I remember the first time — as a middle school student, sitting at a recycled lab desk that had become furniture for in-school suspension. I was asked to reflect on my behavior and talk about how I felt, in place of the writing assignment I would have been working on in class.

It may seem like I was getting off easy. Still, I might have written about a book I had actually read rather than disappointing myself and my teachers even more when I couldn't effectively articulate my feelings.

I'm not sure what your experience has been with journaling — a tried-and-true mental health tool.

Maybe you've felt hopeless or ineffective because one of your students has already tried journaling and it didn't work. Maybe some of your students have benefited from it. And in some situations I've witnessed — maybe some of your students acted out when it was time to journal.

The research says: write it out, get it on paper, it'll help. But for some of your students — especially the ones carrying trauma they don't know how to express, the ones that are willing to do anything for attention, good or bad, anything just to be seen — it didn't feel like journaling made a difference. It was just another SEL activity taking away from other, more pressing issues.

I want every teacher to know that I completely understand, which is why I'm writing this blog about journaling to help my educator friends in social impact use this tool to its full potential.

Here's what I've come to understand so far: journaling is often oversimplified and underimplemented — and therefore underutilized — in youth-serving settings. The effectiveness of journaling depends heavily on who is doing it, what kind they're doing, how long they do it, and under what conditions. Journaling takes many forms, each serving a different purpose. And the students who sat with a blank page and felt nothing — or were distracted and began engaging in behavior to distract them from the task's difficulty — didn't fail at journaling. They were just handed the wrong tool at the wrong time, in the wrong place, under the wrong conditions.

The details matter. Especially when you're working with students whose lives have been shaped by non-stop, inescapable adversity — students who walk into your building carrying more than their young and developing nervous systems can handle.

This can be applied to any behavior and is an even more pressing question to consider when certain SEL activities don't seem to have your students' engagement. We have to remember that the young people we love are reacting to journaling based on what they have been through — and at times, expressing feelings or emotions is not a behavior they've been taught or given a safe space to do without consequences. So we have to implement journaling with student equity in mind. Another way of saying this: implement journaling in a way that makes space for — and aligns with — the student's current emotional capacity, rather than asking them to perform a version of themselves they can't access yet.

School culture can be biased toward performance — producing, demonstrating, showing what you have learned, and rightfully so, because student outcomes matter more than ever for each classroom, each school building, each district, and the community as a whole. This reality has left many educators feeling the weight of outcome-based pressure, which leaves less time and less bandwidth to focus on anything that isn't directly academic.

But here's what the research confirms and what most educators already know in their gut: students feel this pressure indirectly. Studies show that teacher stress is, quite literally, contagious — cortisol levels in students are highest in classrooms where teachers are experiencing burnout. The climate a teacher carries becomes the climate students learn in. Which is precisely why, in a moment when educators are stretched thin and students are absorbing that tension, we have to double down — not pull back — on world-class social-emotional support. Not as an add-on. As the foundation that makes everything else possible.

Journaling should, for a moment, take students away from that environment. The purpose is to create time and space where something that's been stuck inside can begin to move.

Young people move through a school building absorbing moment after moment without ever being given a chance to process what just happened. The neuroscience is clear — when a student's emotional brain is activated, the thinking brain goes offline. The learning that was supposed to follow never fully lands. When this happens day in and day out, our students become increasingly frustrated with learning — and the place where they spend a quarter of their waking childhood hours begins to feel like a place to survive, not to grow.

Drawn from both tried-and-true practice and emerging research. It is not exhaustive. Every student, every setting, and every community will surface moments unique to them. Consider this a starting point, not a ceiling.

But the approach has to match the student. A gratitude list handed to a student in acute emotional distress doesn't just miss them — it could confirm what they already feel: that there is nothing in their life worth being grateful for. And when it doesn't work, that student often walks away believing something is wrong with them, not with the tool.

One more thing worth naming: environment matters. If a student is asked to journal at the same desk where they struggle with math or are corrected, they may not be able to come out of fight-or-flight mode to express themselves freely. Something as simple as a change of location or posture can shift what's possible.

As most educators would agree, your job isn't to make students journal. Let's reframe it in words that align with why most educators entered this field: when you decided to become a teacher, you felt an emotional connection to young people. Journaling is another way to connect. And if implemented correctly, it can make your real job — teaching — more effective and more meaningful.

The next time you recommend journaling to a student, and it doesn't land, stay curious about why. Ask what the experience was like for them. Consider whether the approach matched what they were actually dealing with — and whether the space itself was set up for it.

The students who didn't benefit from journaling aren't the wrong students. They just haven't been led to the ideal combination of who is doing it, what kind they're doing, how long they do it, and under what conditions. Dr. Perry's work reminds us that behavior always makes sense when you understand the context behind it. The student who resisted journaling was probably protecting themselves from something real. Brené Brown might refer to that as armor. Our role isn't to remove it entirely — but to provide something valuable enough that it feels worth letting go of.

Adam Grant has written about the in-between state many people live in — not depressed, not thriving, but somewhere in the foggy middle he calls languishing. Many of your students are living in that space. They're showing up. They're functioning. But they're not fully present, not fully themselves. The right journaling practice won't fix that. But it can begin to name it and release the emotions. And naming something, as Grant himself would say, is often the first step toward moving through it.

The reimagined social-emotional support of the Green Light to Be Great™ Framework helps educators support students like never before. In a world where students are learning who they are and trying to figure out whether the space is safe, being the adult who helps them find a tool that actually works for them gives them the green light to be great.