Recommended Teaching Practices for Supporting Students

Recommended Preparations Before Delivering the Lessons:

When you teach a lesson that invites students to connect with difficult emotions and challenging stories, it is important to be thoughtful and intentional about how you ask them to listen to one another. We recommend you keep the following preparations and considerations in mind:

Create Group Guidelines

Before teaching the lessons, it is important to have a group conversation about how to respond to each other’s stories with compassion, and how to create an environment where students feel safe. Invite students to contribute their ideas to this brainstorming session so that students feel engaged in the process. These guidelines may include:

Listening with empathy: Be respectful as students share, and agree not to interrupt a student’s story.
Maintaining privacy: Agree that, for the students, whatever is shared in the group must stay within the group. (Educators: Continue to follow your school district’s mandatory reporting procedures. These guidelines are for students).
Responding with Kindness: Create an encouraging and supportive environment and respond to each other with kindness rather than judgment or advice.

Review or create class norms when you start the lessons, together as a group, and before you ask students to share. You may want to write these guidelines on a poster and display them for the duration of the curriculum.

Plan for Additional Support if Needed

When delivering a lesson that asks students to tell a difficult story from their lives, you may want to let the school counselor or social worker know ahead of time, so that students can visit with them afterwards if they need additional support. This is especially true for the lessons that ask students to drop into a more vulnerable place.

Think About Lesson Timing

When asking students to share a difficult story from their lives, we recommend that you do this at a time when you can check in with students the following day (not on a Friday or before a holiday or school break). It is also important to continue to follow-up with students who seem to need additional support.