#blog: From Meltdown to Understanding: Six Ways to Support Students in the Moment
| By Kathryn Kennedy |
Originally published with Gale.
Whether you’re in the midst of the hustle and bustle of the school year or just starting, summer may feel like a distant memory and December break far away. You may also be supporting students who need additional help. They may be disengaged, consistently melting down, or exhibiting anger or some other overwhelming emotion. Just like us, our students are human beings and experience all things. Oftentimes, they don’t have the tools to work through what they’re experiencing. While not an exhaustive list, here are six ways to support students in the moment.
1. Understand the why and start with compassion and empathy.1
Taking the time to understand the why behind the behavior is vitally important when working with a student (or anyone) who is feeling overwhelmed. If possible, provide some space for your other students to engage in activity while you take time with the student who needs support. Many times, the student wants someone to listen. Other times, they just want space to decompress and let the overwhelm come out in some way. Show compassion for the student as well as yourself as you create a supportive space for your student. Practice empathy by actively listening, withholding judgment, asking open-ended questions, and exhibiting empathic body language. A great resource to support educators with supporting students is Dr. Mona Delahooke’s Beyond Behaviors: Using Brain Science and Compassion to Understand and Solve Children’s Behavioral Challenges.
2. Create a safe space.2
Sometimes students who are overwhelmed just need some space to work through and/or decompress from what they’re feeling or experiencing. To support them as they are doing that, we can create a small space within our room. If possible, this space can include comfortable chairs or pillows, paper and markers to draw on, fidget toys, calming music, and other supports that can help a student calm themselves and feel safe. You can encourage your students to go to the safe space as they need to, emboldening them to support themselves by listening to their mind and body.
3. Encourage pendulation.3
Pendulation is the act of moving toward something as you feel safe to do so, and moving away from it as you feel overwhelmed. In pendulation, there’s an intentional check-in to see how the mind, body, and the nervous system specifically, are feeling—when moving toward, we feel okay to expand; when moving away, we acknowledge the need for bolstering ourselves before choosing to move toward again. The art of pendulation is a way to expand the nervous system’s capacity as well as contract it as needed. Sharing this practice with your students gives them another tool to use as they feel a sense of overwhelm. In the moment, if your student would like some space to process, invite them to go to the safe space and come back to talk when they’re ready.
4. Practice daily mind-body check-ins.4
Throughout the day, engage your students in regular mind-body check-ins. These intentional pauses can support the nervous system in not only self-regulation but co-regulation processes. During these mind-body check-ins, encourage students to notice what’s happening in their minds and bodies without judgment. This act of slowing down and noticing can also be a welcome pause for you as well. Check-ins will then become a go-to strategy that your students can use at any time when they start to feel out of sorts, especially when they feel too much too fast too soon. In the moment of overwhelm, support self- and co-regulation with practices from these mind-body check-ins.
5. Promote resourcing.5
In the moment a student is feeling overwhelmed, you can support them by inviting them to think of things that are good, such as a new dog they just adopted or a favorite activity they enjoy doing at recess. By inviting students to think of things that are good or safe, we provide them with another opportunity to support themselves in calming the nervous system until they’re ready to work through what they are experiencing that brought them into the space of overwhelm.
6. Implement joyful moments, play, and acts of kindness.6,7
Using joyful moments, play, and acts of kindness can be another option for promoting resourcing. While it might not help in the moment, you can create reflection opportunities for your students that include joyful moments. Ask them to share a time when they felt joy in their day or over the weekend. Remind them that they can always revisit those moments of joy when things feel overwhelming. You can also implement an activity that focuses on students engaging in acts of kindness. This can be at the classroom level and/or at the school level so that it promotes a culture of kindness and offers another opportunity for co-regulation.
There are many more examples of strategies for supporting students in the moment at Greater Good in Education and Momentous Institute. Continue to meet students where they are and practice understanding the why behind their behaviors.
Neff, K. (2015). Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. New York, NY: William Morrow Paperbacks.
Levine, P. (1997). Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
Levine, P. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.
Wellness Library. Wellness for Educators.
Levine, P. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.
The Science of Kindness. Random Acts of Kindness Foundation. https://www.randomactsofkindness.org/the-science-of-kindness
Meet the Author
Kathryn Kennedy has cultivated her two primary passions for 20+ years. She serves as founder and executive director of Wellness for Educators and is the founder and principal consultant of Consult4Ed Group. Her recent publication, The Mind-Body Connection for Educators: Intentional Movement for Wellness, is the first in a four-part book series.
