Handy coping tips: Discussion or group project

[sue_frantz]

The good folks at Google have been working from home since March/April 2020. Their “Supporting Employee Mental Health and Well-being” document has a number of handy tips. It opens with this statement. “We are all learning how to cope with a global crisis. Each day, there is a new challenge that we may encounter. Here are a few things that Google is doing to help our people take care of their mental health during these difficult and uncertain times.”

While covering Stress and Coping in your Intro Psych course, consider this discussion topic.

Discussion

Read Google’s “Supporting Employee Mental Health and Well-being” document.

Part A. Identify two suggestions in the document that are supported by research that you read about in your textbook. Quote the relevant passages from your textbook.

Part B. Identify at least one coping strategy that you read about in your textbook that is not in Google’s “Supporting Employee Mental Health and Well-being” document. If you were revising this document, write a paragraph that would be an appropriate addition.

Alternatively, you could turn this into a group project with the goal of creating a “Supporting [Your Institution’s] Mental Health and Well-being” document that would be distributed to the students and employees of your institution. Your students would be using what they learn in your Intro Psych class in a real-world, impactful way.

Divide your students into groups of three to five, and give them these instructions.

Group Project

Read Google’s “Supporting Employee Mental Health and Well-being” document. The goal of this group project is to create a similar document for [your institutions’] students and employees.

While Google’s document has five categories, you may choose to use or not use any or all of these categories.

Use what you learned in our Stress and Coping chapter to create your recommendations. Each recommendation needs to be evidence-based. Include the reference to at least one peer-reviewed journal for each recommendation. The last page of your document will be a “Works Cited” page.

Once each group has submitted their “Supporting [your institution’s] Mental Health and Well-being” document, a representative from each group will meet to take the best recommendations from each group’s document to create a final set of recommendations and make final edits, as needed. This final document will be distributed institution-wide.