Gratitude in Advisory

We all know what gratitude is.  Right?  Hopefully you do.  Anyway, most people are generally aware of gratitude.  In the first few advisory sessions for the whole school, which were dedicated to gratitude, students at MS447 learned more about what gratitude is, what it does, and how they can practice it.  Students learned that it is scientifically proven that practicing gratitude will make you happier.  Students started to keep gratitude journals, where you record what you’re grateful for and sharing that with their packs.

Chrissy Vissa and Katherine Schrup are the masterminds behind our incredibly meaningful and important advisory sessions.  Ms. Vissa said that they had decided to start advisory this year with gratitude because, “We felt that especially in this year it was so important to express gratitude.”  

Ms. Schrup added, “Gratitude is always important but even more recently because we’re surrounded by a lot of negativity and it helps to reframe our thoughts about what’s good and positive.”  She also said that this year there are “so many negative impacts hitting us at every angle.”

They talked about how they came up with the idea to have students talk about gratitude in advisory.  They had the idea when Ms. Schrup and her friend started to text each other the things they were grateful for every morning.  

Ms. Schrup said, “It helped to frame my day in a more positive way and it’s helped me to think, ok here’s what I’m grateful for, it made me focus on things that I was grateful for and not the chaos that was happening.”  Ms. Schrup also referred to it as “a way to check in with myself.”  Since it was helping Ms. Schrup be more positive and happy they decided to do it with the students.

Ms. Vissa also said that they came up with the idea because, “I think that when Covid hit us hard last year we started thinking about how we could support our students in an easy and manageable way and what we could do to help students and staff with mental well being.  What could be something simple and valuable.”

Ms. Vissa talked about how gratitude can cause you to really appreciate all the little things in life.  You notice things like the beauty of nature, leaves changing etc and you really start to be aware of things.  

Ms. Vissa said, “I truly believe that the daily practice (of gratitude) can change your mindset.”