Conquer Student Anxiety

Transform Student Feelings of Overwhelm to Confidence

Do you find your students feeling overwhelmed? Students want to do a lot. Furthermore, they deal with expectations from their relationships with family, school and friends. It can feel like it’s all too much. And, giving up might be right around the corner. Roles and Goals™, a social emotional goal setting and planning activity, helps students prioritize their roles. This reduces feelings of being overwhelmed.

This image is an abstract depicting young people looking harried because of all the expectations they have and limited time to do it all.

Create Calm with Goal Setting and Planning

In particular, Roles and Goals™ focuses planning based on the preservation and enhancement student relationships. This includes family, school, teams, and friends. In addition, this planning exercise uses a schedule of one week. Importantly, this is a better than daily planning. It gives them an easier view of the context of their relationships and balancing their time.  

Solves a Huge Mental Health Issue

This image is a close up of the previous image of a young girl trying to keep the hands of a clock from moving. She's trying to stop time.

Roles and Goals™ solves the problem of how, often, young people feel overwhelmed with all that they are expected to do. The activity helps students assess their relationships, expectations, and time by prioritizing and organizing tasks for one week. This reduces overwhelming feelings of expectations by breaking down responsibilities little by little, bit by bit.

Student Focused with Real-World Application

Roles and Goals™ enhances learning by giving students a real-world problem to solve — their weekly schedule — and provides examples and prompts to guide them.

How to Get Along with Others

Building a Circle of Community

Just about everywhere – school, work, families, neighborhoods – we have to work and get along with others. If conflict is kept to a minimum, everyone “gets along” better. And the group, team or committee accomplishes its goal more effectively and efficiently. But key to this effectiveness and efficiency is knowing “how” to work together. Often, we’re expected to do this with no instruction or guidance. Teaching about keeping conflict to a minimum and get groups to their goal or “win” often lacks in education. My activity, Circle of Community™, shows teams how to work together to keep conflict to a minimum giving them a better chance of reaching their goals.

a picture of the Totem Animals used in the Circle of Community team building resource that helps students learn how to get along with others

Teamwork

A scene in Apollo 13 provides my favorite illustration of positive teamwork. The astronauts stranded in their capsule need to get back to earth. The NASA scientists and engineers work together to solve the problem. I enjoy challenges with a problem to solve. But not unless I do it with others. For me, there’s comfort in working on a team. I like offering my strengths to the group but I don’t have to know or do everything!  Where I lack certain knowledge or skills, other members’ strengths compensate.

Reducing Conflict and Bad Feelings

But thrown into groups, there’s an expectation everyone will get along. With no direction for how to deal with different personalities, ways of thinking and problem-solving methods, conflict and bad feelings arise.

A Way to Get Along While Working Together

Circle of Community™ helps groups bypass conflict and bad feelings by showing them a way to work together. The activity provides a fun and easy way to build communication skills by assessing each member’s strengths and challenges. By understanding why members do or say what they do, inner team conflict decreases paving a solid road to their business of problem solving.

Circle of Community™ is an activity that works to build community within groups, teams, families, etc. It provides a playful way to learn about each other’s strengths and challenges, illustrating how working together and getting along is an effective strategy for solving problems and attaining group goals.

The activity is for teachers, trainers, Human Resources, parenting educators, parents or any teams or groups working together in for-profit and non-profit organizations.

Every team needs Circle of Community™!