Embedding Mental Health Interventions in Career and Technical Education with Michele Morgan
In this conversation, occupational therapist Michele Morgan shares how she and her colleagues implemented several mental health interventions within her school district's career and technical education (CTE) program. Using evidence-based approaches they developed a relationship-focused, student-centered curriculum model that promotes safety and wellness.
This far-ranging conversations share specifics about the program and the positive outcomes for students.
Links
Other episode links
Make It Work program website we discussed in the episode
gallery of activities discussed in episode
Michele’s recent article in Chalkbeat Detroit
Transcript
Scott Lee 0:19
Greeting Greetings friends and colleagues. Welcome to the Thoughtful Teacher Podcast, the professional educators thought partner, a service of Oncourse Education Solutions. I am Scott Lee. Before I share today's conversation, I would like to highlight a milestone. This is the 50th episode of the Thoughtful Teacher Podcast, I continue to enjoy sharing conversations about making education better for all our students, and advocating for our profession as well. I would like to thank all of our previous guests, and especially thank you, the listeners, literally from around the world, for your participation and encouragement over the past three years, and I look forward to continuing our conversations for years to come. In this episode, we will continue to discuss embedding mental health programming in schools with our guest today. Michele Morgan. Michele is an occupational therapist, transition coordinator and clinical instructor serving high school students in Warren Woods Public Schools in Macomb County, Michigan. With the support of colleagues, administrators, universities, and local businesses, Michele has developed a curriculum that fuses vocational education with evidence based mental health programming. Michele's, intervention approaches have been featured nationally in OT Practice and Mother Earth News and locally by the Michigan Education Association, the Detroit News and Chalkbeat Detroit. Michele's, practices are informed by a affective neuroscience, mindfulness and compassion focused therapy, we begin our conversation, discussing the role of occupational therapy in schools, and Career and Technical Education. Welcome, Michele, to The Thoughtful Teacher Podcast.
Michele Morgan 2:28
Happy to be here. Thanks, Scott.
Scott Lee 2:31
Let's start with learning a little bit about your role and how you're connected to the career and technical education program within your district.
Michele Morgan 2:40
Sure, I'm really fortunate I work in a really unique school district here in Warren, Michigan, I'm in a general education high school that also serves as a center based program is for students with physical disabilities from 21 districts across our county. So all of those students are taken by bus to our high school. So I get the opportunity to work with students with physical impairments, also students with emotional and cognitive impairments. And then I also get to work with general education students who may not qualify for special education services, but those who have maybe fallen through the cracks. And so in most districts, there may be a social worker or a special education teacher that tackles transition, that movement from graduation into adult living, and they do in our district as well. But occupational therapists have that opportunity in our district to serve students in the role of transition. And so I think it's that role in as a transition coordinator. That's kind of allowed me to kind of peek behind the curtain of career and technical education. So I'm, you know, I'm not a certified teacher, and I'm not a vocational education teacher, but I, you know, as an OT, with an advanced degree in education, I use, you know, design and manufacturing, along with my training and mental health, as my modality. So, vocation is sort of my my intervention.
Scott Lee 4:08
Okay. You know, a lot of times, teachers don't necessarily work with occupational therapists. What's the biggest misconception about the work of OTS in schools? Or what would you like other people to know about occupational therapy in schools?
Michele Morgan 4:25
Yeah, great question. Some people may not realize that the field of occupational therapy actually has its roots in mental health. We started in the early 1900s, working with veterans with PTSD during World War One. So with our training in history, I think that occupational therapists really have the ability to bring a unique perspective to any team that's working on social emotional learning, and wellness, along with social workers and speech language pathologists and counselors, so I think we really can provide had a lot and should have a seat at the table when it comes to mental health. Occupational therapists are actually they get a lot of, we get a lot of training in deconstructing tasks, and grading them so that they are accessible to all students. And I really think it's that training that really helped me to bring complex tasks like that are found in manufacturing and InDesign to students. Because it was embedded in my training, I come to find that the struggle with most of the students I work with isn't the ability to perform complex task, it's really managing the mind during them.
