#blog: How to Nurture Diverse and Inclusive Classrooms through Play
by Rebecca Horrace, Playful Insights Consulting, and Laura Dattile, PlanToys USA
Special thanks to Next Generation Learning Challenges for allowing us to cross-post this blog post :-)
By infusing play into teaching, educators can create an interactive environment where students of all ages can approach complex topics with enthusiasm, adventure, and a sense of curiosity while achieving educational goals.
By using play to explore and celebrate diversity, educators can foster a more inclusive and accepting community among students, allowing for a safe space for student-led discussions about their understanding and experiences with these complex topics. The more we embrace and celebrate our differences, the more we learn how much we truly have in common.
This article explores various play methods for educators to teach children about diversity and inclusion, providing meaningful suggestions as well as steps for educators, children, and families to make a lasting impact in their community. Additionally, real-world examples and the power of using play as a tool for navigating complex topics are discussed, promoting interactive and engaging learning experiences for students of all ages.
What is the appropriate age for kids to start learning about race? How do you recommend educators approach the subject?
Children are incredibly perceptive and notice differences in people as early as preschool, making it a wonderful time for children to start learning about race. Educators can approach this subject with playfulness by using diverse toys, books, and activities that celebrate various cultures, especially relating to children’s unique backgrounds. Natural resources and tools spur connections for children as they listen to stories, engage in lessons, and participate in activities, creating confidence and purpose in their work. It’s important to create a welcoming environment where all questions are encouraged, which will grow the conversation as educators instill the value of diversity, kindness, and empathy to foster a sense of inclusion and understanding from an early age.
Beyond conversation, what are some steps educators can take to have a real impact in their local communities, further teaching children about diversity and inclusion?
To have a real impact in local communities and further teach children about diversity and inclusion, educators can take proactive steps by ensuring children engage with peers from different racial, religious, and ability backgrounds. Attending local trips to various play spaces, such as parks, museums, and community centers where diversity is evident and normalized helps children understand and appreciate the differences within their communities. Additionally, educators can support children’s participation in activities like sports, art, and music that celebrate multiculturalism and diversity.
Educators can also inspire community engagement by motivating families to enhance their local communities through volunteering at local cultural and inclusive events. Using online resources or visiting local libraries allows educators and families to learn about upcoming events that promote diversity and inclusion throughout local neighborhoods. Educators can also send home flyers and monthly calendars with highlighted events. After various activities and events occur, educators can facilitate discussions with children, encouraging them to share their discoveries along with their most enjoyable experiences. Real-world, active engagement with community members helps children learn about and embrace the richness of diversity in a more tangible and lasting way.
What are some effective methods that educators can implement in the classroom to teach children about diversity and inclusion?
Continued incorporation of lessons and activities surrounding diversity and inclusion into a child's curriculum is key to success. Approaches should be integrated consistently and through natural means, such as storytelling and discussions. Educators can introduce children to diverse perspectives and experiences through age-appropriate books, videos, and personal stories that highlight different cultures, backgrounds, and life experiences. Following the stories, open discussions can be facilitated where children are encouraged to share their thoughts, ask questions, and express their feelings, which inspires open-ended dialogue and helps children understand the richness and value of diversity.
Collaborative learning allows children to interact with peers who may have different perspectives, experiences, and abilities. Children should have the opportunity to work with their peers as each student brings their own cultural knowledge and experience to every lesson, fostering an environment where diversity is celebrated, and inclusion is actively practiced. Educators can structure group activities to encourage empathy, communication, and cooperation among students, assisting in everyone’s unique contributions so every student feels valued and respected.
Celebrating differences is a fundamental aspect of promoting inclusion. As role models, educators play a pivotal part in modeling inclusive behavior and language for their students. Demonstrating respect for diversity in interactions and encouraging students to follow suit can be a powerful teaching tool. Educators should acknowledge and value the unique qualities and strengths of each child, emphasizing that their differences are assets to the classroom community which fosters acceptance, empathy, awareness, and the benefits of community building.
