As we recognize Self-Care Awareness Month, we highlight self-care as a foundational practice, rather than simply a single activity or special day, week, or month. Relationships are reciprocal, and so is self-care. When educators and learners share these practices, they begin to build a culture of care, together.

Social-Emotional Learning Begins with You

We want to make it as simple as possible for you to invest in your wellbeing and that of the learners you serve, so we’ve put together a quick guide for getting started. First, sign up for a  free curriculum account.

Start Small and Build

Neuroscience of Stress & Educator Self-Care webinar

— Explore the neuroscience of stress and its impact on the body, and practice simple strategies to develop resilience.

Brain Breaks Video Library

— Video demonstrations of Breathe, Move, and Rest Brain Breaks

Resources – Brain Breaks

— Brain Breaks manual – written instructions for each strategy

— Implementation guide – suggestions and tips for implementing Brain Breaks in the classroom, once you feel comfortable practicing them yourself

Let’s Get Moving

Virtual PE Classes

— Video lessons to guide you through Mindful Movement sequences

Pure PE

— Offers a Mindful Movement manual for delivery in the physical education setting at grade levels K-5 and 6-12

— Helps build strength, flexibility, balance, coordination, focus, and relaxation

— Mindful Movement sequence includes the three main elements of breathe, move, and rest

— Sequences easily integrated into an existing physical education program

Ready for a Mini-Unit for Your Classroom?

Curriculum – Peek Inside the Amazing Brain

— Neuroscience mini-unit, requested by educators as a stand-alone option

— Presents 8 lessons that include content and an introductory sequence of postures designed for the classroom setting

Building the Superpowers

Pure Power Curriculum

— 5 units for each grade level

— K-2 & 3-5: Power to Be Calm, Power to Tame Your Temper, Power to Laser Focus, Power to Grow & Stretch, Power to Lead with Kindness

— 6-2: Power to Shine, Power of Mindfulness, Power of Brain-Body Connection, Power of a Balanced Life, Toolkit for a Balanced Life

— Also included for K-2 & 3-5: Health & wellness session plans, resource booklets, reflection journals, visual aids

Even before COVID-19 uprooted our lives and shook the foundations of the systems within which we live, data on mental health in the U.S., and specifically in education, was troubling. Months into the pandemic, many of us still face anxiety, feelings of loneliness and isolation, worries about our health and the health of loved ones, and the emotional and practical challenges that come with a national, ongoing uncertainty around what comes next and when our lives will start to resemble “normalcy.”

Stress is contagious, and when we support the adults who serve our children and youth, the reciprocity of self-care will support the collective good.

In the months since this upheaval, we have demonstrated resilience and ingenuity in adapting to our new circumstances. Some of us have formed new habits and sought new skills in support of self-care, taking a day-by-day approach to our lives in the face of discomfort, stress, or fear. The ability to acclimate and care for oneself is particularly important in the education community, as those responsible for teaching and caring for others must be especially resourced and able to self-regulate and manage emotions. Stress is contagious, and when we support the adults who serve our children and youth, the reciprocity of self-care will support the collective good.

As we plan for the upcoming school year, we cannot ignore that we are also moving through individual and societal traumas. We have to pause to consider whether we are equipping educators with the resources they need to take care of themselves and to be great educators.

We can only show up as our best selves for others when we prioritize caring for ourselves.

Anyone who has worked in schools knows that while teaching can be one of the most rewarding and impactful professions, it is also one of the most stressful. Pure Edge began focusing its work on teacher stress in response to a research brief by Dr. Mark Greenberg of The Pennsylvania State University. At that time, in 2016, nearly half of teachers reported high daily stress. We can only assume this number has dramatically increased since school closings began and as educators face ambiguity around what the upcoming school year will look like. The 2016 brief also underscored that highly stressed teachers impact student academic performance and social adjustment. The impact on educators is significant, too. Those high stress levels compromise health, sleep, quality of life, and job performance. But the findings gave us hope as well. They showed that both organizational and individual interventions can reduce teacher stress, and programs for things like social-emotional learning and mindfulness improve both teacher well-being and student outcomes. As stress levels climb, educators need more support than ever. We can only show up as our best selves for others when we prioritize caring for ourselves.

This August, put yourself first. If you do, we think you’ll be a happier, healthier version of you. And you matter. Here are a few of our suggestions:

1)    If you can only find two free minutes in your day, use them for your self-care. Try a Mindful Minute or your favorite Brain Break. If all you can fit into your day is an Even In-Even Out as you wake up in the morning, that’s ok. That simple act can change your day and help you to better self-regulate.

