APPLICATIONS TO STUDENT LEARNING

1. Strategies to heighten awareness, maintain focus and hone other executive functions increase students’ ability to visualize and process complex scenarios and information, such as intricate narratives and arguments in social studies, language arts, and world language; word problems in math; scientific process and experiments; and demanding procedures in the visual and performing arts.
2. Participating teachers learn to train their students in anxiety-reducing and attention-focusing techniques that allow learners to attend to course content and tasks with greater focus, endurance, and resilience. This results both in deeper learning in any given unit of time, as well as more total time on task due to the reduction of distractions that tend to disrupt learning time.
3. Active countering of stress and anxiety has a double positive effect on the working memory students need in order to process, develop, and assimilate knowledge and skills: First, it frees space in working memory that would otherwise be actively occupied by stressors (from both outside and within the classroom). Second, there is ample research showing that stress not only hijacks units of working memory, but actually reduces the working memory’s starting capacity. Simply put, an anxious or stressed brain cannot process or assimilate anywhere near what an unstressed brain can.
4. Stress and anxiety have demonstrable ill effects on teachers’ and students’ health. Strategies by which teachers can maintain physical, mental and emotional well-being during planning and delivery of instruction allow teachers to respond more consistently and wisely to individual student needs. They are able to maintain a high level of instruction even during the most difficult stretches of the school year, notably mid-fall, late winter, and the final month of the year. These strategies also allow teachers to respond to difficult classroom management situations more calmly and effectively.
5. An emotionally intelligent teacher is the first step to having emotionally intelligent students. Healthy classroom environments depend on the creation of a classroom culture that allows children to develop emotional intelligence competencies. A few important factors are the ability to name emotions and develop an internal emotional literacy. Each emotion has encoded within it important data that we can use to create interpersonal connection and satisfaction. It is through understanding the message of our emotions that we are empowered to act in ways that connect with our best judgment.
6. Students are only as good as a teacher’s ability to serve them. Forest therapy builds skills of sensory awareness and the ability to approach any given moment in a grounded way. It open us to the possibility of discovery in the here and now. This way of being supports a healthy and innovative classroom environment, empowers the teacher to stay grounded, and provides emotional stability. Within forest therapy the forest is our teacher. Whatever is present in the here and now within us, and outside of us, is our teacher. Being open to this dynamic flow can have powerful reverberations for us as educators to also remember that our students are some of our greatest teachers.
7. An essential component of learning is to feel safe enough to make mistakes and be able to reframe them in a way that allows learning to occur.  When we learn to reframe mistakes it lowers stress and increases our cognitive processing capability. Reframing mistakes also boosts self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation.

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