Can you share examples of play activities educators can do with their students to foster an appreciation and respect for people of different genders, races, cultures, abilities, etc.?
By using play to explore and celebrate diversity, educators can cultivate a more inclusive, accepting, and empathetic community, creating a comfortable space for student-led discussions. Play activities can be powerful tools for educators to align lessons while promoting acceptance and community throughout classrooms and schools, as students engage in fun, meaningful ways.
Here are some examples of play activities to promote appreciation and respect for diversity and inclusion:
Cultural Show-and-Tell: Encourage students to bring in an item, recipe, or story from their own culture or heritage. They can share these with their peers, helping everyone learn about and appreciate the richness of different cultures.
Multicultural Storytelling: Share stories from various cultures and backgrounds. Afterward, have students create their own stories that reflect diverse characters and settings, while also sharing thoughts about prejudices or moments of cultural celebration. This can promote understanding, empathy, and respect for individual experiences.
Diversity Games: Incorporate games with different aspects of diversity, such as various cultural symbols, gender pronouns, or famous people from different backgrounds. Games can be simple modifications to current games such as Bingo or scavenger hunts, or entirely new games that the students help invent.
Art and Craft Projects: Engage students in art and craft projects celebrating diversity and inclusion. For example, they can create a collaborative mural or collage featuring elements from different cultures or make friendship bracelets that symbolize unity and camaraderie.
Cultural Days: Designate specific days to celebrate different cultures in your classroom. Each day can focus on learning about a particular culture's history, traditions, and contributions including local foods for tasting and native music for dance exploration.
How can we use play as a springboard for navigating complex topics, especially with older students?
Utilizing play as an educational tool effectively engages students in exploring complex subjects through meaningful ways. Incorporating gamification lessons makes learning interactive and fun, promoting problem-solving, critical thinking, and strategic decision-making, while also creating a safe and comfortable environment for learning and discussions to flourish. Educators can facilitate creative projects enriched with multimodal elements like collage, sculpture, painting, and writing, which allows students to express their understanding of complex issues such as race, activism, disability laws, and so forth in an expressive manner.
Collaborating with other educators within the school who focus on drama, technology, or physical education provides multiple ways to captivate students and facilitate an array of different perspectives about diversity and inclusion, while also allowing all educators to feel comfortable teaching about these complex topics. By infusing play into teaching, educators can create an interactive environment where students of all ages can approach complex topics with enthusiasm, adventure, and a sense of curiosity while achieving educational goals.
Rebecca Horrace, Playful Insights Consulting, and Laura Dattile, PlanToys USA
Rebecca Horrace, Ed.D., has been consistently involved in children's education, from brick-and-mortar classrooms to running a homeschool cooperative program, and even founding and leading a 4-H club for military youth. She is an educational expert in the areas of child development, child-centered learning, children's play, and developmentally appropriate best practices. Rebecca founded Playful Insights Consulting to bridge the gap between play and education across toys, content, media, and curricula using UX research, child-development knowledge, and childhood play expertise.
Laura Dattile, a painter and textile artist, is deeply passionate about classical toys that have a rich historical background, considering them the ultimate play tools for people of all ages. In the toy industry for a decade, presently Laura is the community manager at PlanToys USA where she supports the company's mission of fostering environmentally-conscious children and play-oriented learning. Laura's contributions extend through various outlets including blogging, social media platforms, and collaborating with children's professionals, educators, play advocates, toy enthusiasts, and fellow creators.
#blog: Turning School Libraries into Discipline Centers Is Not the Answer to Disruptive Classroom Behavior
by Stephanie McGary
Special thanks to Next Generation Learning Challenges for allowing us to cross-post this blog post :-)
A proposal in Houston to replace school libraries with discipline centers fails to address the root causes of student misbehavior. A more constructive response can repair harm and address the underlying issues.
