Research-backed mental health lesson plans to improve students' and teachers' emotional wellness
Adolescents are increasingly suffering from mental health problems.
Teachers, who feel increasingly overwhelmed and ill-equipped to help, are also struggling with the toll of this stress on their own health.
What’s more devastating is that the anxiety and depression the youth are experiencing bring graver risks, including self-harm, suicide, substance use, and violence.
A low-cost, accessible (Tier 1), classroom-based, culturally sensitive solution is urgently needed.
Health Teachers, you already incorporate a mental health unit.
Why not use a curriculum that is also an effective therapeutic intervention?
Introducing
A Mental Health Unit for Middle and High School Health Classes
What if less effort by you, using this evidence-based clinical intervention, makes a positive, measurably impactful difference in the lives of your students and their families?
Get 8 plug-and-play mental and emotional wellness lesson plans,
including videos, discussion prompts, and activities that guide emerging adults to release toxic stress, achieve emotional empowerment, and hardwire their brains for happiness.
C.O.M.P.A.S.S. = Connected, Open, Motivated, Powerful, Active, Self-Sustaining
The 8 Lesson Plans are each an Evidenced-Based Intervention
- Understanding Mental Health
- Mastering the Mind
- Nurturing Agency and Authority
- Cultivating Connectedness and Mattering
- Making Peace with Yourself
- Navigating the Modern World
- Building Healthy Relationships
- Committing to Self-Care Practices
Teacher Training
- Mental Health Theory
- Needs of Adolescents
- Neurobiology of Emotional Problems
- Navigating Sensitive Conversations
Jodi Aman, doctor of social work, developed COMPASS in response to the youth mental health crisis. Her 28 years of psychotherapy experience with kids, teens, and families, has given her a front-row seat to witness the nuances and uniqueness of Generation Z compared to other age groups. She focused her doctorate dissertation on what sparked the current youth mental health crisis and researched which interventions equitably reach the greatest number of young people with the most positive impact on their emotional well-being. Designing COMPASS has been a labor of love that she completed with a team of professionals and students, diverse in discipline, age, and race.
COMPASS has been tested in the community with a group of middle schoolers and at Webster High School in Rochester, NY. We are now looking for 40 teachers across New York State to teach the curriculum in the fall semester of 2024, and provide constructive feedback. If you join this cohort, you will have full access to the curriculum. You will also be able to talk to Dr. Aman and have her consult or speak at your school for free. The curriculum has a yearly license fee, but piloting teachers will receive it at a deeply discounted rate as long as they hold the license.
COMPASS presents the material in practical terms, aligning it with the real-life challenges students encounter and demonstrating what to do about it.
Your Students' New Needs
Parents, educators, providers, and the young people themselves are reporting a worsening trend of depressive and anxious mental health symptoms in adolescents and a rise in the risks that come with them, like self-harm, suicide, racism, violence, anxiety, and depression.
At the same time, educators who feel overwhelmed and ill-equipped to help suffer from the burnout of dealing with these seemingly insurmountable problems.
One Impactful Solution
While the youth mental health crisis needs to be approached from different angles, the COMPASS Curriculum is an avenue that addresses both of these without extra time or school resources.
- Using time already dedicated to mental health education––Health Class––COMPASS employs the evidence-based psychological framework of Wise Interventions*, to deliver a low-cost, accessible program that improves students' mental and emotional health.
- COMPASS includes a teacher training component to give dedicated educators the skills and resources they need to make a difference.
Burnout is caused by making heroic efforts yet seeing few to no results.
COMPASS turns this equation on its head:
There's less to do because the work is done; you are given repeatable steps.
Plus, the results are in. There is documented proof of the long-term, positive impact of
Wise Interventions such as COMPASS.
There is a decade of research on Wise Interventions...
"Compared to the control program, the mindset intervention led to significantly greater improvements in parent‐reported youth depression and anxiety as well as youth‐reported youth depression by 9‐month follow‐up"
(Schleider et al., 2018b)
"Middle school students randomly assigned to the intervention condition reported greater increases in emotional well-being in school from pre-intervention to post-intervention compared to students in the control group."
