GIVING THANKS AT SCHOOL TO PROMOTE EQUITY AND EXCELLENCE

GIVING THANKS AT SCHOOL TO PROMOTE EQUITY AND EXCELLENCE Giacomo Bono, Ph.D & Michael Fauteux, B.A. Correspondence concerning this manuscript should be addressed to Giacomo Bono, Ph.D., California State University Dominguez Hills, 1000 East Victoria Street, Carson, CA 90747 or via email: gbono@csudh.edu Giacomo Bono is an Associate Professor of Psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills. He has a Ph.D. in Applied Social Psychology from Claremont Graduate University. His research focuses on forgiveness, gratitude, well-being, health promotion, and youth development. Dr. Bono is co-author of Making Grateful Kids: The Science of Building Character (2015) and director of the Youth Gratitude Project – a research program that develops assessment tools, examines youths’ social emotional skills and wellbeing, and provides curriculum resources and research support to promote student success and wellness in primary and secondary schools. Michael Fauteux is the Innovator in Residence at Leadership Public Schools and co-founder of the nonprofit GiveThx, a research-based curriculum and digital tool that builds school culture and belonging using gratitude. His past innovation work includes co-creating ExitTicket, a real-time student response system, and Gooru’s Learning Navigator, a personalized learning companion. He previously served as LPS’s Director of Innovation and was a Master Mathematics Teacher. He holds a B.A. in History from Brown University and a Master’s in Education from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. 6 Abstract Schools can use gratitude practices to help students build social and self-awareness skills to connect with and succeed in school. Recent efforts focus on improving equity to achieve wider, sustainable effects. Here we present a way for students and staff to practice gratitude that promotes equity and highlight ways school counselors can work with teachers and students to better support a positive school culture. Keywords: gratitude, well-being, intervention, diversity, education Introduction Promoting Equity at School Schools increasingly help students see their identities as assets, navigate differences, build character and wellness. Unfortunately, many schools in the U.S. are under-resourced and underprepared to address students’ basic mental health needs (Whitaker et al., 2019). Gratitude may be particularly valuable for schools because it is a powerful socio-emotional practice that affects wellbeing (Dickens, 2017). Among adolescents, gratitude is also associated with greater motivation, academic performance, and engagement in extracurricular activities (Ma et al., 2013), basic need satisfaction and school wellbeing (Tian et al., 2016), and prosociality (Bono et al., 2019). Differences in race, class, gender, sexual orientation, age, and language can be obstacles to students’ connection to school and success. Thus, it is important for schools to create “identity safe” spaces where different social identities are welcomed as assets instead of impediments (Steele & Cohn-Vargas, 2013). Being responsive to the different identities and needs of students and staff by enabling them to develop adaptive meanings through their social interactions puts everyone on a path to flourishing, increasing equity in institutions and society (Walton & Wilson, 2018). Interventions that do this are considered “wise”. Unfortunately, the “wise” approach to interventions has not been applied to gratitude practices in schools. Interpersonal practices like shout outs, appreciations in circle work, and gratitude walls have public expression components that can activate threats to social identity and prevent safe access. For example, males may be discouraged from expressing gratitude or other feelings publicly to others (Kashdan et al., 2009). Or a language learner However, while gratitude practices help students, their design and implementation do not always create equitable access for all students. There is a greater need for equitable interventions broadly, including gratitude interventions, that better address social identity differences (Carey et al., 2019). Here we share an intervention addressing this limitation. 7 may be reluctant to speak out loud. Despite good intentions, such practices may exacerbate social anxiety and exclude. quasi-experimental study spanning six weeks in two urban high schools with 327 students (57% female; M = 14.72 years, ages 13-18; 85% Hispanic, 10% Asian, 3% Black, 1% White, 1% Other) (Bono et al., 2020). The intervention used a research-based curriculum that Bono created and a thanking/reflection app (GiveThx) that Fauteux created. See Table 1 for details. The curriculum included various intervention strategies – journaling, thanking, letter writing and reflection – for teachers to facilitate with their students. The app provided a safe and easy way to establish a personal practice routine. Before and after the intervention students completed measures, such as the Gratitude Questionnaire - 6, the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale for Children, the Spence Children's Anxiety Scale, the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule for Children, and the Perceived Stress Scale (for more information on measures, find the study here). Improving Intervention Meta-analyzing 20 studies of gratitude among youth, 5 of which were intervention studies in school settings, Renshaw and Steeves (2016) found small overall intervention effects on positive affect and happiness against passive controls. Due to the paucity of interventions and variety of methods used, they concluded that there was weak support for benefits to students and schools and that more research was needed. What are some limitations of interventions though? People have egocentric biases that prevent them from expressing thanks to others. For instance, expressers overestimate the awkwardness and