High School REACT

Objectives: 1. Discuss different types of loss (death, breakup, change of circumstances that could be difficult to reconcile such as being graduated from middle school heading to high school where you don't know anyone). Or, mundane/everyday experiences of frustration when losing a key, a wallet, or a cell phone. Discuss the different feelings and thoughts connected with these experiences. 2. Describe the emotional experience of grief as a knot of various emotions and can manifest as a mental health challenge (see below for reference to the "madness" of King George III). We can imagine the mix of tender and intense feelings coming in waves. However, the specific feelings can manifest differently for you than it does for others. We should not presume we know what someone is going through. It is especially important to practice empathy for those we know who have experienced loss. 3. Describe grief as a process of healing from a loss. If feelings of grief are shut out, heal...

 Activities: 1. Bring snacks 2. Reflect on how principles of REACT ( R, E, A, C, T ) can inform and guide our civic responsibility to be respectful to one another despite our differences and have the courage to do the right thing. 3. Review our lesson on human dignity . 4. Give special emphasis to courage . Photo source: TIME Magazine

  Writing your personal mission statement (original cast of TV series "Mission Impossible")   Writing your personal motto/credo Example: "Anything is possible." Activity #1 : Mission Statement Students write out these prompts as "clouds" on a piece of paper:     1. Knowledge I wish to gain in high school:     2. Activities I want to be part of in high school:     3. Traits of friendship I seek in high school:     4. Jobs I might want to pursue after high school:     5. Place(s) I may want to live after high school:     6. The type of student I want to be:     7. Reminder(s) to myself about looking after my mental health: Activity #2 : Credo/motto Students come up with their own credo/motto for life.

 Objectives 1. Discuss how social media influences self-concept. Also, discuss the desire to curate an artificial identity  2. Discuss communication challenges unique to social media 3. Discuss social media subculture that could be harmful for mental health such as communities that promote toxic positivity, self-harm/eating disorders, contrived/false identification with mental illness that results in actual symptoms, body-image challenges Activities 1. Telephone game to demonstrate how information/"news" through chain of retellings should be questioned since after multiple retellings, distortions to truth are inevitable.

Anger is often connected to many other challenging emotions. In navigating through anger, it is important to be aware of other emotions and understand where they are coming from. In fact, not having the space to understand these emotions is what often intensifies feelings of anger. However, because the feeling of anger itself can monopolize our brain resources, we do not always have the opportunity to pause and reflect on what is going on on a deeper level. Give your students an opportunity to reflect on a recent experience of anger, and give them the space to understand whether other challenging emotions were connected to it. Allow them the space to reflect on what happens to the feeling of anger after acknowledging the other challenging feelings that may be attached to anger (refer to anger iceberg worksheet).   Objectives 1. Demonstrate how anger is a secondary emotion - how there are many other challenging emotions attached to feeling angry. 2. Defining forgiveness as a proc...

As Confucius described, virtuous friendship is characterized by any of these, 1. a friend helping you improve as a person, 2. you helping the other improve. 3. helping each other improve (which is ideal). Other than these three (in situations where it is not about helping each other grow and improve) what is friendship about? Objectives 1. Discuss friendship - what we seek and value in friends (the adjectives). what we strive to be in our role as friend to others. 2. Discuss the practice of communication as friendship in action (the verb) . Review definition of Empathy Activities 1. Each student writes on their own small piece of paper 3 to 5 adjectives of what they want in a friend. After writing them down on a piece of paper, they fold the paper and hand them to group facilitator who then reads what was written on the paper without naming who wrote it. Group facilitator makes note of similarities in how we really all value similar or same things. 2. Reflection . Students reflect on...

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." - Tolstoy's Anna Karenina Objective Family can be an awkward and challenging experience. For adolescents, there is awkwardness and challenges that are unique to their development as well as their role in their families and the autonomy (or lack of autonomy) they experience at home. Family is such a significant factor in how we form our worldview, self-concept, and emotional learnings (or lack thereof). A common experience of family for adolescents is feeling that they have to hide or minimize, or "get over" their feelings. They feel that adults in their lives do not allow them to feel what they are inclined to feeling . As group facilitators, our role is to acknowledge the feelings they want to express and provide a standard for what is mentally and emotionally healthy. We are there to allow them the space to describe challenging feelings and have the experience of relating to one an...

Objective 1. Show how our inner critic focuses on particular negative attributes and can paint an overall distorted picture of who we really are, and how we really appear to others. 2. Emphasize how there is much more to ourselves than what how our inner critic judges us. Also, sometimes our inner critic does not recognize our dignity and our inherent self-worth. [Respect, Trust, Acceptance] 3. Discuss how having an accurate understanding of ourselves comes from our openness to being seen and heard by others and communicating with others. [ Empathy , Courage ] Activities 1. All students meet together in same classroom. Students write on a piece of paper how they would describe themselves - what they see in themselves such as traits, personality, appearance. We will not have them share what they wrote. 2. Watch "Dove Real Beauty Sketches" video together as class: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=litXW91UauE 3. Refer to lyrics of song "Fingerprints of God": Never has t...

Empathy is the key to connection and the bridge to relationship. The lack of empathy..when one is lacking in the capacity to empathize, is at the root of so many mental health concerns and personality conflicts. As John Donne famously put it, no man is an island ...In his poem, he asks for whom does the bell toll? It tolls for thee . No person is truly an island, and when we feel we are, part of it has to do with self-isolation, self-imposed loneliness, part of it has to do with fallenness , part of it has to do with pain we create for ourselves as a consequence of the slippery slope of fallenness that marks humanity (but does not define it). The cards we were dealt after the time of the first Adam . Hay tanta soledad en ese oro. (Borges) . So what is exactly is Empathy...? Empathy is the capacity to seek to understand another person. It is the space we hold for another person even if they are angry and yelling at us. It is the space we create by withholding our own response and ou...