(Smith et al., 2018)
WIs are "rooted in the scientific premise that people’s behavior stems from their interpretations of themselves and their social environment, and that those interpretations are modifiable through targeted, precise interventions."
(Schleider et al., 2018a)
"The experimental group showed significantly greater improvement than the waiting list group in depressive symptoms at 9 weeks and 4.5 months."
(Kramer et al., 2014)
Wise Interventions
Wise Interventions are brief, psychoeducational approaches to improving mental health symptoms of anxiety and depression delivered in nonclinical settings (via the work of Gregory Walton).
They are "precise, theory-based, brief techniques that target specific psychological processes to help people flourish across diverse life domains" (Schleider et al., 2019).
Wise Interventions work by fostering adaptive meaning-making. They are based on three principles:
- Meaning-making can be altered to promote change. Rather than train students to merely "think positively," they address the causal effect of meaning-making by teaching them how to create meaning that connects them to their agency and propels their authority (Walton et al., 2018).
- A change in meaning can be self-sustainable. For example, when students make negative meaning about themselves, they act in ways that support that negative meaning, gathering more experiences that prove it is true and, thus, sustaining that belief (a self-defeating cycle). Wise interventions seek to change the lens through which a person understands themselves to alter behavior in a preferred way (creating a self-enhancing cycle).
- People make meanings within complex systems. The context of student's lives is considered and acknowledged. While a person can change the psychological meaning of a situation, oppressive and inequitable structures still affect that person. Change is a recursive process, a synergetic transaction between the person and their environment. Thus, the program design, content, and venue address structural reform. (Walton et al., 2018)
Humans are meaning-makers. They are motivated to make meaning in three ways: the needs (a) to understand, (b) for self-integrity, and (c) to belong. Wise interventions capitalize on these three needs by providing psychoeducational and experiential learning activities that address them personally and in the larger social context, such as:
- direct labeling (e.g., naming someone Earth-conscious has the effect of making them choose future behaviors to care for the Earth)
- reflecting on positive aspects of the self
- understanding and normalizing emotions
- increasing empowerment and connectedness through action
- prompting alternative meanings
- promoting growth mindset
- implementing goal-setting
- building confidence in one’s abilities
- interpreting others’ behavior
- managing conflict, disappointment, and difficult people
- bolstering social connectedness and mattering
- enhancing motivation for change and positive behaviors (Walton et al., 2018)
Why Health Class?
Health teachers in many school districts in the United States curate their own lesson plans. However, information gathered from focus groups revealed that this content unknowingly follows traditional and medical understandings of mental health, supporting a pathological discourse. The increasing mental health problems of our young people are created in the context of our modern world, so this medical model is unhelpful in changing the tide. COMPASS, on the other hand, explains the problem and what to do about it.
COMPASS's Orientation
Researchers have uncovered correlations between the increase in symptomology and three social contexts: screen time, COVID-19, and discrimination. Theorists believe these three contexts affect emotional wellness by disrupting connectedness, mattering, agency, and authority. COMPASS's lesson plans are designed and tested to reconnect students with these. See how they work below.
Benefit for Your School
Besides the emotional benefit to your students and colleagues, your school will have wholesale access to Anxiety, I'm So Done with You! (paperback or audio) to sell in your bookstore. Potential profits can exceed your licensing fee.
Schools with students who cannot afford the book purchase may be eligible for grants to buy the books for their students.
COMPASS has been tested in the community with a group of middle schoolers and at Webster High School in Rochester, NY. We are now looking for 40 teachers across New York State to teach the curriculum in the fall semester of 2024, and provide constructive feedback. If you join this cohort, you will have full access to the curriculum. You will also be able to talk to Dr. Aman and have her consult or speak at your school for free. The curriculum has a yearly license fee, but piloting teachers will receive it at a deeply discounted rate as long as they hold the license.
"I have taught SEL for years, and nothing is like the COMPASS lesson plans. This content helps my students think about their problems differently. They stop feeling different and start feeling empowered. As a teacher, I'm so grateful that I am helping them."