School libraries should be places where students can learn independently and think creatively outside the traditional classroom. But that won’t happen under a new plan proposed for Houston, the largest school district in Texas. Instead, spaces once reserved for quiet contemplation of books will now be transformed into disciplinary spaces for troubled students.
This summer, the Houston Independent School District decided to close school libraries and replace them with discipline centers. Parents and educators are concerned that this might harm struggling students in a state with the country’s fourth-lowest literacy rate, and fear that the new policy will do nothing to address some of the root causes of student misbehavior, which often include difficulties with literacy.
Superintendent Mike Miles, who was appointed by the Texas Education Agency to lead the district after it was taken over by the state, is pushing the policy. In an NPR interview, Miles explained that disruptive students will be sent to these discipline centers and then rejoin their classmates virtually.
Schools have attempted to address misbehavior with stricter discipline practices for years, but resorting to virtual participation—and virtual problem solving—is not the answer.
Districts should examine why a student chooses to communicate an unmet need by disrupting the classroom. All behaviors are a form of communication; misbehavior specifically is sometimes the only form of expression available to a student at the time.
If Houston’s plan is truly a systemic reform, as its proponents claim, why aren’t we also holding these larger systems responsible for the impact they have on student behavior?
More times than not, misbehavior is a response to a perceived stressor in the child’s environment hindering them from making more “appropriate” choices in the moment. Learning how to read, write, speak and listen—communication—requires more than understanding phonemic awareness, spelling or vocabulary. It requires the activation of the frontal lobe, which is responsible for reading fluency, speech, grammatical usage and comprehension.
In their book The Whole-Brain Child, Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson refer to this area as the “upstairs brain.” They explain that the lower and mid parts of the brain (the “downstairs,” or survival, brain), must feel cool, calm and collected before access is granted upstairs. Many things can contribute to the downstairs brain hijacking everything and revoking access to the part our students need to control their impulses, problem solve and excel in communication.
Traumatic experiences are the main culprit. They include not only the difficult childhood events we often hear about but also detrimental community and environmental experiences, such as structural racism, low pay, a global pandemic and climate crises. All can have negative effects on growing and learning. If Houston’s plan is truly a systemic reform, as its proponents claim, why aren’t we also holding these larger systems responsible for the impact they have on student behavior?
Feelings of anger, frustration or stress, which can be caused by struggles with reading or other comprehension, can also lead to the downstairs brain hijacking the upstairs brain. When this hijacking happens, it can look like students are highly anxious or behaving aggressively toward themselves or others. Struggling with any academic skills can bring feelings of shame, which is a vulnerable emotion often hidden under challenging behaviors, many of which could get a student sent to the proposed “team centers.” A library and supportive librarian would benefit them more.
Not every misbehavior is the result of an issue with literacy, but every misbehavior communicates a need. While discipline is necessary, it should not end there.
Districts and school administrators need to recognize that a student’s behavior might be a trauma or stress response, and they need to learn how to respond constructively. This is known as a trauma-informed approach. Concurrently, restorative discipline practices focus on repairing any harm caused, while sparing the dignity of the student without excluding them from their community.
Not only does student behavior deserve to be fully understood and supported, but our educators, including our librarians, deserve to be allowed to work in their areas of expertise. When students are feeling unmotivated or defeated and communicate this through disruption, they should be met by individuals who not only understand the function of that behavior but also use their unique skills to quiet the downstairs brain to better attend to the upstairs brain, putting students in the best place to learn and grow. This is true system reform.
Educators cannot do this alone. Caregivers can also integrate trauma-informed and restorative practices at home. Parents know their children better than anyone and have a responsibility to advocate and assist schools in understanding the child behind the behavior.
Infusing trauma-Informed and restorative practices into schoolwide policies and procedures will help schools attend to the root causes of misbehaviors without the risk of re-traumatization.
Protecting learning, literacy and libraries and addressing discipline issues are not mutually exclusive. Our school systems can and should do both.
