Tag: teaching

What I wish teachers knew about “what I wish my teacher knew”

Alex Shevrin VenetLeave a comment

As the school year gets underway this fall, many teachers are wondering how to address the mental health repercussions of the past two years. How can we show up for our students with care at the center? How should we start to get a sense of the magnitude of trauma?

One activity that might be tempting to teachers is called “what I wish my teacher knew.” The activity went viral after a teacher asked her students to finish the prompt: “I wish my teacher knew,” and then posted the student’s responses on social media. Kids disclosed family struggles, personal interests, hopes and aspirations. The takeaway I saw from many educators was this: Wow, our students will share so much if we only ask them. 

To a degree, I agree with the spirit of the activity. We should ask students what’s going on in their lives and what they want and hope for in the classroom. We should position ourselves as listeners. Being a listener is different than being a trauma detective, though. We have to be careful about whether the activities we create to “get to know you” are actually invasive and might compromise the trusting relationship we are trying to build. The truth is that we don’t need to know the details of a kid’s hardships in order to show up for them with care. 

To unpack some of these dynamics, this post is about the specific activity in which students anonymously fill in the prompt “what my teacher knew.” editing to add: I heard from the originator of the activity and encourage folks to check out her book which sounds like it has a lot of similar nuance to what I write below. As with many viral teaching activities, this one has a life of its own and so my post may not reflect the version of the activity she intended, but rather the version that exists for teachers on TPT and social media.

You may be able to apply a lot of this to other activities where students are asked to share something deeply personal with teachers or the whole class. But as always, your experience is your own – take what you can from this post and I recognize I’m not speaking to every single teacher or situation.  

Building or breaking trust

How long do you need to know someone to tell them something personal about yourself? My guess is that for most people, the answer is “it depends.” Context matters a lot, right? What you share with a random person you just met at a party is probably different than what you might share with a new doctor, who is bound by confidentiality laws and practices. I would also venture to guess that you have learned hard lessons about trust throughout your lifetime. Maybe you shared something with someone too soon, and it impacted your relationship. Maybe you decided to trust someone who didn’t prove themselves to be trustworthy and broke your confidence. Maybe you didn’t share enough, and found that you built too high of a wall.

All of this is to say that trust is hard, and it’s even harder when we are considering disclosure of something really important to us. “Something really important” doesn’t have to mean trauma – it can also feel scary to share things we’re happy about, proud of. Now take all of that complexity and stir in developing brains, student-teacher power dynamics, and mandated reporting laws. Things are getting a little messy, aren’t they?

When we ask students in the first days or weeks of school, “What do you wish your teacher knew?” we’re essentially asking for a disclosure. The question itself implies a secret. It acknowledges that there are things that are hidden between student and teacher, things that aren’t shared for some reason or another. The question asks students to vault over those barriers and share anyway.

Why, though? What do students gain out of being asked to disclose personal things to someone they don’t yet trust? Shouldn’t we be helping students build skills such as  discernment and agency? Shouldn’t we help them make their own evaluations about who to trust and why, who to tell and when? Asking students to reveal personal stories early on reinforces an unequal power dynamic between student and teacher. 

This is not to say you shouldn’t ask students things about themselves in the first weeks of school. But be mindful that trust takes time. Diving too deep, too soon can have harmful repercussions for your relationship down the line. 

What will you do with the information? 

Picture this: you are a restaurant and your server drops off a piece of paper at your table. “Write down what you wish your server knew about you.” You write “I am deathly allergic to ketchup” on the paper. Your server picks it up from your table and walks away. On their next pass by your table, they drop off your appetizer, complete with a giant dollop of ketchup.    

When we ask for disclosure but then ignore the content of those disclosures, we can undermine trust and do real harm to students. If we ask for students to share their concerns, we have to then address those concerns. It can be deeply invaliding to ask for someone’s perspective and then blatantly ignore it. If you ask someone to disclose something, you are making a commitment to act on it. This gets complicated when you’re asking for anonymous disclosure in a classroom environment where you have a great deal of power over the students’ material conditions for a huge chunk of their time. 

