This article was updated in December 2021 now that the resources are available to teachers.
Resilience is something we, as educators, all had to summon the last two years. The last two school years have looked different, from classroom setup to instruction to the very way content was delivered. Any expectations you had about the school year likely changed—possibly several times—last year. Your ability to power through and continue providing a quality education for your students was possible because you were resilient. Resilience is a quality we also want all of our students to understand and feel empowered by. When someone feels resilient, they can more easily overcome obstacles thrown in their direction. And from March 13, 2020, on, there were several obstacles to overcome both personally and professionally.
For many educators and students, this new school year has been overwhelming. APA has created a set of four lessons for high school students to help them process what they have experienced, cope with their experiences, and understand that there may still be challenges in the upcoming months. These lessons are intended to take 10-15 minutes of your class time but have implications for lifelong learning. The lessons were supported by a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In lesson one, students will privately fill out a Reflections of the Past Year worksheet and self-reflect on how their life was impacted by the pandemic. This will lead to conversations in which students can share what they experienced and start to understand that those around them may have had very similar or very different experiences, but that everyone was affected somehow. Our hope is that students will see similarities among their classmates and will continue to reflect on their experience through the entire series of lessons.
In lessons two, three, and four, the acronym BAM! will be introduced. BAM! (Body, Actions, and Mind) will help students understand how each of these aspects of their lives has also been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Lesson two (Body) helps students understand how their body manifests stress and how breathing can help with the release of this stress. Lesson three (Actions) asks students to come up with actions to take to reduce stress and practice deep breathing when they feel stressors. And lesson four (Mind) allows students to see the connection between what they think and their stress level. Each of these lessons has been designed to be completed in 10−15 minutes, but they also contain additional activities that can be done to dig even deeper into each topic.
We hope these lessons can be used with as many students as possible. One suggestion is to add these lessons to an advisory curriculum as a way to reach the student body as a whole. A separate set of lessons has been developed for late elementary and middle school teachers, focused on grades 4−8. These lessons are also available online at the website above.
This resource was developed with support by cooperative agreement NU87PS004366 funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views or endorsement of the CDC or the Department of Health and Human Services. This resource is a product of CDC funding received between 2018 and 2024.
Allison Shaver is a high school psychology teacher at Plymouth South High School in Plymouth, Massachusetts. She has been a reader for the AP exam since 2015, was a member of the Credentialing Strand for the APA Summit on High School Education and has served on the TOPSS Committee as both a member-at-large and chair. Allison has also presented at a variety of conferences on various topics related to psychology.
