To encourage dialogue and reflection about the ways we help discover and foster happiness, our question for this week is: What are some ways we can encourage and spread happiness for ourselves and others?
Fostering Happiness (Week of 2/5/23) (This is an anonymous Google Form)
Blake's Guiding Lights
Our Students
Blake's Core Values: Respect, Responsibility, Resourcefulness, Reflection
Our Essential Question: How can we cultivate and curate the progression of student learning and growth?
Our Mission: Blake Middle School believes in a living mission statement, based on the concept that our community seeks and respects knowledge, integrity, character, wisdom, and the willingness to adapt to a continually evolving world.
The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning. - John Dewey
You cannot teach today the same way you did yesterday to prepare students for tomorrow. - John Dewey
I hope everyone stayed warm and safe this weekend with the frigid wind and temperature! Aside from a couple frozen pipes (thankfully no damage was done!) and basketball games with the boys, we hunkered down and had a quiet weekend.
The course, Science of Well-Being for teens, share strategies for a happier life
Young people in the U.S. are increasingly dealing with mental health issues. A Yale professor shares some advice for young people from her free online class.
Some surveys say that as high as 37% of teens are experiencing poor mental health. Teen mental health is not great, and it is getting worse over time.
Happy people tend to be very other-oriented. In other words, they're focused on making the people around them happy. They volunteer more. You know, in adults, they donate more money to charity.
It's normative to feel sad or anxious. The key, though, is just we have to listen to these emotions and know how to regulate them and use them productively.
All right. So the takeaway, kids - cut yourself some slack, reach out to others and get more sleep. Adults, same goes for you.
I shared the link with some colleagues and highlighted some of the information within at our faculty meeting this week. Since my first ‘listen’ I have been reflecting upon the information and thinking about connections to our work (curriculum, systems of feedback, structures of school, and supports for students, families, and staff). As part of this reflective process, I am struck by an urge to adapt and do things differently for our students. AIt is important to think about the systems we have in place and the impact these systems and practices (the environment) have on our students. The words below serve as a ‘call to action’ to (and continue to, in some realms) adapt our environment based on the current reality.
The mundane, radical, fun, painful ways we can help our kids find happiness
by Deborah Farmer Kris in The Washington Post
If you ask parents what they want most for their kids, many will answer, “I want them to be happy.” But happiness is an emotion, a momentary state of being. “There is a myth that you can eventually get to a place where you are happy all the time,” Waldinger says. “We need to unpack the word ‘happy’ and ask, ‘What do I really want for my kids?’”
Waldinger’s answer comes down to two concrete actions that form the foundation of wellness: engaging in activities we find meaningful and connecting with people we care about and who care about us.
Two social skills that correlate with strong relationships, Waldinger learned, are generosity and radical curiosity, a “real, deep curiosity about what others are experiencing.”
Says Waldinger: “If your child has the resources to be scared about something and do it anyway — and those resources could include parental support, but not parental fixing — then the child gets that satisfaction of having the resources, using the resources, and meeting the challenge.”
Yale's happiness course is revamped for teens on Coursera
by Lindsay Bever in The Washington Post
“We’re not taking care of our young people today if we’re not giving them strategies to navigate all the complex societal pressures that they face,” said Laurie Santos, a professor of psychology at Yale University who taught the original happiness course and filmed the online version for teens. “We’re really letting our young people down.”
Teenagers are in the midst of a mental health crisis — one that began years before the pandemic but has been exacerbated by it, mental health professionals say.
Therapists who treat youths say that they are seeing higher rates of anxiety, depression, loneliness, isolation, self-injury and suicidal ideation. There is a critical need, they say, for better resources to help address the problem.
“If we can teach children and teens and adults to try to make changes to things they can control, they feel more empowered,” she said. “If they feel more empowered, they feel more in control of their life. And if they feel more in control of their life, they’re not feeling helpless. Then they don’t tend to be as depressed.”
At the heart of much of this work is the foundation of relationships - with students, families, and one another (and the interdependent relationships of all three). Brake’s post from December, 2022 speaks to the ever-changing and ever-evolving nature of education and learning (with the onset and development of AI tools and machine learning) - within, Brake implores us to ‘double down’ on student-teacher relationships in a collaborative and responsive approach. Many developments in this realm have taken place since his post, but the sentiments ring true for me as a framework for us to embrace.
Education in the World of ChatGPT
by Josh Brake
While fear about AI is widespread for many reasons, I've been thinking this past week about its impact on education, particularly with the development of tools which can generate text as impressively as ChatGPT. Tools like this will become a pressing issue in the classroom sooner than we think.
The genie is out of the bottle. The question is now, what do we do? While I’m still pondering the various facets of this complicated issue, one response is clear to me – teachers and students alike must embrace the practice of transparent teaching.
The growing availability of powerful tools such as ChatGPT will require educators to adapt. Teaching strategies in the vein of a competitive game of cat and mouse, ones that attempt to force students into doing what we want them to do without spending adequate time explaining the rationale, will increasingly lead to diminishing returns.
One antidote is transparent teaching. It's hard to overstate the impact that this framework has had on me as an educator…The main goal of transparent teaching is simple: to promote students’ conscious understanding of how they learn. This framing means that as educators we need to be clear not only about what we hope our students are learning but also about how and why.
…transparent teaching must rely on a strong teacher-student relationship. We must remember that students are not simply widgets in the educational machine, being minted by their teachers. Instead, the learning process is more akin to that of a plant growing, needing consistent nurture over time to enable its flourishing.
In a world where the superpowers provided by technology such as AI are simply a click away, we must (re)consider the goals of education and our educational systems. Does ChatGPT have a role in education? I think so. But we must be thoughtful about what its role is and consider its impact on the process of learning. We must strive in good faith to strengthen the student-teacher relationship, seeing that a collaborative instead of competitive framework is the best way for all involved to grow and thrive in the process of teaching and learning.
Sampling of Responses from Last Week’s ‘Question of the Week’: What interests do you want to explore?
- The intersection between language and science!
- I would really like to do coding and family/consumer science
- I would really like to explore art and music.
- I want to explore reading and science.
- How to be more proficient in "letting go."
- I really want to explore the interest of swimming.
- History of our school
- History and art
Throughout the month I am continuing to share words to honor #BlackHistoryMonth - the two quotes below speak to the importance of striving, dreaming, and imagination…
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Take care.
Nat