How can teachers help students with anxiety succeed? If you’re an educator and you have witnessed students who are suffering from chronic anxiety disorders, which means they just can’t get rid of the worry, there are a large number of mental health tools that you can use, particularly the Dr. Buzz method.
In this post, you’ll learn more about how teachers can help students with an anxiety disorder. Contact Dr. Buzz today for exceptional educational coaching services.
Understanding Anxiety: The Educator’s Role
One of the things I highly recommend to educators is to explain to students exactly what anxiety is so they can gain a little bit more control over their ability to function. If anxious students understand the worry, and then they can tie it to what is causing it and what is the trigger, students have a greater chance of feeling achieved and in greater control.
Strategies to Manage Student Anxiety
Be An Effective Listener
We want to be good listeners as educators to our students, particularly when they’re worrying. As adults and educators, we often find ourselves telling students what to do more than just listening to them. Having really good, effective listening skills when an anxious child is worrying will work best for that student.
Avoid Dismissive Statements
When helping students manage anxiety, we want to avoid using statements like, “You just need to calm down,” “You just need to stop worrying,” “You know what the problem is?” or “You worry too much.”
A lot of times, teachers and school counselors say those things because they’re worried for the student. We want to use words by giving them a call to action.
“Why don’t we both slow our breathing down?”
“Maybe you and I could take a walk.”
“What if I reduce the workload so it doesn’t seem as much?”
“How about if I help you with the first few problems to get you started? Then maybe you’ll feel more confident in your work.”
Create A Predictable Classroom Environment
We want to create a predictable structure where the structure is the same every day. As much for some students, that might sound boring, but for students with anxiety symptoms, it’s predictable. There is no unknown when you have a reliable and predictable structure which reduces stress.
The Power of Breathing Exercises
We want to create a reset for the students.
We can do this for the entire class, but it really benefits the students who experiencing anxiety. For example, “Hey, everybody, we have 10 minutes left to class. Why don’t we all put our pencils down? Put your arms up, take a deep breath in through your nose, and slow out of your mouth.” “Hey, class, why don’t we do this two more times?”
Science shows that if you take deep breaths through your nose for at least three seconds and exhale for an average of 3-6 seconds, it will calm your body down and help get rid of anxiety on the spot.
Coping Skills For Students
Calm your resistance tools, my favorite. Ask students, “Well, what is it that we talked about that would help you if you’re feeling really anxious?”
That brings students back to being mindful about what they should be doing because when people are anxious, they only worry about what they shouldn’t be doing or what’s going to happen to them.
Recognizing and Reinforcing Positive Behavior
The last one is let’s catch students when they’re using the coping tools that we gave them and let them know that we caught them doing the right thing, not shame anxious students.
Many times, for students who suffer from anxiety, we only give them attention when they’re having an anxiety attack, when they’re really upset, or when they’re feeling extremely worried.
We want to reinforce the fact that you can actually be a student who’s using your frontal lobes successfully and not be worried.
Implement the Dr. Buzz Method
If you’re an educator or school counselor, and you witness students who suffer a ton of anxiety, which means they worry and can’t control their worry, it’s so important that you use any of the Dr. Buzz method tools.
This includes sharing with the students what type of coping skills they can use for mental health issues by reminding the students how well they’ve been doing while offering them ideas for coping, like taking a deep breath, going for a walk, or grounding themselves by reminding them where they are and how safe that classroom is.
We can also remind them of the structure they have through the day by asking them and using their cognizance skills, which is, what is it that we do when we’re feeling this way? By using these different types of cognitive behavioral tools to help improve students’ academic performance, which I call the Buzz method, you can help almost any student, including elementary students, who suffer from the dreaded anxiety issues that they experience.
Contact Dr. Buzz for a Free Consultation
Contact Dr. Buzz Mingin today for a free educational coaching consultation and learn how you, as a teacher, can help students with anxiety succeed.
