emotions as information,” explains Middle School psychologist Sandra Tecosky. “What do these emotions tell me I need? How can I take care of myself? These skills are especially important during an age of transition, when bodies are changing, brains are developing, and new experiences are around every corner. By teaching and reinforcing these skills early, our students develop resilience and confidence in their abilities to cope with the hard stuff.”
Meanwhile, the school counselors, led by Upper School psychologist Leslee Frye, were in discussions with staff and faculty about ways to incorporate more positive mental health strategies into the school’s curriculum and activities.
Pandemic Persuasion
With these first steps building momentum, a catalyst for more immediate action came in the form of a virus that was creating havoc across the world and an urgent need to address stress levels within the community.
As a first and important step, Dr. Druggan commissioned a Wellness Task Force, one of a group of task forces created to manage aspects of the school’s operations during the community’s physical absence from campus. Led by Frye, Tecosky, Middle School English teacher Jessica Tiffany, Fish, and director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Rayna Guy, the Wellness Task Force was to focus on faculty—helping them feel supported and ensuring they were getting the resources they needed. “We didn’t want them pouring from an empty cup,” explains Frye.
As soon as the school closed due to COVID, Frye and Upper School world languages teacher Alexa Frankel took their yoga and meditation classes online. Sarah McDowell, chair of the History Department, was a regular yoga class participant. “For me, it was a lifeline,” she recalls. “Staying healthy and upbeat was harder for me in the pandemic, and starting my day with yoga really helped put me in the right mindset to keep my habits healthy and productive. More importantly, the yoga group gave me a sense of community and camaraderie during a time when I couldn’t see people in person.”
Taking advantage of the deluge of mental health information arising in response to the pandemic, the task force’s first initiative was to create an online wellness resource on the school’s website where faculty, parents, and students could get helpful information and tools for supporting their mental health. Over the summer, Frye and the wellness team assembled an extensive inventory of articles, lessons, quick tips, fact sheets, infographics, and podcasts encompassing a variety of wellness strategies, from self-care practices to yoga and mindfulness activities, and from helping teens build social-emotional skills to coping with change, loss, and grief.
Small Nuggets
With the return to school in the fall of 2020, teachers and students sought to regain some form of normalcy, despite having to wear masks, conduct classes in tents, and keep six feet apart. Rather than try to undertake a major wellness initiative while still in the throes of the pandemic, the task force decided to dole out its efforts “in small nuggets that were easy for faculty to access—frequent little reminders that ‘We see you, you’re appreciated, and we’re all resilient and can get through this,’” says Frye.
Some of these nuggets included monthly emails with wellness tips and links and a travel mug imprinted with the words “Teachers can do virtually anything” that was filled with assorted teas, a calm strip, menthol cough drops, and a poem written by Tiffany.
Across the school, and in every division, faculty and students were looking for ways to stay mentally positive in the face of an uncertain future and the daily disruptions of student absences due to illness and having to quarantine. “Students are really resilient and we know that,” says Frye, “but at the time, they were coming in and out of school, and grades were going up and down. So there were more divisional meetings set aside to focus on mental health as well as faculty Google meets focused on self-care and self-reflection. That’s when Tecosky and I created a Wellness Check-In form for Upper and Middle School advisories. Students were asked to fill them out monthly as a way to keep tabs on their mental/emotional status. We also introduced more topics in the advisory curriculum based around wellness.”
Students keep things positive with affirmations for one another.
That winter, Frye and Jackson formed a team with Ed Glassman '03, executive director of the Sands Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership (CEL), and alumna Victoria Roebuck '08, another graduate of Penn’s positive psychology program, to explore the best avenues for integrating positive psychology into the school program. Conversations bounced between starting with faculty development or starting with curriculum. A podcast in February helped settle the debate. That month, an Upper School CEL student was interviewed on a national podcast for mental health where she spoke about the stresses on teens and the resources available at her school. While acknowledging the support and accessibility of SCH’s faculty and counselors, she observed that there was no mental health programming for students. A colleague shared this podcast with Frye, and it was then that the idea for an Upper School class centered around the principles of positive psychology took root. With the blessing of Upper School Head Matt Norcini and Glassman, Frye began work under the guidance of Jackson and his PP expertise to develop a curriculum for a CEL class to be titled The Psychology of Happiness, which would be offered in the spring of 2022. “Our thinking was, we may not get as far as we hoped in culture building and professional development,” recalls Jackson, “but we can at least start this class and see how students receive it, which could inform bigger decisions down the line.”
Keeping Things Positive
Work on the class continued into the fall while on the faculty development front, a series of staff/facultyled workshops focused on DEI and mental health was organized. Workshop offerings included “Meet Yourself Where You Are: the Role of Racial Identity Development in Self-Care,” “Gratitude through Journaling, Meditation, and Movement,” and “Protect Your Peace—FlouriSCHing.”
