…And the system must be ready to invite teachers into the leadership for systemic change, to empower them to chart the course for adopting MHL practices, and, most importantly, to make teacher well-being a priority in the process. Initially, however, teachers need to see themselves as having a critical role in mental health efforts (Weston and Ott, 2018, pg.114).
As reading this article, I strongly agree that practicing the Mental Health Literacy in the school setting is significant to serve our students’ individual needs. Depending on the characteristics of a student, students willing to share his/her circumstance to their teachers if they are outgoing and open mind. Definitely, it does matter that have a good relationship with their teachers in order to bring out their internal issues. However, if teachers don’t have a trust relationship with their students, especially students who are conservative or does not willing to share their problems outside of school, teachers never understand why his/her student perform poorly in their classes. Goodman (2018) listed the possible traumas of students might suffer from the relationships with their siblings, extended family members, broke family bond, loss of family members, and drug addiction of parents (pg. 109). In order to access personal issues of the student, how would teachers to support or what strategies that teachers should approach? According to my personal perspectives, first of all, if I were the teacher of these students, I would change classroom atmosphere allows students to use the languages that they prefer. In other words, I expecting students treat me as their best buddy, not like a formal type of teacher (I mean the ideology of students always treat teachers in respect manner). I think this is a big step to walk closer to students because they would feel comfortable to communicate with teachers, as well as to share the common themes that students and teachers both had such as video games, sports, social networking platforms, foods, fashions, anything related to non-academic contents. If we, as educators could able to do that, I believe most students would share their daily lives with us because we are the buddies of them. Since we choose to treat our students as their best friend, we would eager and care about each student’s life outside of school voluntary if they do have certain problems. We would go visit student’s community that they spent the most of the time, even visit his/her house if there’s something wrong with the living condition, parental relationship, or anything that Goodman (2018) mentioned. Additionally, except caring students’ academic progress on the contents that we teach, I also believe we should have a free-period that spent times together with our students to make our relationship to be closest and tightest, as their siblings. Therefore, we would be more aware and serious about the traumas that students who experienced. Once they grow up as a young adult, they would able to understand the positive of the beauty of human nature, as well as to understand how to care the other.
Reference:
Goodman (2018). It’s Not About Grit—Trauma, Inequality, and the Power of Transformative Teaching, (pg.108-128)