On our fall survey of ANCS students in grades 3-8, 83% of them responded “always” or “most of the time” to the prompt: “I know strategies to calm myself when I feel frustrated or upset.” While I’m sure these students have acquired and honed some strategies in part through their parents and caregivers at home, I think I can also say with confidence that some deliberate work at ANCS has helped students to develop skills to overcome setbacks, conflicts, and just plain ol’ bad days. Here’s a bit more about how that happens and why we use the approaches that we use.
At the core of helping students deal with anger or frustration at ANCS has been a years-long focus on helping us as adults become better at dealing with those same emotions. It’s extremely challenging (not to mention pretty hypocritical) to expect young people to respond appropriately if as an adult you continually cannot respond to difficult situations without yelling or some other emotional outburst. Since 2011, ANCS teachers and staff have been working with the framework of Conscious Discipline to manage our own “brain states” so that we can help students to do the same, allowing them to move from their “emotional states” to their “executive states” where they can make better choices (read more about the brain state model here). Through explicit teaching and practice (using the “time machine” to take advantage of conflict between students as a learning opportunity, for example) and through school-wide structures (safe places in each classroom, regular reflection, breathing exercises), students are able to grow their abilities to calm themselves when they’re worked up.
Relatedly, both campuses use variations of mindfulness—the state of being able to focus on the present and to recognize what feelings you are experiencing. The “mindful moment” that Mrs. Zelski leads to begin each day at the end of morning meeting at the elementary campus and the campus-wide “quiet time” each afternoon at the middle campus where an entire building full of middle schoolers and their teachers sit silently for five minutes are the most visible—certainly not audible :)—examples of mindfulness in action, but other mindfulness practices can be found in classrooms. When done regularly, these techniques can quite literally change your brain, making it easier for you to focus and concentrate, even in stressful moments.
Now while 83% of students said they know strategies to calm themselves, of course, that doesn’t mean they’re always using them 100% of the time (similarly, even though I know the same strategies, I can still occasionally be found yelling at a jammed copier). But we’re working to build students’ skills now so that they have them when they need them most, in life outside of school. And using approaches like Conscious Discipline and mindfulness can take time to make an impact on students. They’re not quick fixes. But, when you think about it, most strategies billed as “quick fixes” to solving challenging behavior from a student might be quick but usually don’t fix the underlying issue—a lack of skills on the part of the student—a fact that becomes apparent when an artificial system of rewards and/or consequences goes away. With time, Conscious Discipline and mindfulness practices can increase the capacity of all students (and all adults, for that matter) to have a durable set of tools they can use to deal with all school and life throw at them.