Navigating Uncharted Waters

NAVIGATING UNCHARTED WATERS Landmark’s Counseling Department Guided Students During the Shift to Remote Learning By Laura Polvinen

In March 2020, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health hosted a series of virtual sessions in the wake of COVID-19. One session focused on dealing with stress during this time. Karmel Choi, a research fellow, shared that stress has four main triggers: novelty, threat, unpredictability, and lack of control. As luck would have it, this pandemic cues each of those stress triggers. By now, we’ve lived with this stress for several months and know it can take a toll.

As counselors at Landmark, hearing about and dealing with stress is our forte. When we’re not living in a pandemic, students start at Landmark often feeling the four stress triggers: the experience is novel and can feel threatening, students don’t know what to expect, and they feel that they don’t have control of the situation. Yet, usually within a few weeks, students see they are safe, that the Landmark model caters to their learning style, and that we have the road map for their success.

But during a pandemic, students sometimes show up on a Google Meet with faces of grief, exhaustion, and worry, given how much all of our lives have changed. One student said early on when we met, “This is the worst…but there’s nothing I can do about it, but live it.”

Whether in a pandemic or not, the overarching goal of counseling at Landmark is to service students and families (in collaboration with teachers and advisors) to ensure each student is supported holistically, and therefore more able to take advantage of the academic opportunity at the school. During this unprecedented time, we utilized the Google Meet platform to connect with students and see them face-to-face, to bear witness to their feelings, to share in their successes and struggles, and as that student mentioned, to “live it” with them.

During the final quarter of the school year we held small student groups to foster social connection and community, talked with parents about how to help their kids, and shared weekly resources. These aspects will be an integral part of fall programming, as we continue to navigate pandemicaffected life. We always feel as though counseling is an integral part of the Landmark model, but the remote learning environment has demonstrated how essential counseling support is for many during this time. No matter the setting for fall 2020, counselors will be present, making sure our students can “live it” as successfully as possible, while they navigate the stressors we all feel during this uncertain and future-altering time.