This is Mr. Funky Teacher with BeAFunkyTeacher.com. I'm coming to you with another Be a Funky Teacher podcast. Today we're talking mental health tips for teachers, specifically what I learned from Allison Edwards in her Growing Up Strong professional development session that we had here in my school district. If you have never heard her speak, wow. It was a treat to get to hear her. She brings so much insight into how we can help students handle big emotions that help them grow, and how to deal with emotions that can hold them back if they do not receive some intervention or guidance. But first, let's start with three things I'm thankful for. One of the things I'm thankful for is my ability to take photos with my phone. I love capturing memories instantly. It is such a gift. I’ve always been a picture taker. Even when I was a young kid, my mom was a big picture taker, and I’ve always followed her lead. I love capturing photographs—interesting photos, photos of a moment—and my smartphone makes it so easy to do that. Another thing that I'm thankful for is bright colors. They just make life and the classroom happier. I think of what I've done in my classroom, setting it up to make the colors pop. When I came into this classroom, the wall itself was kind of an off white. Not a lot of color. It was a great space, but it felt like a blank canvas. And when you think about a canvas, what is it? It’s that off white or white background. It’s plain. That’s what my classroom was when I arrived. What I’ve had an opportunity to do is use colors in very intentional ways to make the walls pop and make the classroom engaging and exciting. I love bright colors that can help do that. The third thing is silly signs. There’s nothing like a good laugh to break the ice and spread joy in a space. I have one sign in my classroom that makes me laugh every time. It’s a “No farting” sign. I’ve had a lot of teachers comment on it and laugh about it. It’s random. You’re looking around my room at all the teaching tools and resources on the wall, and then you come across a sign that says “No farting.” I also have other funny signs: don’t pet the alligators, don’t swim with sharks, don’t pet the fluffy animals when it’s obviously bears. Just playful, fun, light-hearted things that can make someone smile or laugh to themselves a little bit. I love things like that. All right, let’s shift back now to Allison Edwards and Growing Up Strong. When I came into the presentation space before she started, our school district handed me a book. It’s her book, and the name of it is actually Growing Up Strong: Empowering Young Minds to Manage Emotions, Navigate Conflict, and Embrace Growth. Just looking at it, some of the big areas she addresses are: • Why feelings matter. • The five feelings kids need to manage before age 18. • A process for managing feelings. • Building emotional muscles—short-term discomfort for long-term comfort. • How to help kids manage short-term discomfort at home and at school. • Mental health journeys. Those five feelings she names are worry, sadness, anger, disappointment, and loneliness. Worry is a feeling. Sadness is a feeling. Anger is a feeling. Disappointment is a feeling. Loneliness is a feeling. She also has a process for managing feelings called the FIT method: identify what you’re feeling, rate your intensity, name the trigger, and then choose a strategy for dealing with that feeling. Then she talks about building emotional muscles—short-term discomfort for long-term comfort. I think that’s such an interesting thought: short-term discomfort for long-term comfort. Helping kids manage short-term discomfort at home and school so they can grow. This book looks great. I’m excited to dig into it because I really enjoyed her talk. She used to be based out of Tennessee, living in Nashville, and now she has moved her family to Portugal. It was interesting to hear that part of her journey. In this episode I’m just going through some of my notes from her presentation and reflecting out loud—talking through my reactions, my “ahas,” and things that stuck with me. I won’t share every single thing, but maybe as I go through these notes there’s something that catches your attention too. One of the first things she talked about is how kids are struggling to do hard things, and how there is a mental health need around that. She even referenced the Surgeon General talking about how parenting can be bad for your health because of how emotionally taxing it is. I love being a parent. I love being a teacher. But I know both roles are emotionally draining. We face a lot of challenges around mental health. Allison defined resilience as the ability to manage uncomfortable feelings. She said it is so important for young people to be able to manage discomfort. Happiness, she reminded us, is a privilege—not something guaranteed. To raise kids who are strong, we need to teach them that short-term discomfort is okay. That connects back to her idea that short-term discomfort leads to long-term comfort. When kids have to do a hard thing, face something uncomfortable, and then experience the benefit afterward, that’s where deeper happiness and confidence live. Allison talked about three basic models for how adults interact with kids about their feelings. The first is “buck up.” This is the approach of “get over it,” “it’s not a big deal,” or “stop crying.” The second is “bubble wrap,” where adults try to protect kids from everything: “I’ll take care of it, it might be too hard, you don’t have to go.” The third is scaffolding: “How can I support you? I think you can do it. I believe in you.” As I reflect, I think my