“Our plan was to get staff equipped with the language of positive psychology and the tools of wellness which they could use for themselves and then gradually integrate into their classrooms,” explains Jackson.
To engage parents in the wellness conversation, Frye, Guy, and Andrea Eckert, director of Parent and Community Engagement, organized a community book club that winter to read Think Like a Monk: Train Your Mind for Peace and Purpose Every Day. Written by former monk and now social media star Jay Shetty, the book offers advice and wisdom on living a less anxious, more meaningful life.
Wellness work expanded to the athletic front as well, with Athletic Director Dave Wilson bringing the Positive Coaching Alliance program to the school, whose mission is to create a positive, character-building youth sports environment that results in “better athletes, better people.” During mental health awareness month in May, the school hosted a panel of sports psychologists who spoke with students about managing their “mind chatter,” balancing sports and academics, and paying as much attention to their emotional and mental health as their physical health.
At the start of the spring semester, a small but motivated group of students gathered for the first class in The Psychology of Happiness. Focused on personal growth and introspection, with readings, yoga, meditation, discussion, and journaling, the class culminated in a series of student-made podcasts reflecting on what they’d learned and the lessons they took from personal interviews with a faculty member they respected.
The class was a hit, word spread, and the original eight-student enrollment grew to 35 registrations for the following year. Frye had to cap the class size at 21. “I loved this class,” remarked one student. “It challenged me to think about things I had never really thought about.” Another student said the class made her more mindful, and another learned that wellness is a personal choice—that “there are active steps you can take to activate your well-being on a daily basis.”
Achievements and Aspirations
Bella Gentile, Kaliyani Wardlaw, and Mary Trudeau complete mindful glitter jars in their Psychology of Happiness class.
While all those engaged in building a culture of wellness at SCH would agree their work is not finished, there has been much progress. Tiffany feels the school’s wellness efforts have made a real difference. “They’ve awakened the entire SCH community to the importance of caring for oneself so you can mindfully care for others. Articles, strategies, and workshops provided by our own community members have addressed the burgeoning need for teachers and students to feel seen, heard, affirmed, and supported with healthy stress-relieving, anxiety-reducing measures. In my own classes, I did more sharing of the practices I was already doing/working on. These included daily mindfulness exercises, planned movement breaks, daily journaling with reflection, learning/practicing 'letting go,' and strategies for regulating anxious or frustrating moments. Now more than ever, teachers and students are taking the time to breathe, reflect, and move their bodies as a means to increase focus, rebuild academic stamina, and reinforce healthy responses to stress.”
Asked about the next steps in building the school’s wellness culture, Frye responded with an ambitious list: “My dream is to have a health and wellness committee at a bigger level and bring together people who are doing it well, who have done the training or just created different activities, and for them to be able to share this knowledge out. I wish we could do a series of mental health Personal Learning Communities for faculty as we did so successfully around DEI. I wish we could combine wellness and DEI to really address some of the issues we’re seeing. I would love for there to be an actual wellness curriculum with more offerings, and for some of the tactics in the Psychology of Happiness class to be incorporated into other classes. And because this is a CEL class, I want to think about ways to combine wellness and business with a focus on how to bring one’s leadership skills and strengths into one’s venture, whatever kind of venture that may be.”
It’s an ambitious list indeed, but achievable. As positive psychologist Charles R. Snyder once said, “Hope has proven a powerful predictor of outcome in every study we’ve done so far.”
1 Source: the Anxiety and Depression Association of America.
2 Source: From a survey published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology.
The Damour Download
Clinical psychologist and author Lisa Damour uses the latest research to offer practical advice to parents. A regular speaker at SCH, her most recent talk as part of our virtual parent program focused on how parents can help their children manage intense emotions. “We’re here to teach our kids how to handle emotions, and we’re going to do that both on how we model, or how we handle ours, but also how we respond to theirs,” she said. A few pieces of advice from Dr. Damour:
Let them express
Respond with curiosity and empathy when children express their emotions, she says.
Distress is normal and expectable
Teach them that distress is normal and even informative. “Our job in this is to not have our kids be scared of getting upset and to not be scared when they get upset,” she says.
Distraction is sometimes OK
If talking it out isn’t helping, tell them, “Leave it with me tonight, we’ll come back to it.” It can help them gain perspective or just give them a break from the issue.
“Sleep is magical”
“If your kid is really reactive," she says, "really short-tempered, falling apart…the number one question I’d be asking is ‘How are they doing on sleep?’”
Focus on pockets of control
Tell them: “Don’t dump energy on the things you can’t control.” Encourage your child to put the full force of their energy behind the things they can control.