Before you do an activity like “what I wish my teacher knew,” ask yourself what you will do with the information. You should be prepared with your answers to all of these related questions:

  • If a student discloses something they like or love to do, what will I do with that information?
  • If a student discloses something they hate or dislike, what will I do with that information? 
  • If a student discloses harm that is happening or has happened inside their home, what will I do with that information?
  • If a student discloses harm that is happening or has happened in school, what will I do with that information?
  • If a student discloses something that triggers my mandated reporting responsibility, how does that impact this activity and its purpose?
  • If a student chooses not to disclose anything, how does that impact this activity and its purpose?
  • What do other stakeholders think about this activity, including my school leader, counselor, and students’ families/caregivers? What are their concerns or questions? 

In short: if you open the door, you have to be ready for what comes through it. If “what I wish my teacher knew” is anonymous, how will you meaningfully follow through on the information you gather? I also don’t believe anonymity actually exists in a classroom setting. Consider the case in which you read something on one of the responses that triggers the mandated reporting process. You will likely need to figure out exactly which student wrote that response. What is the point of inviting anonymity if you can’t actually follow through on it? 

What I’m getting at here is that this activity actually sets you up to break students’ trust, not gain it. If what we’re seeking is trust, “what my teacher knew” isn’t the way. 

How will you prove yourself to be trustworthy? 

This brings us to the core question I would like teachers to consider in the first weeks of school: how are you proving yourself to be trustworthy? If the goal of “what I wish my teacher knew” is to help students share what’s important to them, consider this instead: how can I be the type of person who students would trust to share what’s important to them? Rather than, “I need this activity to find out what students typically don’t want to share with teachers,” consider, “why is it that students typically don’t share things with teachers, and what could I do about that?” 

When I reflect on how I’ve built trust with others, I think about a long, slow process. I think about how people showed me they could be trusted with little or insignificant stuff, whether that was showing up on time or remembering a minor food allergy when they invited me for dinner. Trust is also about how someone responds to you -whether they try to “fix” your pain or simply show up and acknowledge that you’re in it, whether they make things about themselves or hold space for others. If we want to authentically show up for students, we have to look at trust as a process instead of a given. When we push too hard in the first few weeks of school in the hopes that we can skip over the slowness of relationship-building, our efforts can go awry. 

The reframe: what I wish my teacher would

I was talking to the amazing Rhiannon Kim about this blog post and she dropped a pretty amazing reframe, which I’m including here with her permission. She suggested that instead of asking students to complete the phrase “I wish my teacher knew,” we could ask students to fill in “I wish my teacher would.” 

Now that’s a gorgeous reframe if I ever saw one. “I wish my teacher knew” requires students to offer up something personal in the hopes that the teacher correctly interprets what that means for learning together. By focusing instead on what we need from one another, we can build trust. If a student says “I wish my teacher would be more flexible about deadlines,” I have an opportunity to demonstrate that I am worth trusting. I can do what I can to meet their needs without requiring a payment of information in exchange. 

Rhiannon also suggested adding on “I wish my teacher wouldn’t“ and using these prompts as a jumping-off point to co-create classroom culture. She said: “This practice can generate the type of learning space that will be co-created by the youth and the educators. While not every hope or wish can be honored; it is honoring that we will take time to listen to what is needed from the people we are in a learning community with.”

A few more thoughts on start of school get-to-know-you activities

Here are a few more assorted thoughts about get-to-know-you activities for the start of the school year. The goal here is to do these activities in ways that support student agency and self-determination. 

