Simply put, Wellness is the practice of engaging in healthy habits on a daily basis.

It’s not just about activities, it’s about a lifestyle.

• It is subjective; wellness can look a bit different for different people.  
• Trial and error to determine what works for you is important.

The following are key areas of one’s lifestyle that are considered key dimensions of overall wellness:

• Social Connectedness
• Exercise
• Nutrition
• Sleep
• Mindfulness

The key to incorporating Wellness into your life is to implement small, incremental changes in each area above and focus on one day at a time.  Daily practice, no matter how long, is what’s important.

Benefits of incorporating daily wellness initiatives into one’s lifestyle include:

• Stress reduction
• Improved physical, mental, and emotional health
• Increased energy
• Lower risk of disease and illness
• Increased productivity
• Improved relationships
• Increased focus

Original Source

Among many changing climates among schools and administrators, it’s important to recognize when you need to take a break. Because the signs and symptoms of anxiety can vary greatly, we want to give you a go-to mental checklist to be able to work through when feelings come up while doing the important job that you do. 

Anxiety likely isn’t the root of the problem, making it all that more important to recognize that it’s a response to your reality. What is really going on? Where are these feelings coming from? Are you being pushed at work? Are you dealing with challenging students? Do you feel like you can’t do enough in a day? Likely each administrator and teacher has experienced thoughts and feelings of anxiety at some point in their career. 

Is it normal?

Yes! Even Dr. Gene Beresin says “experiencing anxiety is normal,” and explains that “a certain amount of anxiety can even be helpful.” While we are not encouraging you to feel this way, allowing the anxiety that may come up to be a catalyst for change and for reflection is a positive way to address the feelings that arise. Plus, you are not alone! Nearly one in five Americans over 18 experience anxiety.

How do you recognize it?

Often anxiety is characterized by feelings of dread, lessened self worth, fear or worry about yourself, loved ones or career, physical symptoms such as a racing heart or difficulty concentrating or even sleep problems. Sometimes symptoms appear as a result of a traumatic event, challenge at work, or may slowly appear over time. 

How do you deal with it?

There are many at-home and personal solutions to help you navigate day-to-day stress and anxiety. We’ve detailed some of our favorite ways of dealing with overwhelm and anxiety and want to share them here for you to take what you need. Here’s a good list to keep handy:

• Yoga
• Get a massage
• Take 10
• Eat something yummy
• Three deep breaths
• Do your best
• Take a walk
• Jam out
• Mantras
• Exercise

Among our favorite stress relieving tactics are meditation & mindfulness, by simply taking a moment out of your day to refocus and recenter can be a huge help to diminishing tough feelings. By breathing deeply and coming back to your body, often it signals to our brain to relax. Taking a moment to pay attention to ourselves is a long trusted method of calming down when we are in a worrisome moment. 

Original Source

Our founder, Diana Parafiniuk, shares her story on Principal Center Radio.

She had a wonderful time getting to know others in the industry, and talking about all the great things E-Therapy does- from direct services to mental health programs. Having started this company 12+ years ago, Diana set out to find a solution and be able to offer therapy services to kids and students wherever they were.

Tune in today! https://bit.ly/3kqgIsK

“I am grateful to share with you the story that brought E-Therapy into being, and that changed my life, thousands of E-Therapists’ lives, and the tens of thousands of countless students in schools across the United States.” – Diana Parafiniuk

Original Source

What is SEL?

Social Emotional Learning (SEL) has been in the educational spotlight for the last few years.  The benefits of SEL for students make it more than just an educational trend. However, as a teacher, with a jam-packed schedule, you may be wondering how to connect SEL to academic learning. 

SEL is the process in which children and adults acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.SEL Is broken down into 5 domains which include self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making. 

For more information on SEL and its benefits check out: https://www.electronic-therapy.com/blog/introduction-to-social-and-emotional-learning-sel/

Bringing SEL to School

You may be asking yourself “how am I supposed to add something that important to my classroom with all of the other requirements?” 

Even without a formal SEL curriculum and a dedicated time for SEL, you can easily infuse some core concepts into academic learning using these 3 tips: Focus on Feelings, Develop Empathy, SEL Journaling.  These tips can be adapted for any grade and fit nicely into already established lessons and activities. 

Focus on Feelings:

Helping students expand their feeling vocabulary is one of the most important aspects of SEL for both self-awareness and social awareness.   

• Encourage students to identify and then define feeling words as they are used in stories, news articles, and other learning material.  This can be a great introduction to using a dictionary and/or thesaurus. 
• Showcase a feeling chart in the classroom and encourage students to share how a particular activity, story, or lesson makes them feel. 
• For older students, help expand feeling vocabulary.  
  • instead of sad, students could learn about feeling forlorn, desolate, or sullen. 
  • Having students look  within writing materials for more advanced synonyms and antonyms for common feeling words.  

Developing Empathy:

Being able to put yourself in another person’s shoes to understand their perspective including thoughts and feelings is a crucial life skill.   Helping students to develop this skill can be as easy as raising their awareness of others using questions and assignments.  Some examples include:

• Defining empathy.  Then having students compare and contrast empathy and sympathy. 
• Infusing empathy into ELA lessons by: 
  • Guiding students to identify the feelings and thoughts of all of the main characters. 
  • Encouraging students to tell the story from the viewpoint of another character.  
• Asking empathy-based questions in history and social students.  For example:
  • What a student their age would have experienced in a specific time period or during an event
  • What feelings would a main historical figure have experienced? 