parents used all three at times. Sometimes they were “buck up.” Sometimes there was a little bit of bubble wrap. But I really believe they tried to live mostly in scaffolding—supporting my brother and me, believing in us, and letting us face hard things. Those three models apply to any adult working with kids, not just parents. As a teacher, I ask myself, “Am I the buck up person? The bubble wrap person? Or the scaffolding person?” I absolutely want to lean into scaffolding: showing love and support, but not taking every struggle away and not removing all opportunities for kids to learn. She also talked about how many lessons young people have to learn before they turn 18 and connected that back to those five feelings: worry, sadness, anger, disappointment, and loneliness. Teaching kids to manage those five feelings before 18 is powerful and important. If they can understand and manage those feelings, they are more likely to have lifelong success. Not a perfect life, but a life where they know they can do hard things and where feelings do not drown them. We don’t want kids drowning in their feelings, feeling hopeless. We want kids to struggle and learn from struggle, and come out the other side knowing they can make it. Allison made the point that kids sometimes think the whole world cares deeply about what they are going through, but in reality the world as a whole doesn’t stop for anyone. People care, individually, but the world keeps moving. That’s a tough truth, but also an important one. She also talked about the importance of a stable home, while allowing kids to have challenges out in the world. Kids need to go out, face obstacles, and then return to a home base that feels solid and safe. Another big theme was modeling boundaries. She said modeling boundaries sets kids up for success. She encouraged us not to be the educator who rescues and saves kids all the time by removing every consequence of their actions. Kids have to experience the consequences of their own choices. This is an area where I feel a bit of tension. I actually think everyone deserves a “rescue” moment once in a while, as long as it doesn’t become a pattern. My daughter, for example, has forgotten something at home that she needed for school. My wife has brought it to her once or twice, but made it clear that this would not become a habit. That’s different than rescuing over and over. So I agree with Allison that if we are constantly rescuing kids, they won’t grow emotionally and will come to depend on us to fix everything. But I also think there is room, once in a while, for grace and help—as long as we keep boundaries in place. Overall, her point was clear: if you protect kids from every struggle, they won’t grow emotionally. If I am always looking for a way to rescue a student, instead of letting them experience the natural consequences of their actions, I’m bubble wrapping them and taking away learning opportunities. Allison spent a lot of time talking about anxiety. She described anxiety as a negative story about the future. If our main strategy is to avoid whatever we are anxious about, there are long-term consequences. When we face a challenge we’re worried about, our anxiety goes down and our confidence goes up. I’ve experienced that in my own life. I’ve seen it with kids too—like when we do big projects or performances. After the project or performance, their worry goes down and they feel proud of themselves. That’s part of life. She also mentioned bursts of neuroplasticity. We often talk about brain plasticity when kids are really young, those early years where they are like sponges. She reminded us there is a second burst of neuroplasticity in the teen years. Their bodies and brains are going through big changes, and that season is a powerful chance to shape their thinking and resilience by helping them face hard things with support. Allison also said kids won’t tell you when you’re right. That made me smile. As adults we know that joke: kids “know everything” and parents and teachers “know nothing.” Even when they realize we were right, they rarely come back and say, “You were right, I was wrong.” That takes a lot of maturity. She stressed the importance of early intervention—teaching self-advocacy, problem-solving skills, empathy, self-esteem, coping strategies, and how to deal with worry before kids are 18. Without intervention, some kids will drift toward self-harm, substance abuse, screen addictions, displaced anger, or deep avoidance. That really validated the work I’ve been trying to do in my classroom: not just teaching academics, but seeing children as whole humans, where mental health matters and feelings matter. If we don’t address that, we’re not as effective as we could be. Allison also said something that stuck with me: negative thoughts make ruts in the brain. I talk to my fifth graders a lot about their inner voice. I tell them that no one talks harsher to us than we talk to ourselves. When we constantly call ourselves worthless or garbage internally, that negative self-talk carves deep ruts. Those ruts are hard to smooth out. I even thought about my lawn. A heavy machine once ran through my yard and left deep ruts. They were hard to fix. Negative thinking does the same thing in the brain. That image really brought it home for me. She also differentiated emotions from feelings. Emotions, she said, are more unconscious, physical, short-term, and observable. You can see emotions. Feelings are more conscious, mental, long-term, and often hidden. Worry, sadness, anger, disappointment, and loneliness are feelings. You don’t always see them on the surface. I appreciated that distinction. It