Scott Lee 5:36
You started and we'll talk about the programs that you're involved in, starting in just a minute. What kind of problems did you see your students struggling with?
Michele Morgan 5:49
After students mastered the tasks in the shop, I observed several things. You know, we saw shame, anxiety, self criticism, lots and lots of anger coming bubbling up to the surface. And unresolved grief, which surprised me when I started doing some work in the alternative high school, the students there noticed that we had a large amount of recycled quartz and granite that we were able to work with. And they really wanted to make memorials, memorials for pets, they had lost or loved ones family members, it really allowed us to address trauma in that manufacturing environment and with design embedded within it. So it that was something that really surprised me, our students, they have outdated narratives, they often don't have a strong sense of what they stand for in life, they don't have personally held values. That was what was impacting, you know, the pacing, and the quality of the work, not the ability to understand the concepts and the steps needed to do the job. So the light bulb kind of went on around that time, that maybe we should combine lessons in manufacturing with neuroscience and mindfulness. We include lessons on how the brain processes emotions, and the neural basis of those emotions. And we really rely heavily on metaphors. And so I'll give you an example. We do a lot of work on the lathe and something that we make with all students, they get the opportunity to make a pen on the lathe, they turn pens. So when we're in our circle, we'll have the students hold the pen in their hand and their hand is outstretched. And we all agree that the pen doesn't fall to the ground when we have our hands outstretched and we hold our pen. And then we instruct the students to squeeze tightly as tightly as they can. And we agree that similarly, the pen doesn't fall. And so the lesson there is we can hold our thoughts tightly, or we can hold our thoughts lightly. It's our choice. But life becomes much easier to navigate when we can, you know, create a little bit of space and distance between between our thoughts.
Scott Lee 8:00
That is a terrific analogy. I like that a lot.
Michele Morgan 8:04
Thank you. Can I provide one more?
Scott Lee 8:07
Sure,
Michele Morgan 8:07
or two. So this is another one that we have is, like I mentioned earlier, we really want students to understand their values, not only to be able to name their values, but to help them guide their actions, once they're aware of them. Once you know, what you stand for, becomes easier to align your behavior to that because before you make that statement, before you mouth off, before you stomp off the job site, you can remind yourself wait a minute, you know, I value I value independence and being independent part of being independent is staying on this job and earning a living, you know, and so, if they have, if they're harness, if they're really anchored to them, and they're in, they guide their their behavior, that's what we're trying to do. And so we have a dye sublimation printer. And so we will have students come up with their values and sublimate them on a sock. And then on the bottom of the sock, they might put something like walk the walk so that they know and they could even wear this if they're struggling on the job. So they can you know, think about this before you take action and really take committed action towards your values. So that's sort of what we do.
Scott Lee 9:15
Even though people who are listening to this can't actually see it. You held up a sock, what were the values that were on that sock also because you mentioned walk the walk but what were the values?
Michele Morgan 9:29
Yes, well, these are my personally held values. So I am a client of my own interventions. And so I took I did it myself, I've gone through the program myself and mine our curiosity, independence, friendship, humor, connection, kindness and courage. And so when opportunities come up where I have an immediate reaction where I want to run and flee because I'm you know, anxious and it's an unknown, I do remind myself that I value courage and so that helps me to say As to things that I wouldn't normally do. Because if I want to live this life, and this is what matters to me, then these are the things I will do that they are congruent with my values, these decisions that I'm making.
Scott Lee 10:12
Yeah, and so every student would have their own their own sock with their own values. That's the goal home. That's great.
