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Cognitive Coaching

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This 3-minute video for parents features Mental Health Therapist Stephanie Dann talking about how to use cognitive coaching with students when they feel stressed. - Thoughts impact how we feel and how we feel impacts what we do. We can help students to think differently through cognitive coaching. - Validating how our students think and feel is the first step before problem solving. - Help your student to evaluate: is this thought true, helpful, or kind? If not, how can I think differently about this situation. Challenge: It is hard to see our students struggle, try hard at first to validate their experience before helping them to think differently!

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Hi my name is Stephanie Dann. I'm a mental health therapist in the White River School District. Today I wanted to talk to you about cognitive coaching. There's lots of different therapy models that can be used when kids are struggling with sadness, worry, anger, and stress. One of the most researched though, is called cognitive behavioral therapy. The idea behind this kind of therapy is that how we think impacts how we feel. And how we feel impacts what we do. We can intervene in all three of these areas, helping to change how someone thinks, feels, and acts. But therapists often start with how someone thinks. You as a parent do not have to be a therapist to do some of these techniques at home with your students. You can coach them when they are feeling stressed. The first step though before we can change how someone thinks, is we really have to validate their experience, and how they're feeling. So let's say that your student is feeling overwhelmed by distance learning and they're saying things do you like, "This is too much. I can't do this. I can't!". Before you go to problem solving and how to fix this, or how to think about it differently, you have to validate for your student that, yes this is hard. Yes, it does feel like too much. Yes this is hard for me too. You have to really validate how they're thinking and feeling, before you can move on to problem-solving. Once your student feels like you 'get it', you can move into helping them to change how they think. How you do that is you help them to evaluate their own thoughts. There's three different ways that you can talk to your students about their thoughts. Let's use that example of them saying, "This is too much. I can't do it." You can talk to them and say, you know, is that true? Is that too much? For some students that might be true. It might be too much for them. Often though, it's an emotional reaction that they're having when they're saying those feelings. The next question that you can use to talk to your student is, "Is thinking that way helpful?" Is thinking it's too much going to help them solve the problem? And the last thing that you can help your student to think about is, "Is their thoughts kind?" Is their thoughts kind to themselves? Are they beating themselves down in a way that's going to make it hard for them to do something different? Those are some ways that you can help cognitive coach your child at home. You might also decide, I would like to have some support from a school counselor or a mental health therapist in this area, and the White River School District is here to help. So if you feel like your student is struggling, reach out to us.

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