High School REACT

 Session 5: Stress / Executive Functioning / Goals Basically, this lesson is about making a time table to figure out how much "free time" we actually have. Think of it like those Suze Orman financial planning shows when she really gets into the nitty-gritty of how much $ is available in one's budget. Except, time is more than money. It's often said that it is way more valuable than money. But we tend to guard money very vigilantly, pinching pennies yet at same time letting seconds, minutes, and hours slip through our fingers. The key to today is to ask your students what they wish to get better at. Ask them how much they are actually devoting each day to practicing or getting better. Many will say they don't have time for it or haven't really devoted any time. Malcolm Gladwell says that you need 10,000 hours to be really good at something like being Tom Brady at winning super bowls. But, why do we not guard our time more vigilantly? Why do we let Ti...

Session 4:  Stress / Coping / Self-care Objective 1.  Review what has been discussed so far on the topic of stress and how emotional awareness can help us navigate through stress. 2.  Engage students in discussing any recent experiences with stress.  3.  Provide examples of healthy versus unhealthy ways of coping with stress. Engage students in discussing their experience with these and how they had come to see how something is healthy or unhealthy.  4.  Emphasize how unhealthy* coping can add to stress and can be destabilizing. Healthy coping usually involves cognition/mindfulness as a means to slow us down to find balance and anchor ourselves to the present moment and truth. REACT  as a mindfulness exercise is a helpful response to stress as it engages us in dialogue and cognition thereby slowing us down, gain perspective, connect more deeply with our humanity, and help us find our footing.  *Unhealthy coping is about escape and seeking new...

Session 3: Growth Mindset / Stress  Growth mindset is about self-respect. Respecting that we have the potential to grow, adapt, and meet challenges. It's also about Trust- trusting that we ultimately don't have the definitive answer when it comes to determining our potential and capability...trusting that there is a lot more to us and what we can do than what we think. Navigating through stress is also about self-empathy. Allowing us the space to feel what's going on when we feel stressed, to be aware of how it affects our body, and understand what we need in the moment. It's also about trusting the process.. trusting that every experience is an opportunity to grow and learn.  Objective     1.  Engage students in  check-in process  and reinforce sense of group belonging 2.  Briefly review topic of  self-concept and connect it with  Growth Mindset (i.e. a healthy sense of self-concept enables us to be growth-minded) . Provide ex...

Session 2: Feelings 101 / self-concept / human dignity As this your first session meeting with your students as a small group, today is about building rapport (with ice breaker activity, check-in), introducing your students to feelings 101, and establishing self-concept/dignity as foundation for mental health (you can simply prompt this by saying that our understanding of who we are is the basis of our mental health -- for instance, overly harsh judgment of ourselves or others, egotism, self-isolation,  perfectionism, all come from false understandings of ourselves and others, and this is often the source of challenging emotions).   In exploring self-concept/dignity with them, start off just as we did with session 1 by asking what comes up when they think of the word self-concept . What comes up will likely be related to identity formed through relationship (through family, role in society, qualities relative to other people..tall/short). Help them connect the do...