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Gratitude Challenge at The English School

Posted: 26 August 2020

IDEALS  

Discoveries 

Age range:

13 – 17 

Curriculum area:

Social & Emotional Learning

Lead school:

The English School

Overview

The “Gratitude challenge” was born from the social-emotional education programme led by the Learning Support Department at The English School, which strengthened  its joint work with both parents and students during quarantine. Bearing in mind that parents were spending more time at home with their children, we programmed some webinars to accompany secondary school parents during this very special time. Prior to a gratitude workshop, we launched the “Gratitude challenge” with a daily task that enabled families to talk about something they were grateful for. As parents had asked for initiatives that would help them find spaces to promote dialogue at home, and were concerned about seeing their children too withdrawn and uncommunicative, we decided to combine these two needs and that’s when “Gratitude challenge” came to life. 

Planning

First of all we anticipated what families would need, so we planned for a webinar session where an expert shared some psychological strategies to cope during the quarantine. After that we asked parents to answer a short survey -as we usually do with these kinds of activities. The responses provided great feedback and guidance, so after we read and analysed common comments and requests we were able to draw the main topics of interest and chose “Gratitude” as our project. 

As a starting point we consulted online resources and came up with some challenges that could help families talk about those aspects that concerned or interested them, in accordance to what they brought up during our online meetings. 

On one hand, we read about the power of gratitude and its relevance to social and emotional learning.  On the other, the secondary psychology team shared with the community its positive effect to improve overall wellbeing by sharing some resources such as this one:  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JMd1CcGZYwU.

We asked our communications department to design a visual piece that could be shared with students, parents and even teachers and then shared it by email, and  uploaded them to the school’s Facebook and Instagram accounts.You can see them here:   https://www.facebook.com/theenglishschoolbogota/posts/2875970635791011

https://www.instagram.com/p/CAYj21KJ_yf/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet 

Our promotional piece was designed as a “teaser campaign” for our secondary parents and students “Gratitude workshop”. It was also sent by each Psychologist and we sent a reminder before week two started (it was a two week challenge).

Details

The gratitude challenge consisted in a daily suggestion that invited parents and students to share time talking about each day challenge while having dinner. Some of these were: How often do we speak with our family about people or lessons in life that we are grateful for? How often do we talk about things that we appreciate in our daily life (food, funny moments, music, etc.)? On the day that the challenge ended, we hosted a Gratitude Workshop during which families were able to share experiences and feelings. 

Challenges 

During quarantine it’s very important to plan ahead and to communicate clearly and on time. We have to accept that some people engaged because they felt “connected” with the topic and others just don’t. The other thing that we have seen is that there is a lot of information and activities taking place during this difficult time, which is good, but at the same time that might impact the engagement because when there’s such a diverse offer it is difficult to decide which activity to join.

Impact

It was interesting because we found that parents and some teachers engaged with the challenge more than our students did. Students were more focused on their studies and feeling “schoolsick” (missing their daily life at their school and missing their friends).        

What parents and teachers mentioned was that they definitely feel that this situation seems to be better when you are in a gratitude mood because you can identify what you are thankful for, you appreciate more what you have and you can put things into perspective. Some parents mentioned that when doing the daily challenge, they could share it as family and it was an excuse to talk about something that immediately changed the emotional atmosphere in the house. 

Long term outcomes 

We planned other activities similar to this one to help families to cope better with the lockdown situation and promote emotional wellbeing. During the first weeks, we sent out a survey to identify the needs that families had and  based on those results we offered two webinars for parents, led by clinical Psychologists. One of them was about the subject  “Lockdown together: how am I coping with it? https://www.instagram.com/p/B_n2ErVp5jM/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet And the other was: “Taking care of myself” https://www.instagram.com/p/B_oCAZNpv8K/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet 

We trust that parents and students felt supported by the Learning support department, whose  main objective is to provide a quality and informed service for our community. We´ll keep assessing their needs, implementing strategies in response to them and assessing the impact of those activities. We hope that families will respond positively again in the future and that the challenge will be one of their COVID – 19 quarantine memories. 

Advice

Author: Natalia Becerra Rodriguez, Psychologist, The English School 

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