~ Bridget McLaughlin
Schools, students, teachers, and parents will benefit from COMPASS.
"Eighteen to 60 percent of students experienced strong “distress” and especially symptoms of anxiety and depression." (Russel et al., 2022)
Only 42.1% of suffering adolescents seek or receive treatment. Their struggle leads to greater problems and spreads among their peers. (National Institute of Mental Health, 2022).
"Nearly one in four teachers said they were likely to leave their jobs by the end of the 2020–2021 school year to protect their wellbeing." RAND
How do the COMPASS lessons work?
The lessons are learner-centered and follow the Universal Design of Learning (UDL) framework to appeal to various learning styles. Each lesson has a 3-5 minute video, discussion prompts, and an activity to integrate the understandings through different examples and scenarios.
The curriculum covers all of NYS benchmarks for SEL learning and complies with NYS learning standards for health.
Understanding Mental Health
In this lesson, students will deconstruct previous understandings of mental health issues and problems in ways that don't make them feel different or pathological. They will examine how anxiety and depression relate to the broader cultural context so that they know how to dismantle it in their and their friends' lives.
Mastering the Mind
In this lesson, students will gain a deeper understanding of how the human mind works. When they understand it, they will feel less crazy.
Nurturing Agency and Authority
In this lesson, students will gain an understanding of personal agency and a growth mindset. They will practice problem-solving and goal-setting strategies.
Cultivating Connectedness and Mattering
In this lesson, students will learn about connectedness and mattering, by building empathy, gratitude, and listening skills.
Making Peace with Yourself
In this lesson, students will learn the three steps of letting go by developing self-compassion. Activities will also hone skills in improving self-image and self-esteem.
Navigating the Modern World
In this lesson, students will examine the risks of social media, learn the three steps to take when facing challenges, and start developing good habits for self-care, earth-care, and community care.
Building Healthy Relationships
In this lesson, students will examine the differences and nuances of healthy and unhealthy relationships, learn how to set and respect clear and implied boundaries and practice listening skills.
Committing to Self-Care Practices
In this lesson, students will share their final projects and discuss the benefits of maintaining healthy habits for emotional wellness. They will brainstorm other mental and emotional topics they want to learn more about.
Teacher Training
Teachers are not clinicians, but because of the state of their students, they feel like they have to be, to save lives.
Those teachers, struggling with the weight of what the students are going through, are suffering their own emotional turmoil.
The youth mental health crisis is not a simple situation with a clear solution. Fortunately, COMPASS fills the need in an accessible way by including a teacher's training program. Teachers are trained to understand what the kids are going through and why, so they know how to address it. They will understand better the most helpful things to say and do in response to situations that arise in and after class. The teacher's training includes:
Mental Health Theory:
This video will explain the COMPASS Curriculum and Wise Interventions. You’ll learn how the COMPASS Curriculum impacts connectedness, mattering, agency, and authority.
Needs of Adolescents
In this video, you will learn about adolescents' primary needs and why they need them for robust spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical health.
Neurobiology of Emotional Problems
In this video, you hear about the neurobiology of anxiety and depression to help explain what is happening to all of us in this modern world.
Navigating Sensitive Conversations
In this video, you'll learn how to get comfortable with uncomfortable conversations.
COMPASS has been tested in the community with a group of middle schoolers and at Webster High School in Rochester, NY. We are now looking for 40 teachers across New York State to teach the curriculum in the fall semester of 2024, and provide constructive feedback. If you join this cohort, you will have full access to the curriculum. You will also be able to talk to Dr. Aman and have her consult or speak at your school for free. The curriculum has a yearly license fee, but piloting teachers will receive it at a deeply discounted rate as long as they hold the license.
Parent and student feedback.
"R. demonstrated a greater awareness of his own emotions and anxiety and seemed more willing to talk about those subjects."
Mom of R. (age 13)
"I used to think of anxiety as afraid like me but to think of anxiety as a bully makes so much more sense. I understand that it is useless to me." A. (age 16)
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