About the Author
Stephanie McGary
Licensed Professional Counselor-Supervisor and Registered Play Therapist
Stephanie McGary is a licensed professional counselor-supervisor and registered play therapist who finds joy in advocating and training around the mental, social, and emotional wellness of children, youth, and educators. A Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project, Stephanie is currently the director of clinical programming at Communities in Schools of Dallas Region and the owner of Tots N' Teachers Counseling and Consultation where she focuses on the mental health and wellness of children and educators.
#blog: How Schools Can Respond to the Student Mental Health Crisis
by Stephanie McGary
Special thanks to Next Generation Learning Challenges for allowing us to cross-post this blog post :-)
Schools can take these proactive steps now to serve as psychological safe places for both students and educators throughout the year.
In this back-to-school season, our doors are reopening to welcome students who are carrying invisible backpacks full of trauma and stress responses. With all of the traumatic events happening in our world today, the most vulnerable of us—our young people—are experiencing the effects of this reality each and every day.
In President Biden’s last State of The Union Address, he made it clear that youth mental health is a priority for the Biden-Harris Administration stating “we owe them greater access to mental health care at their schools,” but what does that look, sound, and feel like?
Schools are seen as the primary source of providing wrap-around services to students whether they are equipped to do so or not. Attempts have been made to support the mental health of students—including incorporating social-emotional learning, revamping discipline practices, and hiring more clinical staff—but it still feels like it isn’t enough.
While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to helping students who are struggling with their mental health, there are proactive steps schools can take to serve as psychological safe places for both students and educators.
Moving from Self-Regulation to Co-Regulation
For example, many schools and districts believed that social and emotional learning (SEL) would be the answer to behavioral problems by teaching students how to self-regulate, how to become more self-aware, socially-conscious, and make better decisions. But social emotional learning can give false hope, specifically around behavior. Brain development can not be rushed. You can spend all day teaching students how to self-regulate, but—because of where they are developmentally or due to the effects of trauma and stress on the brain—they may have limited access to the part of the brain (the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or DLPFC) responsible for self-regulation. Instead, we should teach young people skills of self-regulation while simultaneously teaching adults the art of co-regulation.
Providing quality professional development and support to educators when a student is unable to access their taught skill of self-regulation can be a game changer.
Addressing Emotional Health and Academics Together
School districts must also think strategically about behavioral support. The student who struggled last year may still be struggling this school year, and we should not wait for their behavior to reveal this need to us again. Now is the time for schools to develop methods to intersect emotional health with academic health.
There are times when academic and behavioral conversations are held separately but research shows us that students who have three or more traumatic experiences have six times the rate of behavioral problems, five times the rate of attendance problems, and three times the rate of academic failure. This means the conversations need to happen together, especially for students who are having challenges in all or one of these three areas. Small shifts can be made to traditional Admission, Review, and Dismissal (ARD) meetings and Behavioral Intervention Plan (BIP) meetings.
Momentous Institute, a community mental health nonprofit where I used to work, collaborated with educational and mental health professionals to create the Strategic Intervention Model (SIM) which can be downloaded for free. The SIM manual can be used on its own to amplify already existing protocols in your school environment.
Partnering with Community Mental Health Services
Schools can not support the mental health of all students alone, nor should they have to do so. Schools can identify community mental health agencies, mentoring programs, and after-school programs that they can partner with throughout the school year to be proactive in addressing school-wide mental health concerns. There is no need to wait until a crisis happens to create a community plan of support.
Schools are a part of communities, and in order for us to tackle the youth mental health crisis, we have to plan ahead and work together. Both our students and educators need us and deserve better.
About the Author
Stephanie McGary
Licensed Professional Counselor-Supervisor and Registered Play Therapist
Stephanie McGary is a licensed professional counselor-supervisor and registered play therapist who finds joy in advocating and training around the mental, social, and emotional wellness of children, youth, and educators. A Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project, Stephanie is currently the director of clinical programming at Communities in Schools of Dallas Region and the owner of Tots N' Teachers Counseling and Consultation where she focuses on the mental health and wellness of children and educators.