2)    If you find yourself beginning to feel stressed, notice what is happening in your body. Then reach for a breathing exercise. Try a few to discover which feels most effective for you. Maybe it’s Take Five (Starfish), Anchor Breathing, or Breathing Ball.

3)    Acknowledge your feelings without judgment. During our Planning for the Return series, Dr. Marc Brackett discussed what it means to be an “Emotion Scientist.” The emotion scientist sees emotions as information and recognizes that even challenging emotions serve a purpose. The Mindful Minute is one way to practice listening to what is happening in your body and what you are feeling.

4)    Find ways to engage with others, even from a distance. Physical distancing is not synonymous with social and emotional distancing. When was the last time you wrote a letter? If that sounds like a little much, a quick “thinking of you” text goes a long way in maintaining relationships and feeling connected.

5)  Build daily habits: Breathe, Move, Rest, Journaling, and Attitude of Gratitude. You might want to revisit our 15-Day Self-Care Challenge, where our Director of Professional Development, Gill McClean, led participants through each of these habits.

Thank you to all who have participated in or viewed on demand any of our nearly 300 webinars. We’d love to connect with you on Twitter and Instagram, where we will continue to share self-care exercises and gratitude for the incredible educators who start with the heart.

Pure Edge has partnered with Garfield Preparatory Academy in Washington, D.C., to bring Culture of Care training to educators and learners.

As the school day begins, the halls of Garfield Preparatory Academy are still. In the classrooms, the loudspeakers project a calm voice directing students and staff to sit quietly and breathe deeply. Once following the morning announcements and once at the end of the school day, the whole school sits quietly for a “Mindful Minute.” The goal, to help educators and learners start each day with calm and focus. In the afternoon, the minute allows listeners to cool down and end the day with a sense of peace.

Garfield Prep is one of five schools within D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) that have received Pure Edge’s Culture of Care training.

Concerned with the prevalence of absences, suspensions and altercations between students, Principal Kennard Branch felt that it was time to adopt a new approach. He and his leadership team implemented a shift toward social and emotional learning after reviewing the behavioral and attendance data. “That was like an ‘ah-ha’ moment,” he said. The educators and administrators at Garfield know their learners face a high number of challenges outside of school. No matter how advanced their math skills or how many languages they speak, how can learners be expected to sit still and focus if they come to school hungry, or without a coat on a cold day? School psychologist Chandrai Jackson-Saunders explained, “We said, ‘we are going to look at behavior as content, just like we do reading and math.’”

Another element of the focus on SEL has been to introduce “calming centers” into classrooms.

Each educator has created a space in the classroom where learners can manage stress and challenging emotions. Kia McCardell, a math instructor with ten years of experience, was especially energized when speaking about SEL. She told us that she could go on forever about her ideas for her classroom or the books and research that inform her teaching. For her, it comes down to each learner’s right to feel loved. As she became more knowledgeable about SEL, Ms. McCardell’s mission was to transform her entire classroom into a calming center, as a way to provide an atmosphere where students can feel safe, loved and calm.

Megan Callahan, a third-year special education teacher, spends each school day at Garfield with the same eight students. She is one of the teachers who embody the school’s commitment to SEL. She helps learners understand their feelings, and once they’ve identified them, work to manage them. To Ms. Callahan, educating the whole child means meeting students where they are. It also means that educators do their best to recognize challenges learners face with basic needs or the at-home struggles they may face. She shared that SEL offers learners and educators alike “the ability to cope with the world around them.”

Katie Larkin, Superintendent for Cluster I at DCPS, described the educators and staff at Garfield Prep as “a group that knows every single child, that will fight for every single child and that will make sure every single child feels loved.” As a result of this commitment to social and emotional learning, Principal Branch now believes that when you walk through Garfield, “You can see, hear and feel learning taking place.”

 

One of the largest school districts in the U.S. has partnered with Pure Edge in response to an increase in stress and anxiety. Both educators and learners reap the benefits.

