Compilation of School Mental Health Education Materials
— ‘Healing’ to a Better Self
1. Overall Background and Work Positioning
(1) Context and Actual Situation of the Student Population
Currently, basic education is gradually shifting from an emphasis on “scores” and “entrance exams” to a stage that values the comprehensive development and harmonious physical and mental health of students. However, the pressure of reality has not diminished. For XX School, the student population mainly consists of children from local community residents and some children of migrant workers. The family structure is predominantly dual-income families, left-behind families, and grandparent-led families. Parents generally value education but have significant shortcomings in areas such as scientific parenting knowledge, effective parent-child communication time, and emotional management skills. As exam periods approach, parental anxiety sharply increases, and the use of “comparative education” and “blaming communication” in their speech inadvertently adds to students’ psychological burdens. The complex and ever-changing online environment, with short videos, online games, and social platforms occupying a large amount of extracurricular time, is also quietly altering some students’ values and attention habits. In this realistic context, it is not uncommon to see students experiencing significant emotional fluctuations, lack of concentration, frequent interpersonal conflicts, and insufficient motivation to learn.
Through the analysis of multi-dimensional data from moral education, safety, and teaching over the past few years, our school has gradually formed a clear “psychological profile of students”: some students have a positive learning attitude and stable psychological state, adapting well to the school’s rhythm; some students frequently oscillate between academic pressure, interpersonal relationships, appearance anxiety, and the gap between self-expectation and reality; and a few students are long-term internet addicts, engage in extreme self-denial, and lack confidence in the future. Behind these differences are influences from family education methods, individual temperament characteristics, and shocks from changes in the social environment. If the school only stays at the simple judgment level of “poor discipline,” “lack of effort in learning,” and “uncooperative parents,” it will neither solve the problem nor avoid secondary harm. Therefore, systematically incorporating student mental health education into the school’s development plan is not an “optional item” but a “mandatory item.”
(2) Work Positioning and Value Orientation
Based on a thorough assessment of the reality, XX School has clearly positioned student mental health education as: an important pillar for implementing the fundamental task of moral education, an important line of defense for maintaining campus safety and stability, an important foundation for improving educational quality, and an important pathway for promoting the happy growth of teachers and students. Mental health education does not replace moral education, nor does it exist outside of teaching; rather, it is intertwined and mutually supportive with moral education, safety, and teaching: moral education provides value direction for mental health education, teaching provides practical carriers for mental health education, safety management provides a stable environment for mental health education, and mental health education provides psychological support for the implementation of moral education, quality improvement in teaching, and safety assurance.
In terms of value orientation, the school adheres to the basic principles of “respecting differences, focusing on the norm, safeguarding the bottom line, and promoting development.” The so-called “respecting differences” means acknowledging the diversity among students in temperament characteristics, family backgrounds, and growth rhythms, without using a uniform standard to measure all children; “focusing on the norm”…
(3) Overall Goals and Phase Arrangement
Based on the school’s reality and student development needs, XX School has established the overall goal of mental health education work: through continuous promotion over three to five years, to build a clear structure, defined responsibilities, smooth mechanisms, professional teams, solid curricula, rich activities, standardized materials, and scientific evaluations of the mental health education work system, so that all students can receive basic mental health education during their time at school, psychological troubles can be detected and effectively intervened in a timely manner, and major psychological crisis events can be effectively prevented and properly handled…
2. Organizational Leadership and Work Mechanism
(1) Overall Design of Organizational Structure
To ensure that mental health education work has someone to manage, someone to oversee, has strength, and is sustainable, the school has optimized and adjusted the original administrative structure, establishing the XX School Student Mental Health Education Work Leadership Group. The leadership group is headed by the principal, who is responsible for the overall mental health work of all students; the vice principal in charge of moral education and safety serves as the deputy leader, responsible for daily coordination; members include heads of the moral education department, teaching department, general affairs department, Young Pioneers, union leaders, grade group leaders, and full-time and part-time mental health education teachers. The main responsibilities of the leadership group are to research and determine the annual goals and key tasks of the school’s mental health education…
