Student Mental Health Questions for Teachers: What Am I Missing?

Vicki Davis (00:00): Happy Fab Idea Friday. This is episode 995. Today, we’re talking about student well-being. Let’s get some good ideas you can use this weekend.

Announcer (00:12): This is the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (00:17): I’m so excited today to introduce Charle Peck. She taught in high school for 18 years. She has a master of social work, master’s of education, and she’s a clinical therapist. She’s co-author of The Language of Behavior and co-author of Improving School Mental Health. So, Charle, first, the American Psychological Association stresses the importance of teacher well-being as a predictor of student success. Everybody says, take care of yourself, take care of yourself, but there’s actually a real reason for that, isn’t there?

Charle Peck (00:54): There is. And thanks for asking that question first, because we need to focus on our teachers and their well-being. And so the way I look at it is it feels like an extra thing to do. And any educator listening knows this. Just go take care of yourself. Go do self-care. And when we feel like that’s one more thing to add to our to-do list, that in itself can be overwhelming. So I just say this. The teachers we work with, they want to be more skilled. And that’s how I got better at responding more effectively to student behavior and youth mental health needs is when I became more skilled. And that gave me the ability to think differently about behavior and think differently about how I was showing up, which was more effective than just thinking, well, just go take care of yourself because that’s really difficult to do in this industry.

Vicki Davis (01:39): I think in my early years, my solution was always just stay up later. I have learned, my husband’s very proud of this, by the way. To set some boundaries. In my early years, I just complained. I didn’t give those constructive things. So how can teachers advocate for themselves? Because the problem is, it’s hard to take care of yourself when your schedule is just maxed out.

Charle Peck (02:02): Yes, and that’s the thing. We are professionals. Let’s not forget that. We are professionals, and so we get to make decisions about how our schedule runs. I always say, insert those daily practices and those tools and skills that we need to manage ourselves, insert them into your everyday practice. And there’s ways we can sneak those in, there’s self-regulation techniques and all of those things that will benefit kids, but also benefit us. So that’s one of the things we do is rapid resets, for example, that to reset our own energy and the kid’s energy when we’re feeling overwhelmed with too much noise or not enough energy.

Vicki Davis (02:35): What’s a rapid reset, Charle?

Charle Peck (02:37): The very key here, Vicki, is noticing when we’re overwhelmed or when our kids need a reset. And so it’s something like, you’ll notice my thumb is up, my fingers pointing at my thumb, and we will just do something like this, which actually does a lot of things. It helps refocus the brain. It’s silly. Kids are laughing. It’s playful. It takes 10 to 30 seconds to literally reset ourselves and find calm or focus, but also reset the room. That’s why I believe teachers need to be more skilled. They don’t have to be therapists, but there are so many secrets that I’m learning as a therapist that I’m thinking, why have we not taught these things to teachers? We need to respect our own limits. That’s the key. We no longer can rely on other people to respect our boundaries or the limit for ourselves because they’re not going to or they can’t.

Vicki Davis (03:24): We as teachers, it sounds like, can really benefit from tuning in on what we’re feeling, can’t we?

Charle Peck (03:31): Absolutely. It’s Dan Siegel’s work, Name It to Tame It. It helps the brain bring awareness to it. So that’s another thing that we need to practice is bringing just awareness to it. And then we can make shifts once we have that awareness. That’s that whole mindfulness practice, Vicki. A lot of people in education get sick of those buzzwords. Right? Like mindfulness practice. Well, okay, let’s not talk about that. Let’s just talk about managing our stress and feeling better and functioning better. It’s got to be just so simple when you learn how to do it that you’ll actually remember to do it. And that’s the approach we take.

Vicki Davis (04:01): Mental health wellness. How is that part of every single class we teach?

Charle Peck (04:06): It has to be. We have so much evidence now about the developing brain and how it affects, their environment affects what they’re going to learn, their attention, their comfort level, how to deal with the discomfort. All of that plays a role. And so we have to make a shift in education. You and I were talking before we were recording about kids and changes. Everything has changed in their world. I mean, their brain is developing the same, but their environment is vastly different. I’m working with kids all the time who have anxiety, and there’s so many issues with anxiety.

Vicki Davis (04:38): Forty percent of high school students say they have persistent sadness or hopelessness. Some of the research I’ve read says the best hope of reducing anxiety is intervening quickly, and catching it early. So we had to talk anxiety because kids are stressed out. And you know, the answer is not always, let’s do the test tomorrow. Let’s do it. Eventually, they got to take the test, right?