#blog: In This Evolution of Learning, Focusing on Student Strengths is #SelfCare
by Dr. Rebecca Itow
Cross post from the NGLC blog.
Teachers’ daily work to learn from students and reshape our understanding of what learning looks like and what teaching feels like is a form of self-care.
Mom arrived early, so the two of us waited together as her student finished an exam. It was the end of a long day and this parent—who teaches high school English by day and university writing by night—shared that she was exhausted. I know this mom as a colleague—we had worked together a decade earlier to develop a then-new model for asynchronous online collaboration, and her contributions have been central in several academic publications. She is one of the best teachers.
So when I asked how her year was going and she responded with a defeated reply, I was concerned. She shared what was weighing on her mind, body, and heart and diminishing her identity as a teacher: a student had submitted an AI-generated paper. The weight of the offense was sitting hard on her chest, she was taking it personally. More than the cheating, she was dismayed that the student did not seem to have the desire—or, more devastatingly, she worried that perhaps she had failed to teach the skill—to "sit with his ideas." She wondered whether as a society we are losing the skill of generating our own ideas, sitting with a blank page, and allowing our sparks of insight to bubble up and spill out onto the page.
I made some feeble attempts to help. Could she have the student critique the AI-generated content or use ChatGPT to generate ideas?* But that wasn’t the point. From her vantage point, this child, who could not or would not execute a fundamental skill that English teachers work to cultivate, was a huge banner showcasing her failure as a teacher.
I have been thinking about this moment for weeks. What is happening? I spend my days working with teachers to develop innovative approaches to learning, and yet this story is not unique. Every day, teachers share that they feel defeated and more-than-stressed, that the students can’t, the students won’t. And I don’t buy the narrative that teachers are negative or power hungry or any of that nonsense.
I wonder if we are experiencing a kind of evolution in learning. Maybe rather than try to outrun our technology, convince students to learn and act as we did or cleverly curb technology-assisted behaviors (as I tried to do above), perhaps our work and our focus should be to identify the new ways and types of thinking our technology affords us. Maybe we should learn from our students how to think and learn and act in innovative ways instead of making them conform to us.
Back in 1995, Edwin Hutchins, a professor emeritus in cognitive ethnography, distributed and embodied cognition, human-computer interaction, and multimodal interaction at UC San Diego, wrote about the way a pilot uses cockpit tools to relieve cognitive load so they can focus on the more complex maneuvers of flying a plane. We use calculators to perform simpler mathematics, which opens opportunities for more nuanced mathematical thinking. And the worriers were right—we may not practice the underlying logic to solve complex problems the way we did with a slide rule, but we can think differently and solve more complex problems in nuanced ways. We can see the world through new lenses because we have offloaded those cognitive tasks to our tools.
Perhaps our work is becoming less about teaching content and more about teaching the skills necessary for interacting in a networked world.
Our profession has trained us to train our students to think and learn as we did, which positions us to fail because we are looking for evidence of learning that is bound by traditional brick-and-mortar conceptions of knowing and learning. But the brick-and-mortar setting is really not where our students are primarily learning today. They are online, engaging in virtual information sharing for formal (i.e., school) and informal (i.e., social) purposes. They use amazingly powerful tools to connect to the world, build relationships, and shape their understandings.
So let’s position ourselves for success. Rather than look for how to “fix” students’ behaviors around the newest (and honestly, pretty cool) technology, let’s find out why they are using those tools in that way in our classes. Is that how they use those tools in all settings? My Mom says that if we operate under the assumption that no child wants to be bad, we can uncover the why behind their behaviors.
