When education comes full circle to return to the overall quality and healthy growth of students, classroom teachers’ strategies for leading and nurturing students need to be more adapted to the need for full balance. Achievement rates are of course very important, but the core of nurturing people is still to cultivate more people with sound personality and excellent moral character for society. Mental health is a key part of the moral education level in schools, and class teachers, as the leaders of students in their classes, have the important task of being mentors and friends. Using the special nature of their identity, they become mentors in the hearts of students and help them to grow up. Therefore, the ability to guide mental health is as important as the ability to lead a class, which is a key skill for teachers today.
I. A mentor who is also a teacher and a friend.
In all types of primary and secondary schools, a teacher’s moral qualities are an integral part of his or her core competencies. A teacher with a high level of quality must be mentally healthy and know how to use different psychological techniques to help with teaching. In other words, there are many scenarios in which students subconsciously see their teachers as their psychologists and are eager to talk and communicate.
It is relatively common for many teachers or class teachers, in their daily communication, to fail to identify students’ distress in a timely manner, causing them to become bored and anxious. Insufficient experience and competence in this area makes it difficult to eliminate the negative psychology generated by students, thus distancing the hearts of teachers and students. Usually, every student has a certain psychological dependency in their formative years and expects more from their teachers than just the transmission of knowledge.
II. Student-centred, collaborative education.
There are many ways for classroom teachers to do a good job of building students’ mental health. Collaborative guidance with other subject teachers and co-parenting work with parents are all necessary. In particular, many parents have not yet reached a real awakening since the introduction of the Family Promotion Act, and many of them still have only a superficial understanding of family education. The school, as the main forum for education, is obliged and equipped to educate parents. From the perspective of home-school collaboration, a student’s daily performance reflects the full extent of his or her mental health and makes it easier for teachers and parents to reach a consensus on parenting.
For example, when a subject teacher gives feedback at a daily work meeting that a student has always dozed off in class recently and appeared very tired, he or she would like the class teacher to pay prompt attention to this. Through communication between the class teacher and the parents, we understand that this student always loves to read martial arts novels recently, and may read them quietly in the middle of the night for a long time before falling asleep in class. The class teacher asked the parents to persuade him, and at the same time talked to the student carefully without criticising him directly, telling him that martial arts novels are as addictive as games and can easily affect his studies, and giving him some examples. Gradually, the student changed this habit, which was due to the patient communication between the class teacher and parents.
Mental health guidance focuses on the soundness of the student’s personality and the balanced development of mind and body. Much of the work is not related to academics on the surface, but essentially determines the development of good habits and a healthy mindset in students, which can be very helpful for grades. As a philosophical saying once said, it is largely the inner qualities that determine whether a person is good or not. Mental health allows one to have good emotions and energy, which in turn promotes the accomplishment of goals.