(2) Detailed Implementation of Job Responsibilities
Around the core question of “who will do it, what to do, and to what extent,” the school has detailed job responsibilities from different levels including school management, functional departments, grade groups, homeroom teachers, and subject teachers. The principal is responsible for incorporating mental health education into the school’s development plan and annual work priorities, listening to reports on mental health education work at important meetings, and allocating resources for the construction of counseling rooms…
(3) Collaborative Construction of Operational Mechanisms
Based on the clear organizational structure and job responsibilities, the school has further constructed an operational mechanism covering “information collection—consultation and judgment—intervention implementation—tracking feedback,” ensuring that mental health education work is not a scattered action but a connected chain. In terms of information collection, the school has established three types of information sources: daily observation records, psychological assessment results, and home-school communication records, maintained jointly by homeroom teachers, psychological teachers, and grade group leaders, with the moral education department regularly summarizing. In terms of consultation and judgment, the school holds at least one special analysis meeting on mental health work each month, led by psychological teachers, to discuss cases of students who need special attention, forming a relatively unified preliminary judgment and intervention suggestions. In terms of intervention implementation, following the principle of “class-level first, psychological teacher intervention, home-school collaboration,” measures such as heart-to-heart talks, classroom support, group activities, and individual counseling are classified and taken, with crisis intervention plans activated for high-risk cases in a timely manner. In terms of tracking feedback, homeroom teachers and psychological teachers regularly record changes in key students, reflecting on experiences and shortcomings in the semester’s mental health education summary, and proposing adjustment suggestions for the next phase of work. Through the interconnected mechanisms, the organizational structure is no longer just a “framework on paper” but a true operational “skeleton” in daily work.
3. Work Goals and Annual Focus
(1) Overall Work Goals
In line with the school’s operational reality and student growth needs, the overall goals of XX School’s student mental health education work can be summarized as “four placements, three enhancements, and one guarantee.” The “four placements” are: organizational leadership in place, ensuring mental health education has direction and strength; institutional mechanisms in place, ensuring work has rules to follow and evidence to rely on; curriculum activities in place, enabling students to receive psychological support and growth experiences both inside and outside the classroom; and home-school-community collaboration in place, making parents and social forces a beneficial supplement to the school’s mental health education. The “three enhancements” are: overall enhancement of students’ psychological literacy, equipping them with basic self-awareness…
(2) Annual Work Tasks
Around the overall goals, the school clarifies annual tasks from aspects such as “infrastructure, curriculum implementation, activity development, team training, home-school communication, crisis prevention, and data organization” each academic year. For example, in terms of infrastructure, the focus is on identifying and addressing gaps in psychological counseling room facilities, psychological file management, and revising and improving systems; in terms of curriculum implementation, ensuring that mental health education courses are fully opened and that theme class meetings are solidly promoted around key themes; in terms of activity development, organizing activities that are not superficial and closely aligned with students’ realities around national mental health education publicity weeks, World Mental Health Day, and other time nodes…
(3) Phase Achievement Goals
To avoid overly abstract work goals, the school has also set relatively perceptible achievement markers for each phase. For example, after a year of effort, it is hoped that all teachers can identify at least three warning signs of student psychological crises and be familiar with basic reporting processes; that students can master at least two simple and feasible emotional regulation methods, such as deep breathing, positive self-suggestion, and writing mood diaries; and that parents can significantly improve their awareness and satisfaction regarding the school’s mental health education work in feedback from parent school questionnaires. These seemingly “fragmented” goals precisely constitute the support points for the overall goals to be realized and correspond and connect with the overall background in Chapter 1 and the organizational mechanism in Chapter 2.