Maybe this egregious act of using ChatGPT to write an essay isn’t about us educators at all; maybe that student finds the blank page so intimidating and they really wanted to submit something so they didn’t feel stupid in front of their peers and their teachers. Maybe they think that what the AI wrote is actually pretty great and have opinions about it. By asking the student why instead of punishing the what, can we learn together and develop new ways of thinking? Perhaps our work is becoming less about teaching content and more about teaching the skills necessary for interacting in a networked world. We cannot predict the ways our students will walk through the world, but we do know that the future will be networked and require students to be nimble as they engage in an interconnected world. Professors Michael Xenos (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Kirsten Foot (iSchool at University of Washington) predicted in 2008 that students will be co-constructors of knowledge, and we must help them prepare to move forward rather than look behind.
It is well documented that educators’ identities are wrapped up in our work. We define ourselves and our self-worth through the success of our students. But our standards and structures are centered on potentially outdated notions of what learning looks like of what teaching feels like. This not only sets teachers up for failure—it is the opposite of self-care.
As I wrote in 2020, it is time to reconceptualize what learning looks like and what teaching feels like.
We do actually know what we are doing. And rather than look for the deficits in our students around how they are not meeting the (outdated) standards—the ways in which they cannot or will not—we can look for their strengths. We don't need to criticize ourselves for what students cannot or will not do. Our daily work to learn from our students and reshape our understandings about what learning looks like and what teaching feels like is the #SelfCareExample. Looking for and learning from students’ strengths is a way to practice self-care. We must each engage in this practice and share it with others. Walk down the hall and share your stories with a colleague. Tell them that they are not alone in this struggle. Be the example for others and ask them to do the same for you. You are so capable. You are powerful. Let’s give ourselves the gift of focusing on our students’ strengths so that we can celebrate their good work and their innovative ways of learning, knowing, and thinking.
*I used Google’s AI, Bard, to help me generate a title for this blog post. I first asked Bard to help me create a title about experiencing an evolution of learning, and it gave me some good ideas. Then I refined my prompt by asking to make sure “evolution of learning” was in the title, and then again to mention teaching identities. While the title you see here is uniquely mine, I used Bard to spark my thinking. I was stuck and knew what I wanted to capture, but couldn’t quite get there. The way I used Bard to get “unstuck” is a good example of how I used this tool to help me articulate the messy thoughts in my brain, and lower my stress level by using Bard’s inspiration to create a title that caught your attention!
References
Hutchins, E. (1995). How a cockpit remembers its speeds. Cognitive science, 19(3), 265-288.
Itow, R. C. (2020). Fostering valuable learning experiences by transforming current teaching practices: practical pedagogical approaches from online practitioners. Information and Learning Sciences, 121(5/6), 443-452.
Xenos, M., & Foot, K. (2008). Not your father’s Internet: The generation gap in online politics. Civic life online: Learning how digital media can engage youth, 51-70.
About the Author
Dr. Rebecca C. Itow (she/her) is principal of IU High School Online. She earned her Ph.D. in learning sciences from Indiana University and was a public high school teacher. Driven to facilitate safe spaces for learners to navigate their academic journeys in valuable and valued ways, Rebecca researches, designs, and implements responsive online pedagogical practices in digital learning environments. Her work guides current university and community partnerships that innovate online teaching, learning, and design.
More content from Dr. Rebecca Itow
#blog: School Was My Safe Place: Prioritizing Safety for Learning
by Dr. Kathryn Kennedy
Special thanks to Next Generation Learning Challenges for allowing us to cross-post this blog post :-)
* Please note this blog post contains descriptions of domestic violence which could be triggering for some readers.
School leaders and educators can use a number of strategies to cultivate safe spaces for learning in their schools and classrooms.
How School Became My Safe Place
When I was a kid growing up in Boston, my friend Diedre and I would play this game. We’d pretend the floor was wicked hot lava. We’d jump from one piece of furniture to another to avoid the floor, trying not to knock things over as we leapt around her room. Each time we landed somewhere other than the floor, we’d say, “I’m safe!” We’d laugh and smile at each other. At the time, I was eight years old and didn’t realize the vital role safety would play throughout my life.