underestimate the surprise and positive feelings recipients feel upon receiving a gratitude letter, which reduces intentions to express gratitude (Kumar & Epley, 2018). Also, positive psychology interventions are better when individuals can focus on practices they enjoy and are intrinsically motivated (Lyubomirsky et al., 2011). Thus, in school, public gratitude practices may feel less safe and a variety of engaging practices may help. We found that, compared to the control group, the intervention increased trait gratitude (d = .55), positive affect (d = .31), life satisfaction (d = .46), and friendship satisfaction (d = .33); and that it improved mental health outcomes, including decreased anxiety (d = .42), negative affect (d = .49), depression for boys (d = .45), and perceived stress for girls (d = .40) (Bono et al., 2020; see Figure 1). Our prior analyses evaluating the intervention components separately found each to be less effective alone. Thus, the combination increased impact. But how did we increase equity too? To address such challenges, we prioritized designing a gratitude intervention that included marginalized voices and identities and realized that technology could help. To test this intervention, we conducted a pretest-posttest 8 Table 1 Basic Description of the Bono et al. (2020) School Gratitude Intervention Figure 1 Change Scores in Psychological and Social Wellbeing and in Mental Health Symptoms 9 Engaging Gratitude Practices for Students and Staff have access to their frequency data, and teachers could encourage them to take ownership by choosing to thank people they have not thanked as often or at all. Students and staff use GiveThx similarly: they pick a person, send them a digital thx note, and select a hashtag reason from among schooldetermined competencies (e.g., listening, help, kindness). Figure 2 displays examples of thx notes. Unlike social media, exchanges are private, and users can maintain a gratitude journal to reflect on and make meaning of their notes and data. Recipients see all their notes in one place online and discover previouslyinvisible patterns of how their actions impact others. Schools can integrate the practice everywhere: classes, advisories, and faculty meetings. Staff can review gratitude exchanges to better understand, coach, and connect with students. GiveThx app is purposely a web-based app. The ubiquity of devices with browsers made it easy to share devices and login to participate in ways that personal native apps make harder. Codesigning with students suggested this choice maximized equitable access. Students also suggested that limiting use to 1-to-1 interpersonal notes with teacher monitoring made it feel safe, increasing equity for those with different social identities. Applications for Mental Health Counseling at School Counselors can deepen rapport and enhance their work with students by reviewing and building off student’s personal strengths inventory of received thx notes. Sending and receiving notes provides a way for counselors and other non-teaching staff to establish and maintain healthy connections with students. Diagnostically, counselors can use the app’s heat map to identify socially isolated students and proactively reach out to support them. Social media is ubiquitous among teens and may be impacting their mental health (Twenge, 2017). Therefore, we built a way to create opportunities for healthier digital and face-toface autonomous gratitude practice in high school to better support personal development and positive connection. For students who receive fewer thx notes or none, the teacher can help too. First, anchoring thx giving opportunities naturally in existing partner/group routines or assignments should help everyone receive some thanks. But teachers can also implement other thanking rituals in class, like “gratitude waves”, where students are allegedly chosen at random to receive thx notes from the whole class, to target students who have received fewer or no thx notes. Finally, students Evidence shows that high-quality social emotional learning (SEL) programs help K-12 students academically, psychologically and socially, but that involving teachers improves outcomes (Durlak et al., 2011). Teachers use the practices in class to nurture wellbeing and relationships with their students. But staff can also use it to improve their relationships. 10 Figure 2 Examples of Students’ Give Thx Notes to Others (Teacher and Peers) During the Intervention Counselors can improve staffs’ SEL capacity by supporting implementation of the intervention. Counselor-facilitated staff practice in faculty meetings and school routines builds adult experience and aptitude. others helps. When schools harness gratitude not as an intervention but as a core, integrated practice, they increase their likelihood of creating more inclusive, equitable, and healthy learning communities for all students and staff. Conclusion How schools practice gratitude matters. Putting equity upfront to increase identity safe access for students and staff is key. Ensuring that gratitude practices nimbly fulfill the needs and enjoyment of youth by being responsive to their digital lives matters. Providing practices and technology that show the impact of thanking 11 References j.1467-8624.2010.01564.x Bono, G., Froh, J. J., Disabato, D., Blalock, D., McKnight, P., & Bausert, S. (2019). Gratitude’s role in adolescent antisocial and prosocial behavior: A 4-year longitudinal investigation. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 14(2), 230-243. doi:10.1080/17439760.2017.1402078 Kashdan, T. B., Mishra, A., Breen, W. E., & Froh, J. J. (2009). Gender differences in gratitude: Examining appraisals, narratives, the willingness to express emotions, and changes in psychological needs. Journal of Personality, 77(3), 691-730. doi:10.1111/ j.1467-6494.2009.00562.x Bono, G., Mangan, S., Fauteux, M., & Sender, J. (2020). 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