helps me make sense of what kids are experiencing. If we can better understand what they’re going through, we can better support them. She talked about kids who come in with a “full tank” emotionally. They are overloaded—maybe aggressive, maybe not listening, maybe melting down. Underneath those big emotions, there are usually deeper feelings. Her full-tank versus half-tank idea was really helpful. The goal isn’t to empty kids out; it is to help them move from “overflowing” to a manageable level so they have room to think and learn. For me, one of my main ways to move from full tank to half tank is exercise, especially stand up paddling. It can transform how I’m feeling. It calms me and gives me room again. Allison encouraged us to help students find their own versions of that—healthy ways to move from full to half so they don’t spill over onto everyone around them. She reminded us that kids will test us to see if we are safe. When kids are really up in their emotions—screaming, yelling, freezing, shutting down—it can be scary. Underneath those big reactions are the feelings she talked about. Allison also shared some of her own story. She talked about how worry has shaped her life and how much she worries about people. Her worry, and her desire to truly be present for her own children, even led her family to move from Nashville to Portugal. She realized she was being there for everyone else’s kids through her practice, but not as much as she wanted to be for her own. She told the story of J.K. Rowling writing Harry Potter in one of the worst times of her life. Those books came out of dark feelings and circumstances—an abusive relationship and poverty. Rowling didn’t avoid her pain. She transformed it into something powerful and meaningful. Allison used that example to show how root feelings can become super skills when they are acknowledged and worked through. In her book, she lays out coping strategies for each of the five core feelings, both at home and at school. The goal is to help kids take those root feelings—worry, sadness, anger, disappointment, loneliness—and turn them into super skills instead of being crushed by them. She talked about soft skills, too, and how important they are. She shared a statistic that about sixty percent of kids who drop out of college do so because of mental health issues, with anxiety being a huge piece of that. Anxiety can be managed, she said, in part by “reciting stories”—rewriting the narrative we are telling ourselves. She explained sadness as focusing on one thing from the past and not letting go. Depression shows up when someone keeps going back to that one thing and making it the center of everything. With anger, she encouraged us to look underneath—at shame, guilt, jealousy, hurt, and all the other feelings that often sit below anger. This connects directly to something I use in my classroom that my grief therapist gave me when my mom died. It’s a visual of an iceberg labeled “anger.” At the top, above the water, is anger. Underneath the surface are all the things that can feed that anger: sadness, disappointment, loneliness, feeling overwhelmed, embarrassment, hurt, helplessness, pain, frustration, insecurity, grief, anxiety, stress, feeling threatened, tired, guilt, jealousy, fear, shame—so many layers. That visual helped me in my own grief because I was angry when my mom died. I was angry at God. I was angry at life. My therapist helped me see there was so much underneath that anger. Now I hang that visual in my classroom to remind myself that there’s more going on for my students too. When a child is angry, there is almost always something deeper going on. Allison talked about disappointment as well. You can’t get through life without being disappointed. Disappointment is when your expectations do not match reality. One of the strategies she uses is helping kids think through multiple possible outcomes ahead of time. Instead of only imagining one perfect outcome, you talk through, “What if this happens? What if that happens? What if it doesn’t go exactly how you want?” I use that strategy with my own kids. It helps them handle disappointment when it comes because they’ve already thought through different possibilities. She also talked about loneliness, especially for kids who don’t feel like they fit in, who don’t have close friends, or who are struggling with family. Some kids try to fill that with online connections that don’t really meet their needs. No matter what kids are going through, she stressed how important it is for us, as educators, to give them a safe, stable environment—without a critical tone. One of my favorite things she said was a simple message we can send to every student: “I see you. I hear you. I accept you.” I love that. When we’re helping kids manage their emotions and feel discomfort in healthy ways, we still need to send that message. If you take anything from this episode, let it be that: let students know you see them, you hear them, and you accept them. That’s the kind of teacher I want to be. I want to keep learning from Growing Up Strong. I want to keep bringing this kind of work into my classroom because I know it impacts students far beyond test scores. I actually got to meet Allison Edwards at the end of her session. I went up and shook her hand and told her I appreciated her. I told her I was going to dig into her content even more. And I meant it. As I continue to learn more, I can do better and still impact students. When we know better, we can do better. With that being said, I want you to remember to inspire greatness in young people. And don't forget to be a funky teacher. Bye now.