Wearing the monitors, students see their heart rate and – perhaps more impactfully for the young students – the heart rate zone as indicated by color.
- Blue indicates a resting heart rate or a calm emotional state
- Yellow indicates a moderate heart rate or emotions ranging from nervousness to excitement
- Red indicates a vigorous heart rate or emotions ranging from elation to anxiety
With heart rate as a leading biomarker indicating a change in emotional state, students learn that when their heart rate monitor’s color doesn’t match their activity level, they may be at risk for an emotional episode. In the LPS program, that meant referring to strategies that counselors taught from their In Focus curriculum.
The program Bailey helped launch at East Elementary School quickly proved its worth. After the NBC Today Show featured the program, district officials expanded the program to all of the district’s elementary schools. East Elementary Principal Kelly Card saw the impact after just a few sessions.
“I was able to watch a student in week one who was having an emotional moment where he was struggling,” Card said. “He was upset about things and he was able to look at the number on his monitor and incorporate some of the breathing exercises we had been learning about. He sat and watched the number on his monitor go down and get into his normal range, which was so cool to see….especially for this particular student.”
Giving Students Easy-to-Follow Feedback
What schools like about the IHT heart rate monitor is the easy-to-understand feedback. With many schools struggling to add counselors and/or specialists tasked with focusing on individual students who need help managing their emotions, the monitors provide an extra level of student support.
In Colorado Springs, Colo., Monroe Elementary School counselor Maddie Francis runs a program for 3rd graders who struggle with emotional self-regulation. Francis teaches calming strategies based on Zones of Regulation. The goal, she says, is for students to stay in the blue zone. They wear IHT heart rate monitors throughout the day and recognize when their feelings move out of the blue zone. Francis can’t be with each student throughout the day, but her colleagues tell her the program is working.
“Classroom teachers are sharing that kids are just more aware of themselves and aware of their bodies, which is making a huge difference for them on a behavioral and a disciplinary level,” Francis said. “We’re seeing a huge decrease in calls for support and things like that. The teachers are really happy with the progress the students are making.”
Students even take the lead in letting their teachers know when they need to take a moment to regain control of their emotions.
“I have students who use the monitor as a way to communicate with their teacher,” Francis said. “One told me that he just points to his monitor and the teacher understands the student is asking for a break to calm himself down.”
Using Heart Rate Reports to Reinforce Feelings and ‘See’ Emotions
A Braham Elementary student uses a hoberman sphere while wearing a heart rate monitor to see how breathing impacts heart rate.
Braham (Minn.) Area Schools social worker Joelle Klemz struggled for years to figure out how to support all of her K-6 students when she learned about the IHT heart rate monitors.
“This is a pretty amazing tool,” Klemz, the social worker at Braham (Minn.) Area Schools, said. “I've wanted to be able to see every student in the school for 23 years and I didn’t know how to do that. Well, now I’m doing that.”
Klemz spends a week with each class on her campus. She teaches a number of stress-relieving strategies ranging from working with Hoberman spheres to Navy Seals box breathing. Then she introduces the heart rate monitors, which she says puts each student in charge of their own science experiment.
“The third graders don’t always know if they are hyper because they’re excited or because they are anxious,” Klemz said. “This gives you a chance to learn that about yourself. So I tell them they are scientists this week and you’re studying yourself. You get to see how different things feel.”
Klemz’s students wear the monitors all day and when they return them at day’s end, they automatically receive an email that includes a graph of their heart rate throughout the day. Klemz reviews the graph with each and they talk about what they see, specifically when heart rate spikes into the yellow or red zones.
One student saw where her heart rate spiked in the middle of the day and explained it to Klemz.
“One girl, I think she was either fifth or sixth grade, was spiked up out of nowhere into the high yellow, low red,” Klemz recalled. “I just kind of looked (at the graph) and wondered what that was.
“And she says, ‘oh, I know! That was a hard test and I wanted to do well,’” Klemz said. “Then she turns to me and asks, ‘so, is that what stress looks like?’”
Students Able to Lead Their Own Self-Regulation
Bremen High School District 228 (Ill.) PE Supervisor Terri Schrishuhn saw students wearing the heart rate monitors recognize when they’d been triggered. On her own, a student went to the cafeteria, had an interaction that didn’t go as planned and upon returning to class immediately asked to see her heart rate graph.
“She recognized that the emotionality of the situation would cause a spike in her graph,” Schrishuhn said. “I think that’s the true testament to (using the heart rate monitors this way). The student understood that when she gets mad, her heart rate goes up.”
Schrishuhn emphasized that neither she nor any of her teaching team saw what happened to cause the student’s spike. With the student wearing a heart rate monitor, she didn’t need to see it.
“That showed us that the kids are learning, and that’s what you’re looking for,” Schrishuhn said.
The monitors enhance and accelerate the autonomy of self-regulation in children, reducing -- while not completely eliminating -- the need to hire extra counselors as school budgets are increasingly stretched.
Boost Student Emotional Health with IHT heart rate monitors:
