Bitesize Research: Classroom Strategies To Support Student Wellbeing

By Jaya Carrier

Welcome back - I hope you all had a lovely half term break and that you’re all having a good first week so far. This week I was interested to see the latest release from the Anna Freud Centre who work with children and families on improving their mental health. Here, they look to outline some simple ways that teachers can support wellbeing in classrooms.

Objectives: To understand some strategies that can be applied by teachers in classrooms to support the wellbeing of their students.

Summary: 

• Importantly, this document doesn’t ask teachers to become mental health practitioners, but rather looks to emphasise the simple things teachers can do to enhance the classroom environment and supportive relationships with students.

• The document focuses on five areas, as follows:

1. Building supportive relationships (outlining strategies including greeting students at the door, sharing some information about your own interests, making time for brief chat with individual students)

2. Creating a classroom environment where all students feel they belong (outlining strategies including using students’ preferred pronouns, and teaching about multicultural role models)

3. Promoting good mental health (outlining strategies including ‘name it to tame it’ and role modelling how you might regulate yourself)

4. Responding to stress, low mood and anxiety (outlining strategies including getting students to quantify how big problems they face are, and support students to spot the signs of anxiety)

5. Preventing bullying, cyberbullying and sexual harassment (outlining strategies including talking about bullying and its impact, and knowing the signs of bullying)

How does this impact me and my practice?: Some reflections arising from this that might be helpful to consider are: 

• Which of these strategies do I already do well? How do I know?

• Which of these strategies would I like to start to implement? What support do I need?

• Which of these strategies link closely to Trauma Informed approaches?

Please do get in touch if you would like to talk further about this - I’d love to hear from you