Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
Shannon Peterson, a high school English teacher at Hurley K-12 School, shows the "mood meter" chart that is taped to the desks in her classroom for students to assess and articulate how they are feeling before class to help focus their attention back to learning.
By TOM LAVENTURE
Hurley - One teacher's tool for students to assess moods and articulate them has expanded into a school-wide exercise.
Shannon Peterson, a high school English teacher at Hurley K-12 School, said she wanted students to take a minute to think about how they feel, why they feel that way, and then address it; so that all attention going forward is on their school work. The exercise is a good thing anytime, but especially during the pandemic when it's even more challenging to connect and relate, she said.
"It all kind of started over the summer," Peterson said. "I was looking around and thinking what can I do in my room to get them to talk about these things."
The mood charts help to be aware of feelings, she said. It also helps to open up about them.
Technology has helped keep school going but it presents its own challenges, she said. The whole COVID-19 experience has created some anxiety and depression and has contributed to making difficult situations worse, she said.
As she is not a mental health professional, Peterson said she looked at her English class as being about writing and conversation. She learned about the mood charts that were developed by Marc Brackett, director of the Center for Emotional Intelligence at Yale University, whose work involves social and emotional learning in primary education.
The "Mood Meter" is a chart that is based on four basic emotions of "happy, calm, sad and angry." The vocabulary of each term expands into more words and more charts were developed for age appropriate groups with just a few terms in each quadrant for younger students and dozens of terms for the high school students.
"The (happy) yellow quadrant are all high energy and positive emotions you strive for, such as 'exhilarated' and 'inspired,'" Peterson said. "The (calm) green are lower energy, such as 'sleepy,' 'restful' and 'positive.'"
The left quadrants include the blue (sad) with low energy terms that tend to be more negative such as despair or despondent, she said. The red (angry) quadrant has high energy but more unpleasant and negative, such as panicked or enraged.
The students look over the mood meter as a health exercise and a vocabulary lesson, she said. The chart helps increase the use of new words and at the same time it helps to pause for a moment to gauge emotions.
"When you ask someone how they are doing they tend to say, 'good' or 'fine' or 'OK,' or 'bad,'" Peterson said. "The mood meter gives them a little vocabulary to really identify how they are feeling."
The exercise has produced interesting moments. When all the students were reporting they were feeling sad or angry, it led to discussion about why everyone was having an "off day."
Some students embrace the tool as an orderly and definitive exercise. Others are not so open with emotions and do not prefer a structured approach to social and emotional learning.
"It's just important that they are pausing for a moment to check in with themselves," Peterson said.
The negative quadrants are not ideal but the exercise helps students learn that people do have those feelings and must get through them, she said. There are times when the feelings are understandable and even beneficial, she said.
The students will start using the Mood Meter assessment in their journaling this semester, Peterson said.
For the second semester the high school students created mood meter "bingo cards" for the elementary students, she said. The moods are detailed by colors and the elementary students learn words by matching the quadrants with photos of the high school students "mimicking" various moods with facial expressions.
"We are not allowed to interact across the school and so we are trying to do distance projects to connect the elementary school with the high school," Peterson said. "We are using games and riddles to get the kids to learn the emotions."
The schoolwide expansion is in part from the unsettling feelings or "weirdness" of the year with everyone wearing masks and functioning in a very virus conscious environment. The students wonder if sports games and events will occur or be canceled, or if the school will close again.
"At one point it felt kind of like a reality show, (and) who's getting voted off the island," Peterson said. "We come in and a kid would not be here or something. There is just that uncertainty and that is a lot for the staff and kids."
