As an education leader, it is vital to help ensure that mental health skills are adopted and embraced with fidelity across your school community. By adopting Open Parachute in your school or district, you can implement a few protocols and practices to guide your staff and students to embed well-being into the everyday learning environment:
1. Structured Onboarding
Implement a structured onboarding plan in collaboration with the Open Parachute team.
Please see our Help Article: Introducing Open Parachute to your School/District for specific guidelines.
2. Educator Resources
In order to get the most out of the Open Parachute platform, be sure to encourage your educators to access all of the following resources:
a) Student Lessons: These enable educators to teach all of their students mental health skills, increasing the resilience of the entire student body.
Hint: Educators will need these lessons timetabled and to know that they are part of their overall educational goals. If you need help mapping Open Parachute lessons to your curriculum, please contact us directly, and we can assist in any way you need!
Find out more about the Student Lessons in our Help Article: The 4 Lesson Types
b) Educator Well-being Series: These modules provide educators with tools and strategies for supporting their own well-being, which is essential for supporting their students.
Hint: Educators generally prioritize their students’ needs over their own, so they might need encouragement to use this resource! Using these modules during staff meetings or giving educators time to review them as PD are great ways to provide this encouragement.
Find out more about this resource in our Help Article: Resources for Educator Wellbeing
c) Creating Resilient Classrooms: These modules provide training for educators on embedding mental health skill-building into their daily classroom routines.
Hint: This training is very effective when done in groups or teams. Creating PD time for grade-level teams to go through these modules together will create a shared language to embed mental health across the school community.
Find out more about this resource in our Help Article: Creating Resilient Classrooms
d) Caregiver Resource Library: These resources can be sent to parents and caregivers to support students' mental health at home.
Hint: Caregivers often struggle to find time to navigate resources. If you can remind them through newsletters and encourage your teachers and counseling staff to point parents to specific content relevant to their child, this can help!
Find out more about providing this resource to your parents & caregivers through our Help Article: Caregiver Introduction
3. Provide Time for Reflection & Collaboration
We all know how busy educators are. The best gift you can give them when implementing a new resource is the gift of time! If you can create space for educators to get together and reflect on their experiences of teaching Open Parachute lessons and encourage more experienced teachers to mentor newer teachers, this will enrich their experience greatly, leading to more effective implementation.
4. Role Model the Use of Mental Health Skills
Your staff and students look to you as a guide. If you are role modeling the skills being taught in the lessons, this will greatly increase the likelihood that your school community will also practice these skills with fidelity. Here are a few suggestions of how you can role model the core mental health skills of the Open Parachute Being Well Model:
a) FEEL: You can normalize emotions to help students and staff become more comfortable recognizing and addressing any challenges they have that are impacting their mental health. Here are a few suggestions:
Speak about emotions to students and staff (e.g., in an assembly at the beginning of the year, share that it is normal to feel nervous/anxious about new experiences).
Speak about your own emotions (e.g., "I'm feeling stressed about this change... does anyone else feel that way?").
Role model self-compassion (e.g., "It's ok that I find X overwhelming. I'm human!").
Provide opportunities for teachers to build self-compassion (e.g., let teachers know that it’s okay for them to struggle, be vulnerable, or feel stressed/overwhelmed).
For more ideas for teaching emotional awareness skills across the whole school, see our Help Article: Helping Students Explore How They FEEL.
b) PAUSE: You can encourage students and staff to pause and take a moment before they react to stressors so that they are more able to respond in helpful ways when they are struggling. You can do this in a few ways:
Role model the language of purposeful pauses (e.g., "Let's take a moment to pause and reflect" in assemblies/staff meetings).
Encourage pause strategies before, during, or after a stress-inducing event (e.g., fire drill, exam week, etc.).
For more ideas for teaching emotional pause strategies across the whole school, see our Help Article: Helping Students Explore How They PAUSE.
c) THINK: You can encourage a growth mindset in your students and staff to better equip them to think critically and effectively about challenges that impact their personal well-being. Speaking openly about challenges you are facing and how you are using a growth mindset (e.g., ‘I can’ statements) is a very powerful tool for encouraging the same in the people around you.
For more ideas for teaching critical thinking skills across the whole school, see our Help Article: Helping Students Explore How They THINK.
d) ACT: You can encourage your staff and students to have agency when it comes to their own mental health, which means they are more likely to take actions that help rather than hurt themselves and others. If you let your staff and students know what you do to help your own mental health and show them these actions regularly, they will feel safe and encouraged to do the same. There are two types of actions that are particularly impactful to role model:
The use of personal support strategies (e.g., exercise, deep breathing, grounding exercises, gratitude, self-compassion).
Asking for help when struggling (personally or professionally).
For more ideas for encouraging positive actions across the whole school, see our Help Article: Helping Students Explore How They ACT.