Teaching Simple Strategies to Foster Emotional Well-Being

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented considerable disruptions to routines that have challenged emotional well-being for children and their caregivers. One direction for supporting emotional well-being includes strategies that help children feel their best in the moment, which can bolster their capacity to respond appropriately to thoughts and behaviors. Strengthening emotional well-being equitably, however, must include opportunities in settings that are easily accessible to all, such as schools. In this paper, we focus on simple, evidence-informed strategies that can be used in schools to promote positive feelings in the moment and build coping behaviors that facilitate tolerance of uncertainty. We focus on those strategies that educators can easily and routinely use across ages, stages, and activities. Selected strategies are primarily tied to cognitive behavioral theory, with our review broadly organized across categories of self-awareness, self-soothing, and social relationships. We review evidence for each, providing examples that illustrate ease of use in school settings.

Can Student Wellness Systems of Support in Higher Education Learn from K12 Settings?

“…In addition, institutions need to understand the evidence supporting specific strategies at different tiers of service delivery. University and college leaders might consider the evidence for current strategies across social (how we connect), emotional (how we feel), and behavioral (how we act) domains of well-being (Iovino et al, 2020).…”

A mixed methods evaluation of the usability of Feel Your Best Self

“…Thus, it is important that universal SEL options be available that require low resource demand and can offer use beyond school settings to reduce the burden on schools to fully deliver and facilitate generalization of skills. One direction to accomplishing this dual focus is to attend to the "active ingredients" of effective interventions, thereby reducing the need to implement a comprehensive curriculum (Iovino et al, 2021). Released in 2022, Feel Your Best Self (FYBS) was developed with this goal, offering a simple solution to bolster learning of important emotion skills.…”

“…FYBS draws on several sources of evidence. First, as summarized by Iovino et al (2021), the introductory lesson and 12 emotionfocused coping strategies (e.g., deep breathing, cognitive restructuring) are well-established by research on self-awareness, self-regulation, social relationships, and emotional well-being. Developers mapped the strategies, guided by Gross's seminal process model of emotion regulation (PMER; Gross, 2014).…”