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Category: For Educators

Free eBook: Tips for a better back-to-school transition

better back to school for kids

Get Your Free eBooks (you’ll stay on this page)

Or go to the landing page here.

What does this 4-page eBook deliver?

  • How to get kids to open up
  • Reduce student anxiety, build resilience, and decrease behavioral issues 
  • Set expectations 
  • Maintaining rituals and routines that inspire comfort
  • Sample anonymous student survey for teachers

Get these bonus eBooks & the crisis text poster with your Tips for Better Back-to-School Transitions download

Build Resilience
teen activator game for educators and youth leaders
Fishbowl game
Short activator games
Crisis Text Poster

We know transitions are vulnerable times for students and their mental health. That means it’s a time of heightened risk … Read more...

How a 16-year-old went from suicidal to hopeful

This is a conversation from a series of comments on this site that took place June 1-June 7 from the page, How to Write a Suicide Note. This “how-to” page is not a template for writing suicide letters but a page people land on from a google search that includes resources.

This is part of my work to use search and digital content marketing strategies to help people save their own lives. I have dozens of these pages that rank well on Google and other search engines and I have been doing this work since 2016, answering comments from … Read more...

Confessions of a stressed-out teacher and what I’m doing about it

4 Tips for Managing Teacher Burnout and Stress

by Tammy Ozolins

Ms. Oz, middle school health and PE teacher

I know other educators can agree with me when I say I surely did not learn how to manage my own mental health as a teacher when I was going to college to prepare myself for education (as far as teaching virtually, and hybrid and in the pandemic). I teach Middle School and I have now been teaching for about 17 years. Last year and this year by far has been the toughest yet.

We always have had duties, but this … Read more...

Resilience, Crisis & Safety Planning Activity for Students

This is not to take the place of a suicide assessment, or professionally-developed suicide safety plan

Get the Resilience & Safety Planning Activity Download

We are calling this activity, Resilience, and Safety Planning for Students. Access to the pdf and editable PowerPoint are below. In short, this is a simple activity you do as part of a lesson that students can take with them when they meet an emotional crisis such as parental divorce, a romantic breakup, or the loss of a loved one.

It’s probably most suitable 7th grade and up.

How this works, why it works

The … Read more...

Young Adults, I have been in your shoes

By Tammy Ozolins, Middle School Teacher

It is such a cliché I know; your world feels like it is crashing down, you have no energy. You even feel like your world is getting darker and darker and all you want is to see a little glimmer of hope. Your days are long, and you are tired of it all. The walls are closing in on you and you cannot breathe.

Does this sound familiar at all?

That is exactly how I felt when I was at my lowest point of depression (I manage and cope with Bipolar Disorder-which was not … Read more...

Stand Tall Leadership Show with Anne Moss Rogers

STAND TALL LEADERSHIP SHOW | Listen Notes
Listen to the podcast

This podcast features, Anne Moss Rogers. Following her son Charles’s tragic suicide on June 5, 2015, she sold her digital marketing business to speak on the topics of mental health and suicide prevention with a focus on helping educators build a climate and culture of student wellness.

Her second book, Emotionally Naked: A Teacher’s Guide to Preventing Suicide and Recognizing Students at Risk written with co-writer Kim O’Brien, PhD, licensed clinical social worker, was published in August 2021 through Jossey Bass.

Hosted by Steve Bollar, also known as Stand TALL Steve, an educational leader … Read more...

What does Mania look like for me?

by Tammy Ozolins

In case you were not aware of what Bipolar was, the medical terminology is called manic depressive disorder. This means the person can experience mania (extreme highs) and depression (extreme lows). Now, everyone varies on the extreme, and keep in mind some may also only have manias or depressive episodes.

What do I experience? I experience mixed episodes

So, for me what happens is sometimes I will experience mania symptoms then later that same day I will experience symptoms of depression. Other times it will be one or the other.

I have mentioned before after accepting the … Read more...

What does a school counselor say to a parent who refuses to support a suicidal child?

Click here to go the Sample Script (you will stay on this page)

A school counselor in my Arizona workshop, The Emotionally Naked Truth About Student Suicide, told me she had a student in the office who shared her thoughts of suicide and when she called the parent they yelled at her and then forbade the child to speak to her.

The parents were ashamed and outraged with their child for talking about such things with a counselor.

