Wellness Groups: One Take on Making Advisories More Effective During and Beyond the Pandemic
A far cry from rebuilding familiar structures that were ‘normal’ and ‘comfortable’ pre-Pandemic, the school is expanding the “Weekly Wellness Groups” they created during remote instruction last year.
Like ‘advisory’ groups, Wellness Groups feature one teacher who meets with a handful of students regularly to ensure they are academically on track. However, the school’s Wellness Groups place a concerted focus on supporting students’ mental and emotional health, which requires teachers to learn about students’ self perceptions, personal struggles, goals and desires in addition to their academic needs. This support, Barakat says, is critical for incoming freshmen, who traditionally experience the multitude of social and academic challenges that come with entering a new school.
This attention to students’ wellness developed gradually over the pandemic as teachers discovered new ways to learn about their students’ lives, new communication strategies, and new ways to collaborate.
When schools were forced into remote instruction in March 2020, Bronx Law, like many schools, was confronted with a sharp drop in student attendance online, assignment completions, and class participation, severely taxing the usual systems for following up on absences. In the past, when students missed a class or an assignment, or were failing in one course, the subject teacher would call the students’ guardians. However, because so many students stopped attending, when teachers continued following protocol, many families and guardians started getting multiple phone calls in a day, all describing the same thing: their child was failing. As Principal Barakat explained, for guardians who worked all day, who were trying to continue supporting their families, this was extremely disheartening.
Recognizing the ineffectiveness of and harm caused by teachers following a traditional accountability system now implemented in the new (and uncertain) space of online learning, Barakat and his colleagues crafted a new system that reduced the number of phone calls, and provided educators with a chance to check in on students. In the new system, one teacher takes responsibility for hosting bi-weekly meetings with the same group of 12-15 students from their grade for one 49 minute period. Meetings focus on students’ progress, struggles, goals, and mental and emotional health, in addition to instructional strategies and modifications that worked best for them in their classes, all of which teachers would share with one another in order to support individual students more effectively. Teachers were given the option to use lessons provided to them through the QUESTion curriculum by the Open Future Institute, or to follow the students’ interests and concerns and develop their own. Wellness Group leaders became the main point of contact between the school, the students and their families.
Each Wellness Group teacher made sure students had access to technology, and knew how and when to log into classes and check their emails. Teachers were also responsible for encouraging students to advocate for themselves by communicating with their teachers, which meant in many cases, guiding students through the process of writing formal emails. To support teachers through the transition, Barakat provided them with differentiated support through one on one meetings and regular technology training.
At first, some teachers struggled with the new responsibilities; the Wellness Groups seemed like another task to complete on top of everything else they had to do to teach in the middle of a global pandemic. Nonetheless, teachers quickly began to create and share new activities to cultivate their relationships with students in a way they had not had the opportunity to do before.
For example, Barakat described how one teacher asked students to create “vision boards” to describe how they were surviving during the pandemic. Upon presenting their boards to their teacher, Barakat, and other educators, several of her Wellness Group students revealed issues they had developed with food and body image, issues that would ultimately be identified as eating disorders. Had this teacher not created this assignment in the context of these Wellness Groups, she, Barakat, and other educators who would later use the same assignment would not have known what these students were experiencing.
“The stories were very profound,” noted Barakat. “Kids were saying things like, ‘I don't want to leave my house anymore, because I gained weight over the pandemic,’ or ‘I stopped eating for a week because I gained weight over the pandemic.’ All of these things started to come out with the vision boards.”
Since face-to-face meetings were impossible, the teachers created text groups or What’s App groups with their grade teams and Wellness Groups to maintain constant communication and ensure everyone was on the same page. In addition to creating a continuity of communication unlike anything they had seen before, these text groups also provided emergent multilingual students and students who are reticent about verbal communication another way to express their thoughts and needs. For the 15% of Bronx Law students who primarily speak Spanish, this was a massive support.
Because Wellness Groups harnessed multiple modes of communication including texting on various platforms, emailing, and phone calls, teachers gained greater revelations about students’ social-emotional struggles. These understandings led Barakat and his colleagues to reflect on not only future methods of family communication, but a paradigm shift that they plan to cultivate in the coming years.
“I feel like we've communicated with parents differently during this time in a much more empathetic way. Working in a socio economically depressed area with an underrepresented population always comes with issues of parent involvement, and we've pretty much consistently moved on an idea of we'll just do it without the parents, because they just get in our way. But that's arrogance, and it's disenfranchising. Because we all had global [Pandemic] fear, there seems to be a softening and a cooperation with parents that I did not see happening before, that comes directly from the Weekly Wellness Group structure.”
As part of the Wellness Group program, teachers also gained access to one another’s gradebooks because they needed to track their students’ progress and report to families. Initially a point of contention for teachers, this transparency forced teachers to critically and collaboratively examine how they score students, how often they should be entering grades, and how doing so helps every teacher, student, and family know how to respond and with what support.
Through this new, collaborative structure, teachers began holding one another accountable for entering grades, and started advocating for individual students regarding individual assignments and tasks. They also began experimenting with modes of communication, interpersonal development strategies, and identity-building activities to determine the most effective ways to support their groups. But most critically, teachers shared their successes with one another, resulting in what Barakat calls “cross-pollination of student-specific strategies rather than general differentiation strategies that most teachers have already heard of.” This teacher creativity led to new discoveries about students’ as whole learners, dramatically shifting the way Bronx Law would come to approach teaching and learning.
Barakat wasted no time in developing structures to sustain and further develop weekly Wellness Groups into the 2021-22 school year. The school conducted initial intake interviews with every student prior to the school year beginning in order to provide guidance counselors with a baseline understanding of their situations. Through a new process of communication throughout the year, the counselors will team up with teachers to address any concerning changes they see in students, and for teachers to report any challenges students report within their weekly Wellness Group. Barakat says, the changes have not gone unnoticed by students and their families.
In the coming months, Barakat and teachers will survey students to determine how much of an impact Weekly Wellness Groups had on not only their sense of academic progress, but their overall wellness and sense of self as a learner.
