dealing with anger?• How have you faced your anger?• Are you afraid to expose your shame or guilt?• Has your anger affected your health?• Have you been obsessed with the injury or the offender?• Do you compare your situation with that of the offender?• Has the injury caused a permanent change in your life?• Has the injury changed your worldview?Source: Adapted from Enright, 2001. Used with permission.
Gratitude
Exploring and experiencing gratitude is another way to help students connect to something greater than self. Researchers Jeffrey J. Froh and Giacomo Bono (2012) stated that, for students, gratitude “improves their mood, mental health, and life satisfaction, and it can jumpstart more purposeful engagement in life at a critical moment in their development, when their identity is taking shape.” In fact, Froh and Bono (2012) found:
Teens who had high levels of gratitude when entering high school had less negative emotions and depression and more positive emotions, life satisfaction, and happiness four years later when they were finishing high school. They also had more hope and a stronger sense of meaning in life.
Gratitude helps us see the positive aspects of our lives overall as opposed to a narrow perspective of what is happening in our lives at a specific moment. According to Christopher Peterson (2008), gratitude is at the heart of positive psychology, the study of what makes life worth living. Peterson (2008) noted that the following beliefs underlie positive psychology.
▸ What is good in life is as genuine as what is bad.
▸ What is good in life is not the absence of what is not.
▸ What is good in life is worth acknowledging and exploring.
These beliefs are probably a good place to start with students as they begin to engage in gratitude practice. Teachers could present groups of students with these statements and discuss the extent to which they believe these principles are true and present in their day-to-day actions.
With this discussion as a background, students working individually or in groups can be asked to generate definitions of gratitude. The following list contains a few examples.
▸ “An emotion or state resulting from an awareness and appreciation of that which is valuable and meaningful to oneself” (Lambert, Clark, Durtschi, Fincham, & Graham, 2010, p. 574)
▸ “Gratitude—a positive emotion that typically flows from the perception that one has benefited from the costly, intentional, voluntary action of another person” (McCullough, Kimeldorf, & Cohen, 2008, p. 281)
▸ “Gratitude is the positive emotion one feels when another person has intentionally given, or attempted to give, one something of value” (Bartlett & DeSteno, 2006, p. 319)
▸ “An estimate of gain coupled with the judgment that someone else is responsible for that gain” (Solomon, 1976/1993, p. 257)
▸ “Hav[ing] something to do with kindness, generousness, gifts, the beauty of giving and receiving, or ‘getting something for nothing’” (Pruyser, 1976, p. 69)
▸ “By showing gratitude … we express our beliefs that [others] acted with our interests in mind and that we benefited; we show that we are glad for the benefit and the others’ concern—we appreciate what was done” (Berger, 1975, p. 302)
Once students understand the concept of gratitude, they can be systematically engaged in gratitude-based activities. The following gratitude activities identified by Vicki Zakrzewski (2013) are easily integrated into the classroom.
▸ Gratitude book: Create a classroom scrapbook with space for students to write and draw about things for which they are grateful. Send the book home with a different student each week so families can contribute to the gratitude book as well.
▸ Gratitude circle: Begin or end the day by having each student identify one thing he or she is grateful for and why. For younger students, provide examples to help model this behavior.
▸ Gratitude collage or bulletin board: Have students cut out pictures of things for which they are grateful and post them on a bulletin board or use them to create a class collage.
▸ Gratitude journals: Once a week, have students write in their journals about three things for which they are grateful and why. This strategy may lose its impact if it is employed more than once a week, as time for reflection is necessary to prevent repetitive entries.
▸ Gratitude letters for the community: Have students write letters of gratitude to others in the school. For example, students might choose to write to janitors, food service staff, other teachers, or administrators to thank them for their service. Teachers could also expand this activity so that students write to members of their larger community, such as firefighters, nurses, police officers, and so on.
▸ Gratitude paper chain: Give students strips of paper and ask them to write down one thing for which they are grateful on each strip. Have the class work together to create a gratitude paper chain and hang it somewhere in the room.
▸ Gratitude quilt: Give students square pieces of paper and ask them to draw things they are grateful for on their squares. Have students mount their squares on larger pieces of colored paper to create borders and assemble the squares into a “quilt” to hang in the classroom.
▸ Gratitude surprise sticky notes: Give students each a sticky note and ask them to write about something in the school for which they are grateful. Have students post their sticky notes in places where others will see them.
Clearly, a number of these strategies can be used quickly and without much setup. As such, teachers can easily incorporate them into class time as activities for free time at the end of a period or during transitions.
Mindfulness
A definition of mindfulness is a deliberate focus on thinking that results in intentionality. The premise behind mindfulness is that people are typically filled with so many thoughts and related emotions that they are often incapable of making the best decisions or noticing what is happening around them. Thus, the simple act of being more aware often increases their self-efficacy.
Mindfulness practice has a strong grounding in research on the positive effects of some forms of meditation. Meditation has been tied to improved academic achievement, with one study finding that 41 percent of students who participated in transcendental meditation experienced boosts in academic performance compared to 15 percent in control groups (Nidich et al., 2011). Additionally, meditation has been associated with better concentration and focus (Paul, Elam, & Verhulst, 2007; Travis, Grosswald, & Stixrud, 2011); emotional well-being, as students who