A couple of years before that, my Dad tried to hurt my Mom. He held a knife to her throat as she laid on the couch in the living room watching a TV show. I was laying down on a couch on the opposite side of the room. I saw everything play out in front of me. Within a few minutes, other family members intervened, saving my Mom from being physically hurt. Because I was so young and couldn’t process what I was seeing, my mind protected me by suppressing the experience. I was 37 when my oldest sister told me I was actually in the room when it happened.
Just before my ninth birthday, my Dad moved my Mom and me to Florida to get away. He didn’t want to take medication or see a therapist to support his struggles with bipolar disorder. I started fourth grade in Florida and acted out because I just didn’t want to be there. I wanted to be in Boston where the rest of my family and friends were. My teacher that year didn’t really take the time to get to know the why behind my behaviors, so I got in trouble a lot.
In fifth grade though, I met Mr. Weaver. He spent time getting to know me and my classmates. He knew our interests and passions and got to know us as human beings. He also made us feel safe. We trusted him. Because of him and his intentional approach to creating a safe space for learning and cultivating meaningful relationships and community, I improved academically, socially, emotionally, and mentally. I likely healed some too. This is when school became a safe place for me.
Because I felt safe there, I continued to find ways to engage at school for long periods of time. I became a year-round long-distance swimmer and runner, which kept me practicing about seven hours a day. I also immersed myself in clubs and other organized activities. I spent as much time at school as possible.
When I was in ninth grade, my Dad tried to hurt my Mom again, and I was the only one in the house at the time with them. I interrupted the interaction when I came out of my bedroom and startled my Dad. The next morning, my Mom and I flew to Boston to stay with family, but six months later we moved back down to Florida with my Dad. Living in the same space as my parents, I couldn’t find a safe place to support my healing. I continued to depend on school to be my safe place. It took finding safe places and safe relationships to truly and meaningfully heal.
Recently I was reading a number of sources that claimed safe spaces are dangerous for students and educators because that sense of safety might encourage them to atrophy instead of grow. Given my personal experience and the research on the need for safety in the healing process as well as in the learning process, I see the opposite to be the case. According to trauma research, safety is the foundational piece of not only the healing process, but it’s also the foundational piece for learning. Creating a safe place for learning is even more vitally important for students and educators of color and those who identify as LGBTQIA+. How can schools and districts prioritize safety for learning?
School as a Safe Place: Strategies
Some safety issues are more systemic, such as gun violence, racism, and gender discrimination, but there are a number of strategies school leaders and educators can begin to implement at the school and classroom levels to start cultivating safety at school:
School-Level Strategies
Employ more licensed mental health professionals to support not only students but also educators and staff.
Regularly seek feedback from faculty and staff to understand what they need to feel safe, and take action to provide for those needs.
Ensure there is representation for both BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ on your faculty and staff.
Co-establish values for the learning community where all stakeholders have input.
Encourage respect of differences.
Let go of shame and replace it with self-compassion and empathy.
Provide calming spaces where people can go to reset.
Think differently about roles and how to clear some things off people’s plates.
Classroom-Level Strategies
Provide space for educators and staff to create and cultivate trust-based relationships with students.
As much as possible, encourage educators to practice calming techniques with their students so that everyone is supporting each other.
Incorporate books and other learning materials that represent diverse cultures, races, gender, etc.
This is definitely not an exhaustive list, but these steps are a good start to creating safe spaces for learning.
Dr. Kathryn Kennedy (she/her/hers): With one foot in digital and online learning and the other in mental health and wellness, Kathryn has been cultivating two primary passions for over 20 years. She serves as founder and principal consultant of Consult4ED Group and founder and executive director of Wellness for Educators. She is author of the forthcoming book The Mind-Body Connection for Educators: Intentional Movement for Wellness (expected publication date: March 28, 2023), which serves as the first in a four-part book series.She lives in Ithaca, New York. You can follow her on Twitter at @Kathryn__EDU and @well4edu.
#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.