Michele Morgan 10:21
Yeah, this last one, I promise, because this one means a lot. So we have a, we have a microwave kiln, you know, our teachers may have very large kilns, but we're on a much tighter budget. So we find more, you know, cheaper ways to do it. And so we have a kiln that we can put in the microwave, it gets to 1200 degrees, and we are able to fuse glass. And so we take children's marbles that you can buy at any, you know, at any regular store, and we fuse them together. And the reason we take two marbles and fuse them together is that we're teaching students about something called cognitive diffusion. So we teach them that it becomes very difficult to make to separate ourselves from our thoughts if we're fused to them. And so these are things that students can wear, these are students things that get put in their pocket, it's easy to learn these concepts when you're sitting in a circle that's quiet, and we're all in this community. But it's not as easy when you are in crisis. When you're struggling on the job, it's nice to have it on yourself somehow, to remind yourself. So that's another project that we were really proud of.
Scott Lee 11:27
I saw on your I believe on your website, on your blog, something about the glass, the fusing glass was,
Michele Morgan 11:36
that's what this is, this is using the glass and using the marbles. And then we're also the other part of that lesson is that your inner child is always with you. And so this is, you know, originally it was a children's play toy. But we're older now we fuse this into something that's a little bit more adult like, but that doesn't mean that we don't carry those experiences with us and that the nervous system does not have a delete button. And so every statement that's been made, every experience is with us all along the way. So it goes along with our lessons and self compassion.
Scott Lee 12:09
We'll be sure in the Episode Notes to have a link to that that specific entry on on your blog as well.
Michele Morgan 12:16
Okay, wonderful.
Scott Lee 12:18
There were two different programs that you and your team developed. The first one was called Scratch the Surface, I believe. Can you tell us about that program and how it works?
Michele Morgan 12:31
Sure, yes, Scratch the Surface that is an after school club. And I started that sort of as an alternative to traditional discipline. And to give a little background, I know restorative practices are nationwide. In Michigan, actually, it's become very those become required here in Michigan in the round the 1990s, we had one of the toughest discipline laws in the country. And you know, we actually had 3 million students that were either suspended or expelled from our schools and the research following that found that there were really some long term consequences for those students. And, you know, a disproportionate amount of them were in minority groups, or they were students with disabilities. So, you know, starting at around 2016, this became a requirement for us to consider restorative practices, so Scratch the Surface kind of fit right in to the things that were already trending across the country. So with that in mind, we collaborated with our assistant principal, and instead of students attending, um, detention, they could attend those prescribed visits in the OT lab with us and get those sessions with us where they would get the programming that we talked about earlier, where they would get those emotional check ins. And we would go through the six core processes of developing psychological flexibility. And then we would make a project based on all of those lessons. And so what happened was, we started the club and students came, they did their prescribed visits, and then they went back to the assistant principal asking if they could continue coming. And so no one left, we really don't have people that that leave the club, that the original intent was that it would be a rotating door of people coming in and out but it didn't end up that way. And we in fact expanded the group that was at our high school over to our alternative high school. So now we have two sessions that meet for Scratch the Surface and now they have really nothing to do with detention as much as getting referrals. You know, they may be students that we're heading in that direction, but that isn't what's driving it any longer. To provide another lesson we do we teach a lot about present moment awareness that is one of our, that's one of our core processes. And so when we're back on the lathe again, going back to the pen, the pen the lathe provides so many mental health opportunities here, because think about it when you're using the gouge and you're Note taking that goes back and forth to shape the pen. If you lose contact with the present moment, a couple things can happen. You can get chatter from the wood, it can, you know, kind of hit you in the eye, or the whole blank just sort of pops off. And it's very alarming. But students are often surprised at how often they are not in the moment, even when they try, it's very tricky. The mind is not designed for it, it's meant to keep you safe. So that's part of our curriculum.
Scott Lee 15:29
A couple of episodes ago, one of the guests was Steve Van Bockern, a professor of education, and one of his student teachers, he was visiting, they had detention. And the student teacher didn't like it. And they did the same thing they create, they turned it into a restorative process. And the same thing happened with them in that students started showing that hadn't been assigned attention started showing up because it was such a meaningful experience for them. So tell us about the other, which is the Make It Work Program.
Michele Morgan 16:08
Yes, so Scratched the Surface. Of course, that's happens after school and students stay after or an hour after school. And the Make It Work Program, it follows the same curriculum, that one requires students to have a documented barrier to employment. So students in the Make It Work Program have to have either what we call in Michigan an IEP, an individualized education plan or a 504 plan. They may come with different names. But what's great about Make It Work is that students that do this program, they get paid, they get paid $14 an hour, and we're really proud of that. We were just recognized last year as a as a job site. And so it means a lot to me that the state of Michigan is recognizing that addressing vocation by itself in a bubble is not enough anymore, we have to look at the entire person. And so to have mental health programming happening right there in the moment on site at the same time fuse together. And to get in for the students to get paid to do that is is remarkable. So in order to, to participate in Make It Work, you have to have open cases with both agencies, Michigan Rehabilitation Services, and Michigan Works. And I imagine all states have their equivalent of those agencies. But there's a lot of funding, perhaps right now, especially post pandemic, to kind of support students as they're trying to transition into the workforce. So it might be something to explore further educators or transition coordinators, looking for unique ways to provide vocational programming.
Scott Lee 17:40
And again, we'll also put a link to that program on our website as well, for anybody that's interested in learning more about what make it work does specifically, another thing that I found really interesting is the way that you went about determining the evidence bases. As you were developing each of these programs. Can you share a little bit about how you did that as well? And what you found?
Michele Morgan 18:06
Yes, absolutely, I find and I've been doing this for decades, and so I find that it's very, it can be difficult to stay current on your own. And if I knew if I had to write grants, and really promote the programming, I wanted it to be evidence driven. I wanted to have facts behind me, I wanted to have, you know, really smart people who have put work into this. And I know that we have really great universities, and I thought this would be a great place to tap and start. And it was. So I reached out to ours was Eastern Michigan University here in Ypsilanti. And I reached out to the research professors there. And they were very, very open and receptive and actually offered 25 graduate students for seven solid months of research. And they said, "go ahead, give us your five questions". They provided comprehensive, systematic reviews, they provided deliverables that I could present to stakeholders if I'm trying to promote this program, in my district or beyond. And then they also provided their recommendations on how I could develop and deliver pre and post tests and things for students in my program so that I can do ongoing quality improvement along the way. And so between all of that, at the end of the seven months, they provided a full presentation of all their findings and they provided links to all of their papers. Now, this is something I couldn't I could not have done it for many reasons. I don't have the skill. I've been out of school for so long, that I don't know that I don't even know the vocabulary of how to start doing what current people are doing and research so they did that for me. And I don't have funding and I there's just I don't have time. And so there is a what a treasure to have these universities at our you know, potentially they acted as though it was put no kind of a favor for them as well, because it gave the students a community partner to work with.
Scott Lee 20:05
It's so hard a lot of times. So when you're in higher ed and research situations to find real life opportunities for students to research something that's meaningful, as well. So I'm sure it was very helpful for those students as well.
Michele Morgan 20:23
It was, Can I share what my five questions were?
Scott Lee 20:25
Oh, please.
Michele Morgan 20:26
Because in case anyone is, as is interested, you know, that I can certainly share as well, the research findings that they had, if it were of any interest, but what I was really interested in was the efficacy of using contextual behavioral science with adolescents. I wanted to know the efficacy of mindfulness interventions, and also sensory spaces, in school settings, I was interested in the role of occupational therapy in building resilience in at risk youth, the needs of students in alternative high schools, and then also the efficacy of bullet journaling, because we do incorporate that into a lot of our programming. So what a great opportunity just to have the questions that I had swirling around in my mind, and to have 25 young adults, go ahead and tackle that, for me was was phenomenal.
Scott Lee 21:13
That's great. So you've worked through how students navigate the program, and how you develop best practices. But still, I know a lot of times administrators or sometimes policymaker, oftentimes, they have pushback on anything that's new, if an administrator or school board member, or somebody would hear about it and say something like this cost too much, or offer some other kind of push back to how would you respond to, to comment like that?
