Mental Health Curriculum Standards

my country's current mental health curriculum standards are essentially based on the "Mental Health Education Guidance Outline for Primary and Secondary Schools" revised in 2012 and the "Mental Health Education Guidance Outline for College Students" issued in 2018 as the core framework. Growth goals are set for each academic period, and teaching content is not mandatory. Practical guidelines that allow front-line educators to flexibly adjust based on school conditions and academic conditions are not a set of rigid national unified teaching templates.

Last month, I went to a teaching and research activity in a district in Shanghai and listened to three psychology classes at different school levels in one morning: In the second-grade elementary school class, the teacher held a stack of cards with expressions of crying, laughing, feeling wronged, and angry, and asked the children to post their most impressive emotions from the previous week on the blackboard. The definition of the word "emotion" was not even mentioned in the entire class.； The class in the third grade of junior high school next door was talking about "how to talk well to parents who are pushing for grades." There was also a live broadcast class at a vocational school in the outer suburbs. The teacher led the students to practice "how to calm down when being criticized by the leader of the internship unit." The content of the three lessons is not comparable, but when the teaching and research team leader commented, he said that these three lessons were good lessons that fully met the requirements of the curriculum standards.

Some people may not believe this. The industry has been arguing for almost ten years about whether mental health curriculum standards should be unified. Those who hold the unification theory are mostly scholars who study mental health education in colleges and universities. The reason is very practical: now nearly 40% of primary and secondary schools across the country do not yet have full-time psychology teachers. In many schools, psychology classes are either taught concurrently by the head teacher, or are simply taken up by the main subject. Even if they are offered, there are not many. A young teacher has turned his psychology class into an ideological and moral class. Last year I came across the news that a psychology teacher at a school said to his students, "Depression is caused by too much idleness and overthinking. Just run two more laps and it will be better." If there is no unified content red line, there is no way to ban this kind of misleading students.

But from the perspective of a front-line psychology teacher, this is completely different. I know a girl who works as a psychology teacher at a school for migrant children in the Pearl River Delta. 80% of the students in their school are children of migrant workers. Some have to change schools once a semester, and some can only see their parents once a year. If you follow the curriculum template of key schools in first-tier cities and talk about "How to deal with anxiety about entering a prestigious school"" "How to reasonably arrange time for extracurricular interest classes", students sitting below will only feel that you are standing and talking without backache. The content they need most is "how to express your inner feelings during a video chat with your parents whom you haven't seen for a long time" and "what to do if you transfer to a new school and are excluded by new classmates". It is impossible for these contents to be written in the unified national curriculum standards.

In fact, if you look through the two programmatic documents, you will find that what is stuck in the curriculum standards is never the specific teaching content, but three core directions that cannot be deviated: students are not required to memorize what is emotional granularity and what is ABC rational emotional therapy. As long as they can recognize their own current feelings and know that "I am not feeling happy now because I am small-minded, but because I am really wronged", they have met the standard.； You cannot engage in moral kidnapping, and you are not allowed to say "You can't be angry" or "You must always be positive and optimistic." If you are sad, cry, or find an appropriate channel to vent when you are angry. As long as you do not harm yourself or others, it is right. ； We should also give priority to covering common growth pain points. In primary school, we focus on habit formation and emotion recognition. In junior high school, we focus on adolescent confusion and interpersonal relationships. In high school, we focus on career planning and stress regulation. In college, we focus on the meaning of life and social adaptation. The general direction is right. How to explain it specifically depends on the teacher.

Two years ago, I helped a vocational school in my hometown adjust the course standards for psychology courses. They used to copy the template of ordinary high schools, and the course selection rate was only 30% after one semester. The students all said, "What they teach has nothing to do with me." Later, we changed half of the content and added "How to deal with the intern masters" "How to relieve interview stress" and "How to adjust your mentality after being scolded by a client". In the second semester, the course selection rate increased to 92%. Some students went to the psychology teacher to tell them that they used the breathing method they learned in class when they were scolded in the last internship. They really didn't quarrel with the teacher and learned something.

Oh, by the way, many people still have a misunderstanding. They think that the mental health curriculum standards are set for psychology teachers and have nothing to do with other teachers. Last year, a junior high school math teacher complained to me, saying that there was a child in her class who failed the math test and was squatting in the corridor crying. She went up to comfort her and said, "It's okay. This time the test was difficult, and everyone did not do well in the test." However, the school's psychology teacher said that her comfort was wrong and that she did not empathize with the child's feelings. She was particularly aggrieved and said that I am not a psychology major. In fact, it has been clearly stated in the curriculum standards that mental health education should be integrated into the daily teaching of all subjects. This does not mean that every teacher should become a psychological counselor. Instead, when you answer a wrong question, don't scold "Why are you so stupid?" Instead, replace it with "The wrong question this time happened to be a knowledge point you did not master. We will just make up for it." When you see a child's mood is not right, ask more "Have you been troubled by anything recently?" This already meets the requirements of the curriculum standard.

To be honest, many schools' curriculum standards are still prepared for inspection. They either copy a set of templates from the Internet and store them in the folder of the Academic Affairs Office, or they turn psychology classes into exam classes and ask students to memorize psychology concepts for the final exam. This completely deviates from the original intention of setting the curriculum standards. In the final analysis, mental health curriculum standards are never a yardstick used to evaluate whether teachers teach according to regulations, but a bottom line - whether what you teach really captures the emotions of the children sitting in the classroom, and whether it really helps them solve some real confusions. As long as this is achieved, whether you use cards, games or chat to teach, it is a good psychological class.