#blog: Building the Bridge through Courageous Conversations: An Interview with Shomari Jones and Paul Sutton
by Shomari Jones, Bellevue School District, and Paul Sutton, Pacific Lutheran University
Cross post from the NGLC blog.
Educational equity leaders (and podcast hosts) Shomari Jones and Paul Sutton examine courageous conversations, what they are, why they are important, and how to have them.
Could you introduce yourselves?
Shomari: Sure! I'm Shomari Jones. I am the director of equity and strategic engagement for the Bellevue School District [Washington].
Paul: I'm Paul Sutton. I'm associate professor of education at Pacific Lutheran University [Washington].
How did you meet and start working with each other?
Paul: I've been working with Shomari for several years now. We work on various projects together, but mostly, the thing that we do together is this podcast, this little project that we started. Coming out of COVID, we started having conversations with each other just about stuff that we are noticing and just issues that were surfacing, and so we decided to start recording it. That turned into this podcast that we have called Coffee with a Little Bit of Cream, which is Shomari and I talking about all things related to equity and education; we bring on guests, and it's fun.
Could you talk about your work around engaging in courageous conversations? What are they?
Shomari: Courageous conversations are opportunities for us to engage with each other, seeking opportunities and ways to learn and grow within ourselves and within relation to one another. We start with this compass.
Credit: Creative Conversations about Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools and Beyond by Glenn E. Singleton
The compass in and of itself is just a tool that we utilize to express that sometimes when we come to the table, we're coming to the table from a different space than the person who we may be engaging with. And we really boiled this down to four spaces in which you traditionally come from. You don't have to only come from one specific space. You can have a couple of different spaces that you react to immediately. But most often we gravitate to one. So for example, I tend—specifically, when engaging in conversations that are complicated—I tend to show up a lot of times in my emotional space. After some practicing, Paul, I’m actually seeing that I no longer hardcore die in the emotional space. It's interesting to see how I've progressed through my continual practice. Instead of landing in emotions, we want to evaluate and assess where you are in each one of these categories so that you can be centered. Because centered is a way that we will most achieve opportunities to build bridges and build relationships with other individuals.
And so just looking around the compass, oftentimes we either fall into the feeling or the emotional quadrant, the believing or the moral quadrant, the thinking or the intellectual quadrant, and the acting or the relational quadrant. And there's nothing wrong with any of them. We want you to experience all of them, but just note this example from my personal experience:
I was in conflict with the community in which I serve around building a body of work, specifically equity, that I thought was really important to the success of our students. This particular part of the community was not in agreement with what my beliefs are. They were operating from and coming to the conversation in their feelings quadrant. I was operating from and coming to the conversation in my head or in my thinking/intellectual quadrant. And when we engaged in discussion, we were not seeing eye-to-eye. We were planes crossing in the air, without having any opportunity to build relationships or build bridges.
So, what would have been best served for me is to maybe show up in my thinking and take time to think about my beliefs a little bit, then explore my emotional quadrant, and then proceed to my action quadrant. Because if I’m seeking to transform someone else's belief, I need to meet them where they are.
Paul: Courageous conversations really revolve around coming to the table with people who think differently than you, revealing needs, shining light on fears, identifying preconceived beliefs or understandings, and spending time building a pathway to better comprehend each other’s perspectives, creating an atmosphere of patient listening that blends the elements of mercy and truth. I really want to know where you're coming from and why you're coming from there as much as I want you to know where I'm coming from and why I'm coming from there.
The goals of courageous conversations are to:
Gain wisdom to see from a bigger perspective.
Gain understanding that will help establish truth in relationships.
Build bonds and bridges, and a lot of times, cross-sectional with individuals who may not come to the table believing what we believe.
Ultimately, if we continue to share or shirk our responsibility to involve all different perspectives and all different voices, we will not be moving together.
Shomari: These conversations can sometimes be challenging, and they can sometimes be revealing and make us vulnerable, so these three guidelines kind of provide us with some rules or norms about how we can be in that space:
Stay engaged.
Be authentic by sharing honest feelings.
Maintain confidentiality.
Remember these five anchors to take care of yourself during difficult times in courageous conversations:
Quiet your mind.
Notice the sensations, the vibrations. What's going on in your body?
Accept the discomfort.
Stay present.
Safely discharge the energy that remains.
Paul: I hope that folks who are reading this just find some small part of their life to lean in and just give it a go and see what happens. Enjoy the wallowing and enjoy the awkwardness and know that every time you do that, you just get a little bit better at it.
