A Brighter 2021: Ending the School Year Strong, featuring Ana Homayoun

With just a few weeks remaining of the school year, helping students finish the school year strong while also laying the groundwork for how to thrive this spring and summer is a top concern for local parents and caregivers. To reach a wide audience with strategies that could help, the Safe Community Coalition hosted our annual spring speaker virtually in a webinar presented by international author and educator Ana Homayoun entitled “A Brighter 2021: Ending the School Year Strong” on Tuesday, April 13.

“As we near the end of the school year, the level of grief and exhaustion from the past year is coming out more and more,” said Homayoun. “We’ve been running a marathon since last March and now that we’re nearing the finish line, the wheels come off and there’s a sense of exhaustion.”

As an author, educator and school strategist, Homayoun noted the challenges she’s seeing in the remote learning environment, including managing distractions and staying focused; planning out time to complete work; keeping track of where individual teachers assign work and would like the work to be submitted (and when the work is due); social-emotional disconnect from classmates; and navigating various learning platforms by class with different teachers using different portals with non-uniform expectations.

As kids transition from online to a hybrid or in-person learning environment, another set of challenges emerge. To help, Homayoun recommends having a system for organizing notes, homework, and quizzes that can be used in both remote and in-person models; identifying strategies for how to check school portals for upcoming assignments and missing work daily; using paper planners to visualize work blocks and due dates; and ensuring kids know how to communicate effectively with teachers.

Here are the six recommendations Homayoun offered to finish the year strong academically, socially, emotionally and physically:

Acknowledge and Validate

“Where are your kids now in their journey, and what do they need?” she asked.  Acknowledging and validating their experience is often the first step in reframing our expectations and supporting students during this time.

Focus on Energy Levels and Mood Management

“People talk about procrastination as if it’s a time management problem because that’s what it looks like, but in reality it’s a mood management issue,” said Homayoun. Procrastinators have lower self-compassion and are harder on themselves, and they easily fall into shame spirals which can aggravated by varying energy levels.

Provide Time, Structure and Support

Parents and caregivers do not have to do this all themselves. Family friends, older cousins, relatives, can sit with a student for 20 minutes, in person or even virtually. A little extra support system can greatly reduce the tendency to procrastinate. “Hybrid is hard to navigate when you think about two different situations – kids need a little bit of side-by-side extra time, structure and support.”

Promote Daily Movement and Intentional Transitions to Start and End the Day

Aches, pains and headaches are the physical consequences of the extended disruption, social isolation and stress are taking a toll on our bodies. Encourage students to identify two to three different daily habits that bring them joy, calm or energy with varying time levels, from 1 minute to half an hour or more. Examples could be one minute of deep breathing, 10 minutes of shooting hoops and 15 minutes of walking the dog.

Encourage Self-Exploration of Hobbies, Interests, and New Pursuits (or Continuing Old Ones)

Last spring many students had sports or other activities cancelled and had the opportunity to learn new skills, hobbies or sports. Now that more activities are becoming available again, ask students for three to five examples of things they’d like to explore, spend more time on, or try that are available right now. “How do we help our kids use this time as a sense of exploration?” asks Homayoun, “because none of us are going to be coming out of this last 12 months the same.”

Practice Grace

When we look back in this unique moment of time in our lives and in American history, our goal above everything else is that our kids emerge socially, emotionally and physically intact. Parents, especially those feeling exhausted or overwhelmed, need to acknowledge what we need for ourselves to be able to help our children. Outsourcing, asking for help, or going to plan B instead of plan A are all ways to think about giving yourself a new outlook.