Michele Morgan 21:44
Well, two ways. The first one just relies on the previous question is that I go right to my research, I go right to the evidence, it speaks for itself, it's hard to dispute, you know, what is been proven to be to be, you know, effective. And so I start with the research, and then I have my own data that I collect. I also do pre and post tests for all sessions that I that I do. And so I get feedback from students, and it's in their writing. What did you like, What didn't you like? What should we improve? So a lot of the changes we've made over the years has been right from the students. So I'm, I'm listening to them. And so I do impart that to the administrators. And then I also rely very heavily on community partners. I go well beyond the walls of my school. A lot of the materials that I work with are donated. So I mentioned the quartz in the granite memorials. I partner a lot with the kitchen and bath Industry. I get donated sink cutouts, I get donated quartz and the granite, I get anything fixtures handles, I get a lot of phone calls, that are "I don't know if you'll want this" and the answer is always "yes", we take all sorts of industrial waste, and then we find ways to incorporate it into our existing curriculum. So we'll find ways to make that tie to make that metaphor kind of come to life. And then we just kind of let the community decide, you know, what the program has, there are things that we have to purchase. And there are things that we have to sell, so that we can, you know, have money to buy what we like, but we rely heavily on donations. And then the other thing is bartering. I'm a big fan of bartering. And so if another company does not want to buy a laser cutter, I don't want to cut, you know, wood, you know, intricate shapes, we can barter. So we do have a company that works with adults with traumatic brain injuries, and their intervention is on cutting these would cut outs, well they do that work. And then at one point, we provided laser engraving services for an awards banquet that they had, it's a win win, you know, and no money has to be exchanged at all. And so just I, I talked about I live and breathe program, I talk about it every every opportunity that that arises. And so we get a lot of donations and interest that way.
Scott Lee 23:59
Tell me favorite story about a student or group of students.
Michele Morgan 24:04
This one just stands out to me because it's recent, I had a placement specialist who encountered who works with an agency, one of our agencies. And this placement specialist encountered a student who had already been through our program and had been three to four years, and he was out on the job site. And something had come up and he was struggling. And he had to have that uncomfortable conversation with his boss, and the placement specialist was there to support him. And before he even said a word the student reached into his pocket and he and he took his pen out, you know, the one that he made four years ago and he just simply said I made this, you know, and the placement specialist made a point to tell me that he thought that was profound and meaningful that this wasn't just a pen you know there. What we did around the making of this has some sort of lasting memory for him or impact that he saw. It is a point of pride of something to just reassure his employer. "Listen, I made this". So can't be all bad, you know? Oh thing I can do that, that. That's really that meant a lot to me.
Scott Lee 25:13
Oh yeah, I'm I'm sure it did. It has been great speaking with you. And there's a lot of information about specifically about the program and a recent article in Chalkbeat that you wrote, discussing this further, and we will have links to those on our website as well. Thank you so much, Michele, for joining us today on the Thoughtful Teacher Podcast.
Michele Morgan 25:37
Thank you for having me.
Scott Lee 25:40
The Thoughtful Teacher Podcast is brought to you as a service of Oncourse Education Solutions. If you would like to learn more about how we help schools and youth organizations, strengthen learning cultures and implement restorative interventions, please visit our website, www.oncoursesolutions.net. This has been episode six of the 2023 season. If you enjoy this podcast, please tell your friends and colleagues about it either in person or using social media. We also greatly appreciate positive reviews on the podcast app you use. The Thoughtful Teacher Podcast is hosted and produced by R. Scott Lee and is a copyright of Oncourse Education Solutions, LLC. We encourage diverse opinions however, opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of producer, partners, or underwriters. Guests were not compensated for appearance, nor did guest pay to appear. Episode notes links and transcripts are available at our website thoughtfulteacherpodcast.com, where you can also sign up to receive notices when new episodes are released. The music is composed and performed by Audio Coffee. Please follow me on social media, my handle on Twitter and Instagram is @drrscottlee and on Mastodon @drrscottlee@universedon.com