Shomari: Yes, that's awesome, Paul. To gain wisdom to see from a bigger perspective, I involve myself in conversations with others, especially those who I don't see eye to eye with for a multitude of reasons. I was told once that I am not going to be ever capable of changing who you are. You have to change who you are. I can provide you with a perspective. I can take you on a journey alongside me. I can show you the way, but until you make the decision that you are going to be the one who changes for you, it just won't happen. And so to gain wisdom, to see from a bigger perspective—to me, [this] involves me walking and taking a journey with you to a place where we can both come to an understanding and an agreement. And I want to gain some understanding that will establish trust in the relationship; relationships are built on trust. That trust is going to allow me to continue to come back to the conversation with you.
Because of that established relationship, I can pause and not be salty [laughing]. And start off from a space of listening and then engaging, which would help to lead to a quicker bridge to the other side and to gain knowledge so that you can take the next steps, right?
I want to encourage you all who have the opportunity to read this, to reach out to us if you want to practice, to find pathways to try this and practice this at home with your loved ones or with—let's not try it on your boss first. Let's practice a couple of times before you take it off, and then suddenly, you don’t have a job anymore [laughter]. Let's practice in some spaces where you feel the least amount of negative impact as possible so that you can continue to build up that courage to engage in courageous conversations.
About the Authors
Shomari Jones is the director of equity and strategic engagement for the Bellevue School District. He is a co-host of the Coffee with a Little Bit of Cream Podcast.
Paul Sutton is an associate professor of education at Pacific Lutheran University and co-host of the Coffee with a Little Bit of Cream Podcast.
#blog: “Time does not heal all wounds…” A Call for Healing and System-Level Changes
by Dr. Kathryn Kennedy
Cross post from the NGLC Blog
“Contrary to conventional belief, time does not heal all wounds since humans convert traumatic and stressful emotional experiences into organic disease.”
–Dr. Vincent Felitti, ACEs Study, 1998
Schools that acknowledge the trauma and stress of the past two-plus years can support educators, students, and parents/caregivers to heal with three wellness and mental health strategies.
In 1998, Dr. Vincent Felitti, the director of the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study, and a team of doctors from the CDC and Kaiser Permanente published a groundbreaking research article focused on the effects of ACEs on over 17,000 participants. The study highlighted that our minds are not the only part of us affected by trauma and prolonged stress. As Dr. Bessel van der Kolk put it, The Body Keeps the Score; that is, the body stores traumatic and stressful experiences in its tissues (2014). When not worked through, these “issues in our tissues” come up later on in life.
Source: Tori Press, @revelatori, https://www.instagram.com/revelatori/
Many in the field of education want to “go back to normal,” but many educators, students, and parents/caregivers have not had the time to heal the trauma and prolonged stress they endured for almost two-and-a-half years (and, for many, even longer).
The lack of focus on healing and the importance of it are major reasons we are seeing so many mental health concerns today, not only in the field of education specifically but also in the world at large.
Back in 2020, I feared this is where we were headed.
The Trauma of Schools During the Pandemic
As someone trained in online and digital learning, when the pandemic hit, I was involved in a number of projects focused on shifting in-person learning to online learning. At the same time, I was sharing concerns about educators’, students’, and parents/caregivers’ mental health and wellbeing.
Every stakeholder in education was thrown into something they weren’t prepared for. Educators had to punch the gas pedal and couldn’t let up. It was constant “GO” mode from the start:
School leaders had to learn about remote, online, and/or hybrid/blended learning environments in order to figure out how to best lead and support their educators, students, and parents/caregivers. Some also had to shift their schools and districts into spaces that provided just-in-time and wraparound community supports.
Teachers had to learn how to teach and support their fellow teachers, students, and parents/caregivers in a remote, online, and/or hybrid/blended environment. They not only had to learn technologies that they weren’t familiar with, but they also had to learn how to use those technologies to teach and connect with students and parents/caregivers in meaningful ways. Additionally, educators were asked to provide social-emotional learning supports for students and parents/caregivers.
Students had to learn how to learn in remote, online, and hybrid/blended learning environments using technologies in ways that they weren’t used to.
Parents/caregivers had to support their children as they learned in remote, online, and hybrid/blended learning environments.
Everyone did the best they could during all of this while the undercurrent of the pandemic, and the plethora of reverberations from it, raged on. But the education system was continuously on shaky, unsafe ground for over two years.
And now, as if that wasn’t enough, the same stakeholders who desperately need time to heal are in another “GO”-mode situation, being shamed by continuous conversations focused on “learning loss” and “learning gaps.” A recent Rand report found that pandemic learning loss is the top job-related stressor for educators (Steiner et al. 2022).