SEL Journal Topics:

If you are like many other teachers across the country, you already may have your students regularly practice writing through ongoing journaling assignments.  Incorporating some SEL-focused journal topics is a great way to merge SEL education with academic learning to help students contemplate, learn, and benefit from SEL skills. 

Here are a few journal topics to get you and your students started:

• Using a new feeling vocabulary word, journal on how that feeling can impact you throughout a typical day using specific examples.
• Using a new feeling vocabulary word, journal on how that feeling can impact you throughout a typical day using specific example
• Write about a time your values were at odds with your peers and how this impacted your choices.  
• What do you do to motivate yourself when you are feeling unmotivated?
• What is something you used to not like that you are now grateful for?
• Tell about a time you showed compassion to someone. 

These are just a few of the many ways that you can begin to incorporate SEL skills into your classroom in a manageable and fun way while enhancing the lessons you are already teaching.  The great thing about SEL is that you can be as creative as you want to help your students develop these skills. 

Original Source

Strong, clear, and timely communication between parents and schools is often linked to improved family involvement with the school and may help facilitate increased student achievement. 

How can you meet everyone where they are?

Information exchanges need to include both low- and high- tech strategies. Schools should never assume that all families have effective or consistent internet access, or that they communicate primarily in English. Administrators play a pivotal role in creating a school culture where parent communication is valued and the time and resources needed are consistently allocated to implement a comprehensive communication plan. 

Some tips and tricks:

• The beginning of the school year, end of a semester, or after holiday breaks are great times to ensure that families have access to copies of student handbooks and discipline policies and that teachers understand communication expectations.
• Be honest and efficient – sticking to the point, offering help and support, and lending a listening ear are all great ways to stay on the best side of the conversation with parents.
• Effective procedures and systems for communicating with parents during remote learning is as critical as it is with in-person instruction so remember that we are all at different stages of going “back to normal”.
• Using E-Therapy’s School-Home Communication Checklist for Teachers and Administrators can be a useful tool in starting a staff discussion, planning school or district policy, and/or tweaking current parent communication systems. 

One quick note:

Documentation of all parent contacts needs to be stressed with teachers. The time required for the staff members to complete parent phone calls along with documenting these attempts needs to be acknowledged by the leadership.

At E-Therapy, we truly are the teletherapy experts and know the power of communicating effectively with families in the virtual instructional environment. Do you need help with strategies? One of our expert therapists can equip you with resources and tools to take on tough conversations, and relax when the going gets tough. Learn more about our eQUIP program here.

Original Source

When you think of managing student behavior we’re guessing that these words sometimes come to mind: challenging, disorganized, intimidating. It’s E-Therapy’s hope that we can help you change the narrative so that words like easy, communication and hopeful begin to replace the latter. 

We recognize that life is all about balance, and that as leaders within your school organization it’s important to maintain your composure and quickly de-escalate challenging behavior. We’ve compiled a list of our five favorite tips and tricks so that when all else fails, you can remember that you have go-to methods that you can count on one hand. 

Read between the lines.

Remember that behavior is a form of communication, so it’s up to you as a leader and teacher to really dive deep and attempt to understand what the student is trying to say, perhaps without words at all. 

Over the years, and through an extensive amount of research and education, E-Therapy has gathered tools along the way that have helped schools, administrators, directors and teachers overcome some common communication barriers. When a difficult situation arises with a student, bear in mind that much of what they want to tell you is communicated through their body language. Some common functions of behavior are to seek attention or to avoid something. Is there some indicator within this behavior that might help you identify how to help?

Know who is in your corner.

You are likely not alone as an administrator or leader in your school when dealing with communication and behavioral issues among your student body. While it doesn’t make the issues go away immediately, building a support network of other teachers and administrators (whether in your school, district, or town/city), it’s likely that the others among your network have their own tips and suggestions that you can add to your stock of go-to solutions. 

Educators and administrators across the globe are beyond successful at building communities, so rely on those you’re surrounded with to help you work through the tougher times of leading. At the end of the day, discipline is helping a child solve a problem, so you can approach uneasy conversations and behavior with grace and sympathy.

Create a positive narrative.

Often we assume that students should know the right way to behave, when in fact we haven’t provided them a baseline for what is and isn’t acceptable behavior or communication. Much like raising our own children, we have to explain the expectations we have for those we teach and discipline. 

Most administrators would agree with us that students are inherently good. While they may make decisions based in fear, or act out as a way of needing our attention, students seek our praise and guidance at every step of their educational journey. By having visuals and conversations around what behaviors are and are not acceptable, we prepare them with the tools they need to succeed in the environment we are creating. 

“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

It’s a priceless quote, and one that we have all heard. Ultimately, it can be a reminder to be a role model. Especially when it comes to dealing with and improving challenging behaviors, emanate the behavior that you are hoping to receive. Being a good role model isn’t just about redirecting when behavior is challenging or disruptive, but about leading and guiding through the process so they begin to take authority and become independent.

Speaking of, we urge you to encourage independence.

Children often thrive on the power they are given, guiding their peers and taking roles such as “team lead” or the like as a way to help manage the classroom or group activities. By encouraging students to model the behavior and actions that add up to a safe and fun learning environment. 

Ideas for establishing this type of classroom or group management are behavior charts, rules, visual lesson plans, reminders posted throughout the room or within assignment details, and don’t be afraid to experiment with allowing your students some freedom to make their own choices.

Original Source