By: TRAILS
What can we offer students struggling with behaviors that derail learning?
School mental health professional Katie guides students through concrete techniques to navigate anxiety and strengthen coping skills that help them with academic challenges.
Katie’s Story
Katie’s been a school mental health professional for three years. She uses TRAILS programming to help students develop skills that reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression and finds incremental practice the key to success. She says, “a lot of high school kids that I work with are not used to having a homework piece” to their mental health work. She encourages her students to practice coping skills outside of their time together. She says that TRAILS exercises help her students pinpoint actions and activate skills to address their symptoms and change behaviors.
As with most educator roles, her interest and challenge is in actuating the learning—moving beyond skill comprehension to utilization. She notes that skill set development in youth mental health work is often misunderstood. Many think of these challenges as abstract problems with mysterious solutions. But she stresses that research pinpoints a specific set of skills that young people can develop to help manage behaviors, and that practicing those skills is as important to behavioral health as problem set work is to success in math. Therefore, she makes an extra effort to get her students to engage in skills “homework” and she sees positive results.
She talks about one student who struggled with high anxiety, “and then depression followed.” Katie says that the TRAILS Cycle of Avoidance resource really impacted the student. The resource explains how short-term relief from avoiding a task reinforces avoidance, ultimately leading to feeling incapable and helpless in the face of academic challenges. Meanwhile, anxiety around the task grows and avoidance behavior increases.
This particular student’s anxiety and avoidance cycle was affecting her academics. “Her anxiety would crank up and then she wouldn’t go to school.” Missing school just compounded the anxiety. “It’s this vicious cycle of ‘I’m not going to face my problems.’” So Katie used her TRAILS resources and training to help the student disrupt that cycle.
Her TRAILS manual laid out a simple step-by-step process to tackle avoidant behaviors, starting with smaller challenges. They identified some minor tasks she’d been avoiding and filled out the Fear Ladder sheet. This resource helps students experience smaller doses of anxiety as they work toward a larger goal, building their capacity and skill set to meet the challenge they’re avoiding. After setting up her Fear Ladder, she got to work, acclimating to smaller doses of anxiety related to attendance step-by-step, finally reaching her end goal.
“When she actually rated her anxiety before and then after, she said, ‘Oh, that wasn’t bad at all!’ And I said, ‘see, it actually makes a difference!’ So those little life skills—she really learned that it’s okay to be nervous, but she still was able to do the tasks” and reach her goal.
Katie says having specific steps laid out to guide students through skill development makes her job in intervention work feel feasible, like she’s addressing important issues at an appropriate level for the school setting with effective methods: “since it’s so focused on signs and symptoms and skills to cope, but not solve, it’s manageable for a school to do.” She adds that she always feels clear in her role with these tools—that she’s not working in the realm of therapy, but fully within education, helping her students gain knowledge, skills, and the ability to fully engage in what school can offer.
About TRAILS
Supported by funding from the State of Michigan, TRAILS is available to Michigan schools at no cost. The TRAILS model offers three MTSS-aligned tiers of programming that address general classroom education, interventions for students needing extra support, and a third tier dedicated to suicide awareness and crisis response. Programming is skills-based, providing students with tools to navigate social and emotional challenges. With modular and flexible programming, TRAILS is able to meet students where they are.
Click here to learn more about TRAILS programming.