From Roomies to Zoomies: Tips To Support the Mental Well-being of Your Students

Published: Jan. 13, 2021, 10:56 p.m.

Covid-19 has restricted everyone to the confines of their homes, especially kids. In such a stressful period in their lives, students are bound to feel pressure and isolation may cause anxiety among students. As a teacher, you need to make sure that you ensure student well-being through virtual classrooms.

Below are a few tips that you can incorporate into your virtual classroom:

Parent interaction

These days, students are mostly surrounded by just their families. So, the involvement of parents is beneficial. You may convey to the parents if the child is feeling anxious and ask the parents about the student’s behavior in class. Further, try to counsel the parents on how they can create a more positive environment for their child.

Frequent check-ins

Develop channels of communication to foster engagement with your students. You may create a group on an online messaging platform. However, it is important to make sure that students are actively participating. If time and school policy allows, follow up personally with those who aren’t to ensure that no student is feeling isolated. You may even offer to help with tutoring, additional help with the coursework, etc.

Design unique assignments

Instead of adhering to traditional assignments topics, to help ease the tension among students, it may be time to make your assignments unique. Try to think of it in terms of how you can improve engagement among your students.

For instance, you can ask your students to make a video blog entailing their daily routine, or a creative photograph assignment of their surroundings.

Teach task management skills

Staying home may have adverse effects on the productivity of the students. They can get easily distracted by the internet, social media platforms, etc., and the piling coursework may cause some anxiety. So, try to teach a few time management skills for studying at home and help students with a few tools they can use to do their work.

Revise the priorities

Your students may feel overwhelmed with too much classwork and not being able to step outside may cause some irritable behavior. Work with other teachers in your school, as well as your administrator, to find new and engaging methods of teaching, game play, and lesson reinforcement.

Plan your lessons

Not everyone can have access to the internet. Try to record your lessons so that your students can download it and watch it whenever they wish to.

In such a stressful time, students may feel unequipped to pay constant attention to the lecture. So, avoid planning long lectures for an improved learning retention rate.

Conclusion

To conclude, here are a few takeaways:

  • Engagement is the most effective resource in ensuring the well-being of your students.
  • Interact with the parents of your students to understand if there was any behavior change.
  • Tweak your assignments and make them more creative.
  • Help your students stay productive by introducing them to task management applications.
  • Try to change your priorities as per the behavior and performance of your students.
  • Pre-record your lessons.

Above all, give yourself some grace. These are unchartered waters. Remind yourself that you are doing the best you can, with the resources given you. And that is what you are the very definition of “essential worker.”

Thank you to Aditya at Hiration for this guest post.