Source: Rand Corp. via The 74
In 2021, during one of the book studies Wellness for Educators hosted with educational leaders in Alabama, we heard from a number of the leaders about how they were feeling, and one of the educators stated so poignantly:
I wish everyone understood that educators are human beings also. We have the same struggles as everyone else and are susceptible to all that goes along with being human. We carry the weight of every child, faculty, and staff member in addition to what we carry ourselves. Kids are definitely first, but we as educators do matter and we aren’t expendable.
–School Leader in Alabama
Given the situation we are in now, we cannot underestimate the effects of trauma and prolonged stress. There will continue to be consequences if we do not take the time to heal.
The push to go back to normal as quickly as possible, and avoiding talking about topics like “trauma,” “social-emotional learning,” and “mental health” anymore is sending a message that what we experienced was not traumatic or stressful. But with many educators heading for the exits of the field, the system really has no choice but to heed the warning signs.
Dr. Peter Levine, author of Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, explains:
Trauma has become so commonplace that most people don't even recognize its presence. It affects everyone. Each of us has had a traumatic experience at some point in our lives, regardless of whether it left us with an obvious case of post-traumatic stress…Because trauma symptoms can remain hidden for years after a triggering event, some of us who have been traumatized are not yet symptomatic…In our culture there is a lack of tolerance for the emotional vulnerability that traumatized people experience. Little time is allotted for the working through of emotional events. We are routinely pressured into adjusting too quickly in the aftermath of an overwhelming situation. Denial is so common in our culture that it has become a cliché.
3 Educator Wellness and Mental Health Strategies
It was in late 2021 that I heard some educators start to acknowledge that what they experienced was traumatic and stressful. Despite that, some schools will continue to ignore the need for healing, but those who acknowledge it can use the following guidance to support educators, students, and parents/caregivers.
1. Acknowledge educator wellness is not an individual effort, and affect system-level changes.
More than anything, the field needs to acknowledge that educator wellness is not an individual effort; it’s a system-level issue. As one of my teachers, Dr. Albert Wong, a somatic psychotherapist, said during one of my certificate programs, “Challenges within communities or systems need interventions at the level of communities or systems.” Viac and Fraser (2020) emphasized many factors that contribute to educator wellbeing in their OECD white paper. Some examples include large class sizes, low pay, and initiative overload. In addition to these, educators also need to feel heard, respected, valued, and have room to be creative, among other things. Also, issues such as racism, gender identity discrimination, misogyny, and gun violence also need to be acknowledged as issues that factor into educator wellness, as they show up at the system level as well. These issues are complex, and won’t be solved overnight, but even small steps to change these conditions can go far for educator wellness.
2. Acknowledge that when we don’t take the time to heal, it affects our ability to learn.
When we’ve experienced trauma and prolonged stress and do not take time to heal, our learning processes are affected. Specifically, the amygdala activates, and the hippocampus shuts down. The hippocampus is crucial to learning, memory encoding, and memory consolidation. As van der Kolk shared, the trauma and prolonged stress that we do not work through has the ability to affect our physical bodies but it also changes our brain and our nervous system so that we experience our lives in different ways. Schools can consider taking some tasks off of educators’ plates to provide them time they can spend in collective healing with other educators as well as time that they can take individually to refuel on their own. As one of Wellness for Educators’ former Board members, Dr. Cathy Cavanaugh, shared, “The ripples of our own healing can support the healing of others. Educators are helpers by nature. Sometimes motivation to care for oneself comes from the opportunity to help others.” Some schools and districts are partnering with organizations that can provide just-in-time therapy and coaching to support educators’ mental health and wellness. Additionally, some schools and districts are collaborating with mind-body practitioners to provide healing opportunities through practices such as play, Qigong, yoga, art, etc.
3. Emphasize that it takes a collection of tools to heal trauma and prolonged stress; provide opportunities to engage with those tools.
In his 2014 book, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, van der Kolk explains that cognitive-based therapy, such as talk therapy, alone cannot be the only method to support healing from trauma and prolonged stress, especially because the body also “keeps the score.” Mind-body education and practices, such as yoga, breathwork, art, music, dance, meditation, Qigong, and more can be used to release the “issues in our tissues.” As one of The Trauma Foundation’s videos conveys, “Many of the activities that we intuitively know make us feel better—like spending time in nature, practicing yoga, dancing, helping others, and more—can help the autonomic nervous system become more regulated and resistant” (7:20).
While mind-body practices can help educators, students, and parents/caregivers heal trauma and prolonged stress, there is a critical need for schools and districts to make intentional changes at the system level. If system-level changes aren’t made and opportunities to heal are not provided, we’ll continue to see resignations, teacher shortages, retention difficulty, burnout, secondary traumatic stress, post traumatic stress disorder, behavioral concerns, learning loss, learning gaps, and more.