Charle Peck (05:02): That’s exactly right. Anxiety is actually pretty easy to treat. And that’s it.

Vicki Davis (05:06): Really?

Charle Peck (05:07): Yes. Depression is the number one thing that kids are struggling with. Depression and anxiety are like best friends. They show up together a lot. ADHD shows up a lot with anxiety as well for lots of reasons, but anxiety is definitely something that I’m seeing over and over and over in my practice. And so the good news is, is once we bring awareness to what are these things happening in my body, this physiological response that my body has based on what’s going on in my brain and then sending messages throughout my nervous system, I know that and now I can do something about it. So let me get really attuned with my body. Here’s what I love, Vicki. I love that I get to work with adolescents and teach them this information, teach them how their body reacts to stress. Some of it comes from trauma and that’s a whole thing too. But regardless, how is my body reacting? And now I can do something about it and catch it so that I can reframe that negative thinking or I can just show up differently and do something different to distract it. And when we teach it to adolescents, imagine what that does for their whole life. So my thinking of anxiety here, let’s go back to educators for a second. How many educators are really struggling with anxiety? So there is anxiety and there’s anxiety disorder. There’s a difference. However, we all understand what anxiety kind of feels like. And so when we’re dealing with the feeling in our bodies, we know that we can catch it and then use a coping strategy there. There’s another piece to this going back to the educators again. Some of them are very triggered. There’s a buzzword people don’t like to hear. So something that I’m responding to, I see over and over that really bothers me and gets my body to respond, let’s say it like that. But when that’s happening with a teacher who has a student who has unresolved issues, something’s happened or something in their own personal life has happened and they’re bringing it into the classroom, you better believe they have an emotional charge. But guess what? We can actually, that’s coming especially from trauma. We have a great process now. It’s called ART, accelerated resolution therapy that I’m actually trained in now. We can help people who have extreme emotional response and we can help settle their nerves, settle that emotional response. Imagine how effective that would be for teachers who are experiencing that in our system.

Vicki Davis (07:18): I think shortly after the pandemic, when we came back to in-person learning, there was a student walking by my room in the hall and the wind caught a door and it slammed the door. The student that was walking by my room that moment had a complete and utter meltdown. So I pulled her in my room and it was definitely PTSD. And it came from a situation that had happened repeatedly when she was at home during the pandemic that triggered her. Now, sometimes we don’t know what we don’t know. So if we do something to cause it, what do we do once our eyes are open and we realize this student may have an issue? Because like you said, we’re not therapists, we’re not psychologists. But if you’ve been teaching a while, you can kind of read children. You just can, right?

Charle Peck (08:05): It’s hard to do because we feel so busy. But the answer is reconnect with that kid, validate their experience. That’s a very quick, easy way to do it. Hey, I notice you look a little frazzled. What’s up? And really strengthens that connection and trust with that kid is notice you looked a little different when that happened. What do you need? Ask them what they need. Or what am I missing? Some states that I work within won’t let me use the word trauma or SEL, and that stuff’s fine. That’s just language.

Vicki Davis (08:33): You can’t use the word trauma? Well, kids live it.

Charle Peck (08:37): Yeah. Yeah, they do. And again, we have plenty of evidence that that’s an underlying problem. But it’s fine. We’re not going to politicize stress. So I just say, let’s talk about the stress response system. We can all talk about that. And so it is. It’s about addressing that response. But what do we do as educators when we’re so darn busy? Yeah. Ask, what am I missing? Because once you do that, instead of what’s wrong with you, what am I missing humanizes them and they feel validated by you. And you can say as a teacher, listen, I know there’s something there and we’ve got to move on with class because kids are coming in. Can you just sit down here and we’ll touch base right after class about this? Right when you’ve done that, you have a shut down sometimes, not always, but shut down that system. And then what I’ve done when those kids come back into the class and I still see their faces because we know our kids so well. I notice that one of those kids, that particular kid maybe, needs something. Like the energy level. I go by energy level. It seems too high, meaning they’re tense. So what can we do? Well, we don’t need to call them out. We do something with the whole class. We do another rapid reset for the whole class because we don’t need to single them out. It’ll benefit other kids too who are struggling and not showing it the same way that kid does. That kind of dance that we can do all day long, easy tricks that we can do.