“I’m passionate about SEL,” said Kearny High School English teacher Daina Weber, “and I felt like this was another opportunity for students to get skills in self-discovery and self-care.” She had just finished participating, with three of her ninth-grade classes, in the first of four Pure Edge training days. Kearny is a project-based learning school in one of the largest and most diverse districts in the nation, San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD), and its new students have embarked upon a social and emotional learning project. Weber’s new ninth-grade learners are the first at the school to receive the trainings since Pure Edge began partnering with SDUSD in support of the district of roughly 200 schools, over 120,000 students and nearly 6,000 teachers. With the help of advocates like Lynn Barnes-Wallace, the district’s physical education resource teacher, the impact of the partnership is permeating the school communities and beyond.

To launch the district-wide rollout, SDUSD specifically requested a focus on educator well-being, in response to an increase in stress and anxiety. After Pure Edge’s initial visits, Barnes-Wallace began encouraging other educators to regularly employ mindfulness practices. “I use the starfish all the time,” she stated, referring to Pure Edge’s Starfish Breath Brain Break. With repetition, tools like these become second nature. Educators and learners alike can learn to reset or self-regulate in any place, at any time. Barnes-Wallace knows that the essential aspect of successfully equipping her district with SEL strategies is engagement from educators and learners. As these tools become routine components of the school day, they support a strong foundation for mindfulness and stress management in the school culture. She shared that she receives regular feedback from SDUSD learners asking for more mindfulness in their schools, suggesting that their classes incorporate mindful movement and breathing as a daily expectation and excitedly sharing that they plan to teach the skills to their families. The educators she has spoken to are just as invested. “The greatest thing about this is that the teachers have just gravitated toward this; it’s amazing,” she revealed.

“We had one principal who heard about it and made the hour-long Pure Edge training a breakout session, and roughly 90 teachers showed up by choice. The room was packed.”

Pure Edge Director of Programs and National Trainer Anne Contreras used a Brain Break to set the tone for each session with Weber’s ninth-graders—the educators expect that as learners gain experience with the techniques shared in the first session, they will individually step up to lead the classes in the breathing and movements. The ninth-graders had begun exploring parts of the brain and their functions in biology class, and in the Pure Edge training, they quickly found that the science their biology teachers had shown them would directly apply to the practices they learned.

“We’re going to be activating our cerebellum later as we move,” Contreras offered to the class as an example, “because you’re going to need it to balance.”

Last school year, Kearny’s ninth-graders worked with Barnes-Wallace on a project that focused on physical health. As Weber explained, “We wanted this year’s students to feel like they were taking on their own, equally important role in addressing health needs. Additionally, we were reflecting on how many of our students have struggled with emotional issues in our past teaching experiences and felt that this project could empower students, while simultaneously providing them with tools for self-care.”

The sessions at Kearny will continue through January 2020, and the ninth-graders plan to subsequently visit elementary schools in the area to teach the practices to younger learners. Weber envisions her classes mastering the exercises and sharing them within their own communities. “Ultimately our goal is for our students to become the experts,” she explained. Throughout the district, the focus has turned to developing social and emotional skills for learners and educators. Leadership understands that educator-educator, educator-learner and learner-learner relationships all fuse to determine a school’s climate. As Barnes-Wallace tells it, the students realize the power of these skills as well.

“Kids ask for this kind of stuff now,” she said. “That’s the best part. They’re driving all of this.”

The district has prioritized a social and emotional education for all learners.

In many schools and districts, it might be rare to hear the word “love” used freely and with intention by educators and administrators. But during a recent visit to Garfield Preparatory Academy in Washington, D.C., we heard from educators and District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) leadership who all shared a common message: Every learner deserves to feel loved. For the district, that simple but vital fact is a nonnegotiable piece of educating the whole child.

But how does a large school district manage to provide a whole-child education for every learner when there are so many to serve? DCPS opted to make educating the whole child an explicit priority within the district’s strategic plan.

It defines educating the whole child as providing “rigorous, joyful and inclusive academic and social emotional learning experiences to ensure all students are college and career ready,” and it aims to embed SEL in its classrooms and overall culture.

But perhaps the most distinctive part of the DCPS approach is that one of the official goals of its strategic plan, listed right between “90 percent of students graduating within four or five years” and “100 percent of schools highly rated or improving,” is “Goal 4: 100 percent of students feel loved, challenged and prepared.”

Treating SEL as a content area is a big piece of reaching that goal. DCPS offers twelve treatment interventions in support of learner mental health. It also employs a School Mental Health Team that promotes healthy relationships and emotional regulation, aiming to increase every learner’s access to mental health services. But the district understands that empowering young people through a comprehensive social and emotional education will provide them with skills they can carry throughout their lives, in and out of the classroom. To do that, educators work to treat SEL the same way schools are accustomed to treating math and reading.