4. Integration of Mental Health into Educational Teaching and Daily Management
(1) Penetration and Integration in Classroom Teaching
Mental health education, if limited to the courses and counseling rooms of psychological teachers, will find it difficult to achieve full coverage and sustainability. Therefore, the school guides teachers of various subjects to view mental health education as an inherent part of classroom teaching rather than an additional burden, starting from the perspective of “finding points of convergence for psychological education in subject teaching.” Language teachers, when teaching literary works, not only lead students to understand character fates and plot developments but also guide students to connect their own experiences by discussing characters’ psychological activities when facing setbacks, misunderstandings, and choices; in the essay training segment, students are encouraged to write about “small troubles,” “small grievances,” and “small achievements” in their lives, helping them sort out and re-recognize their self-experiences during the narrative process. Moral and legal education teachers emphasize psychological health-related content such as respecting others, protecting oneself, and interpersonal boundaries when discussing rights and obligations, laws and rules, helping students understand the psychological basis for rule setting and the underlying logic of interpersonal interactions…
(2) Creating a Supportive Atmosphere in Class Management
The classroom is the main arena for students’ school life and the most direct and nuanced space for mental health education. The school has clearly stated in the assessment and training of homeroom teachers that “class management should shift from ‘being able to manage’ to ‘managing well and providing warmth,'” advocating that homeroom teachers create a safe class atmosphere through building class culture, improving class systems, and optimizing peer relationships. Many classes have initiated discussions and established class agreements through “class co-construction meetings” at the beginning of the semester, focusing on questions such as “What do we want this class to be like?” “What do we not want to see in class?” “What do we hope will happen when someone makes a mistake?”…
(3) Guiding Adjustments in the Evaluation System
Evaluation methods have a profound impact on students’ psychology. If all honors revolve around scores, and all evaluations focus on results, students are likely to equate their self-worth entirely with their grades, leading to a “total denial” when facing a failure. Therefore, the school has made moderate adjustments within the existing evaluation system framework, strengthening process evaluation and diversified evaluation. At the class level, homeroom teachers strive to describe students’ progress and efforts specifically in comments and daily feedback, avoiding vague labels of “good” or “bad”; at the grade level, combining various evaluation projects such as “Civilization Star,” “Progress Star,” and “Helpful Star”…
5. Screening, Warning, and Crisis Intervention
(1) Normalized Mechanism for Psychological Status Screening
To comprehensively grasp students’ mental health status, the school has established a normalized psychological status screening mechanism, respecting students’ privacy and adhering to educational principles. At the beginning or mid-term of each academic year, the school organizes age-appropriate students to participate in psychological health questionnaire assessments, focusing on aspects such as learning pressure, interpersonal relationships, self-evaluation, emotional experiences, and family atmosphere. Psychological teachers conduct preliminary analyses of the questionnaire results, forming overall reports based on dimensions such as grade, gender, and class, and then providing feedback to the leadership group and grade groups. For students showing significant high-risk signals in the assessments, psychological teachers do not simply label them but further understand their true state through interviews to confirm the risk level. Meanwhile, homeroom teachers supplement information about students they believe need attention into the “psychologically concerned student ledger” based on daily observations and home-school communication, improving screening accuracy through a combination of “quantitative data + qualitative observations.”
(2) Identification and Reporting of Psychological Crisis Warning Signals
In teacher training, the school has specifically compiled a “Student Psychological Crisis Warning Signal Prompt Sheet,” outlining behaviors or verbal changes that are easily overlooked but significantly meaningful, such as long-term sleep difficulties and lethargy, repeated appearances of death imagery in essays or drawings, frequent expressions of extreme statements like “My life has no meaning” or “It doesn’t matter what I do,” and suddenly disposing of cherished items…
(3) Emergency Procedures for Psychological Crisis Intervention
In response to potential severe self-harm, suicide, or harm to others, the school has developed the “XX School Student Psychological Crisis Intervention Emergency Plan.” The plan clarifies the command system, disposal procedures, and work division during a crisis, dividing the emergency process into “on-site discovery and preliminary control,” “rapid reporting and command intervention,” “emergency rescue and professional support,” and “information communication and public opinion guidance”…
6. Home-School-Community Collaboration and Family Education Guidance
(1) Optimization of Home-School Cooperation Models
If mental health education only stays within the campus, it is difficult to achieve lasting results. Based on years of experience in home-school communication, the school has optimized the home-school cooperation model, gradually shifting from a single “grade reporting parent meeting” to a “growth co-planning parent meeting.” In the setup of parent meetings and parent school courses, the school deliberately increases content on mental health and family education, focusing on topics such as “how to accept children’s ordinariness and imperfections,” “how to express expectations appropriately,” “how to help children face failure,” and “how to handle emotional repair after parent-child conflicts,” facilitating discussions and exchanges. The speakers include psychological teachers with a certain theoretical foundation and experienced homeroom teachers who have accumulated rich experience in class management, using real cases as entry points and practical suggestions as focal points to help parents gradually adjust their parenting concepts and behaviors in a way that is “understandable, relatable, and actionable.”
