Gratitude Practices at School That Work

Gratitude Practices at School That Work (and Why Some Don’t)

A good teacher knows that establishing strong relationships with students is key not only to helping them succeed but also to supporting their own love for the job. One way to develop a rapport with students is to introduce gratitude practices at school.

While research shows that gratitude can support individuals’ mental health and well-being, it’s been difficult to teach gratitude in schools effectively. But my colleagues and I conducted a study in two high schools right before the COVID-19 pandemic that helped improve students’ well-being, mental health, and friendship satisfaction. Participants used a web app called GiveThx, which lets students and teachers send thank you notes to each other privately and to reflect on their patterns of giving and receiving thanks.

Expressing gratitude to others can feel awkward at first—and that deters people from doing it even though sharing and receiving gratitude both have powerful effects. Further, teachers find it hard to develop a regular cadence in the classroom. Here are four things we learned that can help you integrate gratitude practices effectively in schools:

1. Find common ground while celebrating diversity.

Provide opportunities in class to appreciate the diversity of student’s social identities. Differences in race, class, gender, sexual orientation, age, and language can be obstacles to students’ feeling connected to school. Often, positive psychology practices, including gratitude, are done very publicly without creating a space of trust and support for each other simply as humans. This can backfire with young people. Therefore, first make classrooms “identity safe” spaces where different social identities are welcomed as assets, not impediments. Then challenge students to find things that they have in common with each other and with you. People are more comfortable disclosing things about themselves when they see similarities with others. This sets the stage for trust and genuine, rather than hollow, gratitude practices.

2. Decide as a class how you want to show gratitude.

Giving thanks can be done verbally, in writing, and behaviorally (giving high-fives, for example). Discuss how you want to exchange thanks in a way that everyone is comfortable with—and the more options the better. Maybe your class wants a stack of special sticky notes to be able to leave surprise thank yous. Or you and your students might enjoy the challenge of flipping complaints looking for silver linings in daily frustrations or negative events. A popular practice in my research has been posting a strengths poster in class where students describe their top character strengths and classmates add appreciations of them. Deciding together makes it more likely for you and your students to form habits and develop rituals around gratitude in class.

3. Give opportunities to exchange thanks regularly.

Had a good class discussion? Thank contributors and encourage students to do the same when ideas resonate with them. Say why the ideas matter, too. When you make collaborative assignments, praise good teamwork and provide space for students to thank their partner or teammates when the work is done. Appreciate acts of kindness in class and encourage students to give thanks meaningfully—with eye contact—when they’re helped. Students can share their favorite ways to practice with each other, which helps them expand their repertoire.

4. Schedule five minutes every week or two to write in a gratitude journal in class.

Decide with students how everyone wants to keep a journal first, whether it’s on paper or electronic—and teachers should do the exercise along with students. We can be grateful for people, things, relationships, events, pets, basic needs (like food and drinking water), opportunities, health, etc. Encourage students to focus on meaningful details and build up a long list. These can be from their personal life or thank yous given in class. These journals will be great mementos one day. But for now, they help students clarify how their lives are uniquely blessed and, most importantly, about the life they want to live.

If you’re looking for more ways to integrate gratitude in the classroom, you can find curricula for all ages here. Both teachers and students need engaging and caring school communities to survive and thrive today. Put these practices to work and you and your students will recognize each other’s humanity—and discover how all of us can make a positive difference in the world every day.

I use the acronym RULER to talk about five essential skills. The first R is recognizing emotions in myself and others. That’s paying attention to my physiology, to where my brain is taking me. It’s paying attention to your facial expressions, vocal tone, body language—trying to make meaning out of that.

The U is understanding emotion—the causes and the consequences of feelings. What makes me feel angry? What makes you feel angry? Anger is about injustice, but what I see as an injustice and what you see as an injustice might be different.

L is labeling emotions—having that precise word. E is expressing emotions—knowing how and when to express emotions with different people across contexts and cultures. And then the final R of RULER is the regulation of emotion. These are the strategies we use to help us prevent or reduce unwanted emotions and initiate the ones that we want to have.

Labeling. Most people have not been brought up with an advanced emotional vocabulary, and even when they learn words, they don’t really know what they mean. Everybody’s stressed. Or anxious. But do they know the difference? My research shows that most people clump together the anxiety, the stress, the fear, the pressure, the overwhelm, the worry. It’s all one big clump of red on our mood meter. That makes it hard to find the best strategy to regulate those feelings.

The mood meter is a tool that helps you plot how you feel as a product of two dimensions: pleasantness and energy. If you’re high pleasant, high energy, you’re in the yellow—the generally happy emotions. If you’re high pleasant but low in energy, you’re in the green—chilled out. If you’re unpleasant with a lot of energy, you’re in the red—the angry emotions. And if you’re unpleasant with a little bit of energy, you’re in the blue—sad.

The mood meter helps us take all the complexities that are in our minds and bodies and put it into an emotion space. It’s easy for people to say, I’m in the yellow or green or blue or red. And then from there, we can get more granular by asking people questions. “Well, what’s happening for you right now?” “Oh, I’m doing an interview, that’s exciting.” “I’m about to go to bed. I’m tired.” “I’m about to do a presentation—I’m overwhelmed.”

Download the app How We Feel, which provides definitions for 144 emotions and 36 research-based strategies. The app can help you build a more advanced emotional vocabulary and understand how your feelings are linked to things like the people you’re with and what you’re doing. And you can track that over time. If you set reminders throughout the day—you’re at home, you’re at school, you’re at the gym—and you’re plotting your emotions over the course of a month, you can analyze your data to see what color quadrant you’ve been in and in what context with whom.

It can be very eye-opening because some people think, “Oh, I’m always in the red.” And that might be because they only think about their feelings when they’re in the red. Whereas, when they use the tool and plot themselves throughout the day, they start realizing, “Actually, I do experience wider and more pleasant emotions.”

What do people get wrong about emotions?

People sometimes think of anger and stress and anxiety as bad. But there are no bad emotions. All emotions are information. Let’s say you have a kid or a significant other and you’re plotting yourself in the red with those people, you’re angry. That’s an indication that you’ve got to work on your relationships. It’s not a bad thing.

You’ll want to ask yourself, what’s going on in your life? Is it that you have no space? Is it the people you’re with who are bringing you into the red? Is it your work? And then start setting goals—say, I want to be 5 percent less red next week. You’re not going to get rid of your red. Because life is about being in the red and blue. We’re complex people who should feel the full range of emotions.

Be a role model. Parents and teachers want me to teach them the tricks of nurturing an emotionally intelligent child. And what they don’t realize is that the real trick is their own development of the skills and modeling them.

Kids are not going to talk about their feelings unless you talk about your feelings. Not when your head is spinning out of irritation. But maybe in the morning you can say, “Hey, how are you doing today? Last night, I didn’t sleep so well, and I’m kind of irritable this morning. I just want to let you know that if I look a little off today, it’s not because of you. It’s just that I’m trying to get myself together.” Talking about feelings every day—it’s just part of who we are. We talk about feelings here.