School leaders are always looking for an edge to improve student mental health. Wise administrators know that strong minds create more resilient learners, leading to extraordinary growth school-wide.
Often, they take a deficit approach by looking for barriers to remove, problems to sort out, or lingering mind health issues that impact students the most. While that’s important, it’s not all!
How many times have you truly evaluated the assets your students have in terms of mental health? What plans are in place to leverage those strengths?
Schools for Strong Minds is dedicated to understanding and maximizing student mental health.
Learn more about our work here.
Here are 6 assets we leverage to ensure each student can give their best.
Students who feel stable in their school environment have a stronger ability to remain calm and focused. Conversely, a chaotic school day leads to heightened awareness and difficulty focusing for the majority of students.
Now is a great time to review your school’s policies and procedures to look for routine and stability. Leverage calmness and a stronger ability to focus through a schedule that students can rely on. This can be done on multiple levels:
Find one area of your school that could use a sharper routine and set your students up for enhanced success.
School culture skyrockets when students have opportunities to collaborate in positive ways with tangible, positive impacts. Have you ever seen students petition for an elective class, club, or change to a school policy?
Unification like that is powerful. It gives students a sense of purpose and belonging, which leads to a deeper care for their school environment. Collaboration can be leveraged for extreme learning gains.
The next time you want to make an improvement or addition to your school’s environment or learning catalogue, put students in charge. Let them form committees, acquire signatures, and involve the student body for solutions.
When do students get to move and channel energy? Far too often, sedentary lifestyles clash with long class periods and lack of movement. Students may be seated playing on phones and games at home, only to come to school and continue sitting for entire class periods with the only exception being P.E.
Leverage energy! Get students moving with mindfulness breaks, stretches during class transitions, and school-wide exercise programs and challenges. Even something as simple as a hopscotch board painted into a hallway can give students a boost of energy as they walk by.
If only there were a way to see how strong your students are in each of these areas. It would inform your decision-making and help you leverage their best strengths for school outcomes. Good news, it’s here! The Schools For Strong Minds survey will give you the vital data you need to create the most positive outcomes possible for your school’s growth. Sign up here!
What happens when students are given opportunities to take risks and make decisions? Often, they become more invested and responsible, knowing they have a real impact on their environment. Here are some opportunities to leverage autonomy to improve student mental health and success:
There are many creative opportunities to increase decision-making capacity in students that may be unique to your school. Open those opportunities up and watch their responsibility and ownership increase.
Technology has its place, especially in moderation. However, students have become used to creating connections through social media and gaming instead of in-person connections. This does not align with the typical school setting, which leads students to stay on their phones and sneak as much tech time as possible.
Social connections are powerful learning tools, but schools cannot pretend that students will automatically create those empowering, in-person connections. So how can your school leverage it for success?
It takes a mixture of strong technology practices and intentional social opportunities. Students who have complete freedom of technology are not likely to connect with their classmates. Find opportunities to remove or reduce tech use, and then replace it with challenges, team-building activities, and small group events that involve all.
Healthy students are students who learn regularly and love learning. How often is learning enjoyed and celebrated in the classroom and around the school?
Leverage knowledge acquisition by creating intentional opportunities for student learning around their interests and passions. Whether in the classroom, at the hallways, or at school functions, there are opportunities to encourage the love of learning. Fun facts, tidbits, and graphic displays of interesting knowledge are all easy, accessible opportunities to expand their skill level.
These are a few examples of how to utilize the skillset of your student body to create school-wide gains. School leaders who hone in on mental health and these intangible skills quickly find tangible results. But how do you leverage these skills without the data?
The truth is, you can’t. Just like any academic rollout, if you don’t have data, you won’t find the right program to create authentic learning gains. But how do you find student mental health data that is proven, accurate, and meaningful for your programming?
This is the expertise of Schools for Strong Minds. We boast over 2 million survey entries of data, used in peer-reviewed research on mental health and the ability to thrive. Our comprehensive school survey gives you the most important data on your school, impacting your school improvement plan and ability to serve the actual needs of your students without guesswork.
Sign up here and see the impact in your school!
