How can teachers help middle school students deal with stress? Teachers can help middle schoolers navigate stress by first recognizing that all middle schoolers will suffer stress sometime in their lifetime.
Continue reading to understand how stress impacts middle school students and learn various ways teachers can help middle school students deal with and reduce stress and anxiety.
Contact Dr. Buzz Mingin today to learn more about how educational leadership coaching can assist teachers in helping students manage what they are dealing with on a day-to-day basis.
Understanding How Stress Impacts Students
Even though studies show that more than 50% of all people will suffer a mental illness sometime in their lifetime, everyone suffers from stress. Middle schoolers are always most at risk for suffering chronic stress because they’re extremely hormonal.
Strategies for Dealing With Stress
So, what are some of the things teachers can do to help students with stress management on a regular basis?
Creating A Structured Environment
Teachers, you want to set routines and rituals in place so you have perfect structure. When you have structure in your school or your program, students then have reliable and predictable details that they can anticipate, which ultimately leads to less stress and improved mental health.
Another intervention that you can use to prevent stress among your middle schoolers is to develop classroom expectations. By developing expectations, students will know how to conduct themselves, while each class expects the same of each student.
Encouraging Mindfulness & Grounding Techniques
You want to create opportunities for mindfulness and grounding techniques and times when you can simply stop and just breathe. This technique can encourage students to catch themselves and reset themselves on a regular and daily basis.
Positive Reinforcement & Validation
We want to catch students doing the right thing when they’re doing it and making proper and healthy decisions versus catching them when they’re only stressed out or when they’re doing the wrong thing. We want to use validation statements like “I realize” or “I understand.”
For example, “Johnny, I realize you’re having a really tough time right now, and you’re extremely stressed. So why don’t we go take a walk so we can calm your stress down?”
When we use validation statements, students tend to believe that we’re more emotionally connected to them and that we understand what they’re going through.
Preparing For The Unexpected
We want to help students anticipate unexpected occurrences. For example, we want to remind students, “Hey, don’t forget to bring your lunch tomorrow.” We want to remind students, “Hey, make sure you grab your book bag before we leave.”
When we can help them anticipate unexpected occurrences, we’re reducing the natural tendency for students to react to their stress levels.
Ensuring Consistent Communication Among Staff
Staff, you want to make sure that all of you are well-communicated and collaborative. If you want to add stress to students, having two staff members giving different directions or expectations to a student can stress them out. So you want to make sure that everybody who is an adult supporting and teaching students is always on the same page.
If you’re a staff member working in education, whether you’re a teacher or a support staff member, you want to remind yourself that students, particularly middle schoolers and high school students, are always going to suffer stress. A growth mindset is understanding the importance of communication among staff to help students manage stress.
Building a Supportive Classroom Culture
While you’re supporting your students in a positive learning environment, you really want to have a team effort, creating a culture and a climate in your classrooms that makes students feel safe, responsible, and respected. Ultimately, you want to offer them opportunities to be able to de-escalate themselves. That way, they have the opportunity to feel calm, and they can use their frontal lobes to learn more.
Contact Dr. Buzz For A Free Consultation
Contact Dr. Buzz Mingin today for a free educational leadership coaching consultation and learn how teachers can help middle school students reduce stress and provide mental health support.
