Therapeutic School: Learning To Cope With Anxiety
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, levels of anxiety, learning disruptions, and depression have been impacting students. If you're considering therapeutic schools to help your student deal with anxiety, using creative and palliative learning techniques can improve academic performance and build strong coping skills.
Here are some teaching methods used by therapeutic schools to help students suffering from anxiety.
Expression
When students feel seen and heard, they can find constructive ways to express their anxiety symptoms, which can make them feel supported and resilient.
- Collage Art: making an abstract emotion like anxiety feel more tangible can help students develop strong coping skills. Many therapeutic schools encourage students to create collage art that expresses how they feel and experience their anxiety. Because collage art can incorporate a variety of artistic mediums, students can feel free to create organically and authentically. They can practice this technique using a blank poster board, canvas, or digital interface. Next, teachers encourage their students to focus on colors, shapes, words, images, sounds, and associations they have with the word "anxiety." If students are hesitant about sharing the intimate details of their anxiety, they could create a collage for a character or song that represents anxiety to them. Many therapeutic schools have teachers model this expressive technique for an emotion like anger, sadness, joy, fear, or grief. The students may present their collage anonymously to their peers. This can allow for dialogue, sharing, and introspection without the fear of being judged.
Movement
Students can feel paralyzed by anxiety, which can force them to retreat and hide. Many therapeutic schools use kinesthetic learning techniques to use movement as a coping strategy.
- Walk and Talk: preventing the spread of COVID-19 forced many students to shelter in their rooms and hunker down behind computer screens. Teachers may break this cycle, while also promoting physical health, by moving traditional lectures and discussions to a local park, trail, or walking path. When teachers and students walk and talk, they may begin with a question and pause for reflection before sharing ideas. Many therapeutic schools will have students listen to audiobooks, podcasts, or lecture clips with headphones while they walk. Once the material is covered, they will ask students to remove their headphones, before commencing the discussion. To alleviate students' anxiety about sharing ideas with a larger group, teachers may give them the opportunity to have one-on-one discussions with a peer, teacher, or therapist during these walk and talk outings.
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