(2) Precision Advancement of Family Education Guidance
For general parents, the school popularizes general psychological health knowledge and family education concepts through parent meetings, parent schools, and WeChat articles; for parents of students with special family structures and prominent educational issues, the school provides more precise guidance through home visits, scheduled interviews, and small-scale parent salons. For example, for families that have long been in opposition to their children, frequently ending communication in arguments…
(3) Orderly Integration of Social Resources
Without shifting responsibility, the school actively establishes cooperative relationships with communities and health service institutions, signing cooperation intentions for home-school-community collaborative education, clarifying contact personnel and communication channels. Community police participate in school activities on anti-bullying, anti-campus violence, and anti-fraud education, emphasizing emotional management and communication methods while explaining rules; health service institutions provide consultation support regarding common physical and mental diseases among students…
7. Teacher Mental Health and Team Care
(1) Realistic Examination of Teacher Psychological Pressure
Frontline teachers bear heavy teaching tasks, complex class management, tedious administrative affairs, and high-intensity home-school communication pressures, while also facing workplace competition such as title promotion and performance evaluation, making them prone to emotional fatigue, professional burnout, and interpersonal sensitivity. The school has discovered through multiple teacher discussions and surveys that many teachers have experienced feelings of “being overwhelmed but afraid to speak up” and “feeling both compassion for students and being suffocated by reality.” If teachers’ physical and mental states remain in the “red zone” for a long time, it is difficult to maintain stability, patience, and warmth in the educational process. Therefore, the school has specifically set up a section on “Teacher Mental Health and Team Care” in the overall planning of mental health education, viewing “taking care of the guardians” as an important prerequisite for student mental health education.
(2) Institutionalization of Teacher Care Mechanisms
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(3) Implementation of Teacher Psychological Support Activities
The school encourages and supports psychological teachers to provide limited yet sincere psychological support services for teachers while balancing student work, such as setting up emotional adjustment groups for teachers, stress management salons, organizing reading sharing, outdoor walking, and interest clubs…
8. Data Management and Effect Evaluation
(1) Systematic Collection of Data
To ensure that mental health education work is traceable, assessable, and improvable, the school systematically categorizes and standardizes relevant materials. Institutional documents include various work systems, implementation plans, emergency plan texts, etc.; curriculum lesson plans include mental health education lesson plans, theme class meeting designs, group counseling plans, etc.; activity materials include plans and summaries of mental health education month activities, news articles, photo materials, etc.; individual case and counseling records include individual counseling records, home-school communication records, follow-up records, etc.; summary and evaluation include semester and annual work summaries, satisfaction survey analyses, and typical case compilations. The moral education department and psychological counseling room each set up paper file cabinets and electronic document directories, with designated personnel managing and reviewing processes, providing a basis for school decision-making while protecting student privacy.
(2) Multi-dimensional Evaluation of Work Effectiveness
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9. Future Work Ideas and Development Outlook
(1) Consolidating Direction through Concept Deepening
In the coming period, the school will continue to deepen all faculty and staff’s understanding of the importance of mental health education through training, experience exchanges, and other forms, helping everyone to “truly value it conceptually, genuinely recognize it emotionally, and genuinely integrate it into action,” preventing mental health education from being pushed into a “professional corner” for a few people, but rather making it a shared value consciousness for all teachers.
(2) Enhancing Quality through System Improvement
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(3) Forming Characteristics through School-based Innovation
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(4) Expanding Synergy through Collaborative Interaction
The school will further streamline collaborative relationships with families, communities, and relevant professional institutions, exploring tighter and more effective home-school-community collaborative models, allowing more parents to transition from “bystanders” to “participants”…
(5) Maintaining Bottom Lines and Expanding Space through Integrity and Innovation
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