If you saw the title and clicked on it then you probably fall into one of two categories. The vast majority of you will be curious as to exactly what level of idiocy could lie behind such a title, and the other person is my mum (hello mum).
Students should be at school. They should be with their friends. They should be sitting in front of highly-qualified professionals who know how to stretch and inspire them. They shouldn’t be on Zoom at the kitchen table, without the playground to look forward to. In other words, what is there to be grateful for?
Maybe there isn’t much, but perhaps it is worth trying to find something to be grateful for anyway.
Gratitude has been shown to increase happiness, lead to better health, enable people to build stronger relationships, and to build resilience amongst many other things. Given the immense benefit of experiencing gratitude, we are very fortunate to live in a time when Psychology has developed tried and tested ways of helping us to develop it as a trait.
One of these methods is called Three Good Things. Basically, you write down 3 good things that have happened each day. I have been working on a variation of this with some of the students I coach. We have been looking to identify 3 good things about working from home. The results have been impressive.
We start by acknowledging that this is not the ideal, and then we work towards finding some positives in the situation, and being grateful for them. In doing so, students are able to become more at ease with the reality of home schooling. In the background, they are also developing other traits which will serve them well in life. A big one is resilience. By moving through adversity, our students can with support, build resilience in a way which will help them a great deal in the future. This will enable them to meet challenges with a belief that they can navigate them. Building resilience is a life-changer, and gratitude is as good a way as any to build it.
The hope is that one day they will be able to look back from a point of achievement and say, “That really crazy hard time in 2020-2021 helped me to get here, and I am grateful for it.”