Teachers are increasingly being called on to be educators, counselors, and support systems for students. Schooling has been turned into a “universal large-scale experiment.” As of October of 2021, education in the United States has been impacted by COVID-19 for a year and a half.
While not alone, Pace Center for Girls has felt the push and pull of changes to learning, ways to support positive behavioral health, and how to provide a safe and trusting environment for our team members as well as our girls. We have experienced the deep systemic inequities of our families, differing approaches to dealing with stress, disrupted carefully crafted routines at our centers, and enhanced the vision of schools as “social-service providers and connectors”.
In the following PBS NewsHour Extra video, teens discuss feelings of negative thoughts, isolation, a desire to stay optimistic, and the need of love, support, and encouragement while going to school during the pandemic.
Although trauma-informed and trauma-responsive care is at the core of Pace Center for Girls services, this pandemic brings about new and challenging opportunities.
We, at Pace Center for Girls hear these concerns from our students as well. As we continue to live through, now the impact of the Delta Variant; dedicated educators and counselors at Pace Center for Girls continue to wrestle with how to ensure that collective care and responsibility for learning and self-care are constructed.
Our focus was and remains answering the question: How do we help balance our girls and team members’ physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing?
As our team members work diligently to support our girls, we have seen positivity and ingenuity through adoption of remote educational and social emotional technologies to help with this balance, improve grades, build good relationships with teachers and counselors, and ways to reduce class sizes.
- Microsoft Teams Video Conferencing allows our counselors and teachers to engage with our girls in both auditory and visual manners. Our National Office team members check in for counselors and teachers to assist in reducing anxiety a way for team members to participate in meetings, and easy access to classroom assignments.
- Smiling Mind App created by psychologist and educators, this mindfulness app assists with, staying connected, using self-care, and achieving emotional calmness.
- Wakelet provides a place for teachers to curate content and student a place to collaborate.
- Nearpod provides classroom curriculum that is tied to Florida Standards and allow the girls to engage our girls in remote and in classroom learning sessions.
- Google Classrooms to allow for creation, distribution and grading of lessons as well as assignments.
- Mentimeter, Poll Everywhere, and Padlet are all websites that encourage real-time response through live polls, quizzes and word clouds to check in with our girls and create engagement during group sessions and classroom lessons.
- Kahoot has a library of Social Emotional Lessons that help build empathy, provide opportunities to check in and even build resilience.
According to Psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth, the key to success is grit. So, as we move through this unprecedented time, we need to remind ourselves of two things:
- The importance and continuation of providing self-care, and
- that having passion, perseverance, and stamina to ensure your achievement of future goals is our way toward a better future.