Vicki Davis (09:55): Well, we have to relate to educate, and it’s part of what we do. So, Charle, travel back in time. Pretend like you’re still a teacher in a classroom. If you could be your own PD person, what would you tell Charle in the classroom that you wish you had known then?

Charle Peck (10:12): And I will say it depends on the timing, because as every teacher understands, there are different times of our lives when we are experiencing something that we’re bringing into the classroom. And because we switch up our classrooms either every semester or every year, sometimes daily, we have to notice ourselves. So what I would say is just notice your response. Find patterns of your response. Anything that’s uncomfortable, any negativity, any ruminating thoughts or feelings that just keep coming up for you and try to identify where that’s coming from because it could be resolved pretty quickly if we’re just addressing it and understanding the underlying problem. The other thing I would say to that is if you are having that pattern, because this is why I said about timing, I mean, there are times in my life where parenting for me was really difficult. There was something going on there, something personally, like I lost my best friend to cancer. And three days later, after I watched her leave us, three days later, I showed up to my classroom full of new teenagers for the start of the school year. Right. And so just notice where you are in bringing that in. And if you need some kind of therapeutic intervention, I say that because when I say therapy, it doesn’t have to be three months. It can be, what’s that problem? And let’s use something like ART to address that trauma. Or maybe you just need a different kind of intervention. So there’s hope. There’s absolute hope. And I think that the entire future and shift in youth mental health absolutely goes back to teachers.

Vicki Davis (11:46): Well, with loneliness as a crisis, I know you have an immense amount of respect for teachers. And when I ask this question, I always have to be careful how it comes out. What are some of the biggest mistakes that you think educators make as it relates to mental health, and how can we shift and get better at those?

Charle Peck (12:07): Yeah, ignoring kids is really tricky for them. So when a kid puts their head down on a desk, instead of scolding them, ask, how are you doing? Is everything okay? Or simply, are you okay? Or what do you need? Like, keep it simple. It doesn’t take long to ask those questions. It doesn’t take long to acknowledge that. And then maybe the timing is you don’t address it at all and just know that that’s what that kid needs for some reason right there in that moment. And then go back to that kid. Say, I noticed you put your head down. What am I missing? What’s up? What do you need? How can I support you? These are things kids are telling me all the time. But I will say, teachers are trying so hard. They do care deeply about kids. They just, they feel the pressure of the system. And I say, it’s time to shake up the system because if we wait for the system to change, we’re going to be already retired and out of the system. And so we’ve got to do it from within, person by person. So there’s, again, plenty of evidence, Vicki, of meeting emotional and academic needs of students and having way better outcomes when we do that. It’s just they need some basic skills and language to use. And let me also say this, they need a referral system that works in their school well. They don’t want to carry the burden themselves, but if they don’t trust that there’s a referral system where that kid is getting help and they care, they’re not going to refer either. So that’s one of the first things I do when I work with the school is we talk about the student referral system because it addresses so many issues at once.

Vicki Davis (13:41): I learned this lesson very, very early in my teaching career. At first, I would see the behavior as a problem instead of seeing the behavior as an indicator of a personal problem. When a child’s behavior changes, there’s always a reason. And a student had put his head down and he had never done it before. And I was like, hey, what’s up? And he said, oh, my mom had a new baby last night and I was at the hospital until 6:30 in the morning and they just dropped me off at school. And he was exhausted because I was first period and I did something I just don’t do. I said, hey, why don’t you go in the back? I’m going to let you put your head down. The rest of us are going to work. He and I are going to work tomorrow. But the loyalty and the buy-in I had from that student because I had compassion in that situation, that type of loyalty builds relationships like no other thing that we can do as educators. So what you’re saying just really resonates with me.

Charle Peck (14:43): Yeah, and you prevented potential problems later in the day or later in the week. The other thing you did there, Vicki, is you showed compassion for the whole classroom. You modeled it. And it gained their trust. They do notice when teachers do those kinds of things.

Vicki Davis (15:00): Because when we deal with behavior in front of the class, you’ve got all the ears, not just the one you’re in. And so that is so important. Thanks for the work you’re doing, Charle.

Announcer (15:12): Thank you for tuning in to the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast. Join us here every weekday and subscribe to the Classroom Matters newsletter. See you later, educator.