“We are developing a really robust, multi-tier system of supports that includes the work Pure Edge has done with us this year,” said Dr. Deitra Bryant-Mallory, Senior Deputy Chief of Student Supports. Pure Edge continues to visit schools throughout the district to deliver Culture of Care training to educators and staff.

Bren Elliott, Chief Equity Officer, wants to ensure that “every student is in a class where they feel nurtured, supported and challenged to be their very best self.” Chandrai Jackson-Saunders, School Psychologist at Garfield Prep, explained that the challenges with which learners struggle can be academic, financial, medical and social-emotional, and schools must recognize the impact all of those factors can have on learning. This is why Garfield implemented the Behavioral Instructional Leadership Team, introduced “calming centers” into classrooms and developed monthly parent workshops to teach parents stress-management strategies to use at home.

“If you really want a student to be successful,” explained Katie Larkin, Instructional Superintendent for Cluster I, “you have to invest their whole family in their education.”

She assigns much of the credit for Garfield’s success to Principal Kennard Branch, stating that he has “worked to make Garfield a place where kids learn and feel loved.” Garfield Prep stands out as an SEL pioneer in the district, but DCPS leadership champions the cause throughout its schools, determined to reach every single learner.

How can a school district ensure a rigorous academic environment without allowing high expectations to negatively impact its students? The competitive and demanding nature of today’s schools is unlikely to change, but districts can and do choose to equip students with tools to help manage stress and to ultimately develop strategies to ward off the increased anxiety that can lead to depression. Dr. Maurice Elias, Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University, stated that:

“In the schools, we have the ability to create trauma-free environments, and that’s what our kids deserve.”

New Jersey’s West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District (WWPRSD) in Mercer County is doing just that: working collaboratively with student leaders, local agencies and community supporters on a comprehensive set of tools to create trauma-free schools. According to Superintendent Dr. Dave Aderhold, in the past few years, the young people of the Mercer County have experienced “an escalation of suicidal ideation and mental health concerns.” In a community-wide Call to Action, the superintendents of Mercer County held a forum where over 700 parents and community members attended.

The Pure Edge team partnered with the district to offer professional development to educators and student athletes. WWPRSD has since maintained an impressive level of energy and engagement around our trainings and has started to train its own staff. We have also had the privilege of meeting many brilliant kids who recognize the need to manage high stress levels and want to learn and share mindfulness skills. The students in a group called NüYü 2.0 aim to promote mindfulness for themselves and their classmates. Phanisree A., a student active in the group, shared, “Protecting your mental health is just as important as protecting your physical health. You need to understand the basis of empathy, the basis of SEL, and we can create valuable relationships going forward.” Social studies teacher Joe Bossio noted the high standards to which WWPRSD students are held and explained, “Lofty [expectations] are good until they can become potentially toxic.” This truth begs the question of how to foster academic success without sacrificing students’ mental health and how to center students’ well-being without compromising performance in school. At Pure Edge, we believe the answer lies in educating the whole child, and our mission is to provide the free resources to impact as many students as possible.

A popular approach to youth suicide prevention centers anti-bullying as the solution. However, a holistic approach understands that youth suicide cannot be attributed to a single cause. The National Violent Death Data Reporting System analyzed data on suicides of youth ages 11 to 15 and found that from 2003 to 2014, only 9 percent of cases cited bullying as a causal factor. However, over half of cases identified relationship issues as a factor leading to suicide, and over half also noted that the youth had mental health struggles. In 60 percent of cases, multiple causes were found. The many challenges faced by youth can compound and lead to terrible results. To educators and administrators like those in Mercer County, a whole-child approach is the most desirable model for suicide prevention.

Cranbury School District, also in New Jersey, has identified the need for a whole-child perspective as well. Board of Education President Karen Callahan shared that the district has noticed children “exhibiting signs of stress and anxiety at an earlier age.” After witnessing Pure Edge’s presentation on the neuroscience of stress at a national conference, Cranbury enlisted our help in bringing mindfulness practices to its students. We began working with school counselors, administrators, classroom teachers and P.E. teachers. Those staff members are now incorporating the practices they have learned into their own lives and sharing their knowledge with students. Counselor Joann Charwin described Pure Edge as

“Really our introduction at Cranbury School to mindful movement, breathing and rest.” She added, “I think it has changed the lives of our teachers and students a great deal.”