You might default to thinking that the parents are terrible people and while they might be, it is usually a cultural … Read more...

After a suicide at a school or college. What do you do?

The term “postvention” describes an intervention initiated after a traumatic event and for the purposes of this post, the term refers specifically to an intervention following a death by suicide on a school campus. An effective response includes communication, connection, healthy grieving, commemoration, stabilization, coping skills and resilience development, as well as advocacy.

For an immediate list of to-dos in an aftermath of a suicide on a school campus, see this page.

Good postvention is good prevention

The knee-jerk reaction by schools and colleges is to cancel everything. But the opposite is recommended. Furthermore, the administration usually tries to … Read more...

A friend I met teaching online lost her son to suicide

by Julie

I can’t even imagine the heartbreak. The helplessness those left behind are feeling. The hopelessness her son felt in the final days when everything went so dark there was no turning back to find the light.

Suicide isn’t a desire to die; it’s a desire to end the pain. Too many beautiful young people have ended their lives trying to end the pain because they can’t see the light at the end of the darkness. We often wonder how they could do this with so much going for them. If only they could see themselves through our lens … Read more...

Cult of Pedagogy Podcast. Suicide Prevention: What Teachers Can Do

Listen to the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast on their website.

What Teachers are saying:

Excerpt

…..Anne Moss Rogers has focused her latest work on teachers, whom she sees as a vital link between troubled students and the professionals who can help them cope with suicidal thoughts. In her new book, Emotionally Naked: A Teacher’s Guide to Preventing Suicide and Recognizing Students at Risk, she and co-author Kimberly O’Brien give teachers the information and tools they need to help reduce suicide in young people.

“(Teachers) see millions of adolescents nationwide,” Rogers explained in our … Read more...

RFM: Help Students Grieving a Loss by Suicide

7 Important Strategies for Educators

  • August 30, 2021

In 2015, my son Charles took his own life at age twenty during an episode of major depression and withdrawal from heroin. By 2017, I had sold my business and invested myself in suicide prevention which included a focus on postvention, the period following a death by suicide. 

To better understand this kind of tragedy and its aftermath from an educator’s point of view, I interviewed several educators, including a Colorado public school teacher who had lost a student to suicide. This teacher offered a chilling account of how her students opened … Read more...

First Book for Teachers on Preventing Suicide–Just in Time for 2021 Back to School

Help save lives with this essential resource on suicide prevention in schools. Publish Date: 8/24/21

NEWS- FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 
FROM: Publisher Jossey-Bass (a Wiley publishing brand) and Emotionally Naked LLC 
CONTACT: Anne Moss Rogers

emotionally naked a teachers guide to preventing suicide and recognizing students at risk
Publisher: Jossey-Bass; A Wiley Publishing brand
Publish Date: August 24, 2021
Paperback: 288 pages
ISBN-10: 1119758300, ISBN-13: 978-1119758303
$29.95, Book Page

Emotionally Naked: A Teacher’s Guide to Preventing Suicide and Recognizing Students at Risk by Anne Moss Rogers & Kimberly O’Brien, PhD, LICSW. Publishes August 24, 2021, through Jossey-Bass, a Wiley Publishing Brand, $29.95

Although real-time data for suicide risk is scant, we know ER … Read more...

Chapters 11 and 12 of the teacher’s guide to preventing suicide book

Password protected page for those who have purchased the book, Emotionally Naked: A Teacher’s Guide to Preventing Suicide and Recognizing Students at Risk by Anne Moss Rogers and Kim O’Brien.

To download the pdf versions of the last two chapters (11 & 12) with clickable links to the resources mentioned in the book and printable pages of the worksheets, scripts, activities, surveys, and quizzes.

  1. Enter the password you see on page XXI of the book.
  2. Once you enter the password below, you will see a short form where you enter your first name and email address.
  3. Then the link
… Read more...

How teachers can support grieving students (tips specific to suicide)

Many of these tips are specific to suicide, however, most of them will work for any grief event.

Many schools will react to a death or suicide loss by bringing in outside counselors. And while that’s with the best intentions, the truth is, students are going to want to talk to you, the person they know, and not a stranger. Being together and connecting is an important part of the grieving process and school is one place, if not the only place, where this can happen consistently over a period of time.

The goal is not to make teachers grief … Read more...