  • Be transparent about information sharing in your classroom. I write about this a little bit in my book, but some quick tips: be clear with students about the difference between secrecy and confidentiality. Explain your duty as a mandated reporter and what that means for students. Give examples of the types of information that you won’t/shouldn’t keep to yourself, and who you might tell (for example: “sometimes as a teacher I need support to best help you all. I might occasionally talk to the principal about what you tell me so she can help guide me. But I promise not to share things with other teachers without your permission.”) It might also be relevant to help students understand what their parents can and cannot access/request information about, and what information does/doesn’t go into their academic records. Essentially, help your students become informed so they can make their own choices about what to tell you. 
  • If you want to create a space for students to share things they wish you knew, do it in relationship. Do not give students an anonymous slip of paper or anonymous Google form. These leave you with no way to acknowledge and connect with students about what they shared. If what you’re asking is for students to share what they wish you knew, then it needs to be reciprocal. Here are two ways you could do this:
    • Write students a letter sharing some things about yourself, ask them to write you back, and then respond to each letter.
    • In a start-of-the-year survey, include an open-ended question like “Is there anything I should know about you as a learner to help you be successful in this class?” Embedded in the question is the purpose of the information-sharing, which helps students make choices about what to share.
  • When planning group activities in which you’re asking students to share things about themselves, or read one another’s “I am from” poems, for example, consider how you are building emotional safety. Please read this fantastic piece by Kate Bowles on safety during classroom community-building. It has some great pointers about trust and agency.
  • As you set up activities, name that students can “choose their vulnerability.” Don’t require students to share something deeply personal, and be mindful of the types of examples you give. If you share something deeply personal on day 1, students may feel an implicit pressure to do the same. 
  • Never, ever, ever share student responses to these types of activities on social media.  If you want to prove yourself to be trustworthy, do not share students’ private words for public consumption. 

Weaving it in throughout the year

Curiosity about your students’ lives isn’t a one-and-done! Build in opportunities for students to share things with you on a regular basis. In the classes I teach for undergrads, they fill out a weekly survey reflecting on their learning from the week, giving me feedback on how I did as a teacher, and adding anything else they want me to know. I frequently check in with students and have other community-building practices. A Google Form isn’t the only way that students can communicate with me, and I make sure they know that. Whether it’s circles, check-ins, or small conferences, find a way to regularly build relationships. Small, meaningful moments of connection are way more impactful than a single flashy activity at the start of the year. 

Photo by Paper Textures on Unsplash

Thank you to Dulce-Marie Flecha and Rhiannon Kim for being thought partners on this post.

Survival adaptations and moving forward from here

Alex Shevrin Venet1 Comment

Scrolling TikTok the other day, I saw a fantastic post by comedian and veteran Patrick Loller. In it, Loller draws parallels between their experience as a veteran struggling to reintegrate to civilian life and people struggling to adjust to “post-pandemic” life. Some of the key points in the TikTok:

  • There were public health campaigns about staying inside, distancing, etc, but not parallel campaigns about how to reenter the world 
  • People often process trauma after the crisis is over, so some may be processing/struggling now in a way they weren’t a few months ago
  • Humans adapt well to traumatic situations, but those adaptations don’t just go away when the crisis is over

I really appreciate the way that Loller puts this so clearly, and it’s got me thinking a lot about adaptation, trauma, and where schools go from here. What adaptations have we made to cope with the pandemic, and how will we let those go as we enter post-pandemic (or at least post-vaccine) life? 

Adapting to the pandemic 

Even as I write this, I notice one of my own adaptations to this collective trauma: an unwillingness to plan ahead to “post-pandemic” school. When the world so rapidly changed in March 2020, and restrictions and case counts continued to fluctuate, I adapted by narrowing my focus. I didn’t plan too far ahead, and focused instead on what I could do today or this week. I wrote “post-pandemic” and immediately felt that adaptation’s tug. Don’t get too comfortable, my survival system tells me. We may not be out of the woods yet. It’s going to take some time to unlearn that instinct, to truly feel safe, and to focus more on the future.

Educators adapted to pandemic teaching. Our students have adapted to pandemic learning. And we’ve all adapted to pandemic survival. We’ve learned to be hypervigilant, constantly scanning our environments for cues of threat and danger. We’ve learned that being physically close with people isn’t safe. We may emotionally distance ourselves because we’ve adapted to being alone. We might not ask for help from peers because we’ve been figuring it out ourselves. These are just a few examples. What adaptations have you made?

Unlearning, shifting, and how things are now

As the world changes yet again this summer and fall, a few things feel important to me. First, to recognize that we aren’t “going back” to anything. Things are shifting to something new. The goal isn’t to shake off adaptations and go back to an old way, but to find adaptations that help us live with how things are now. Within this, let’s acknowledge that the pandemic isn’t over, even though case counts are lower in many places. Indeed, some people may find themselves more stressed or leaning more heavily on survival adaptations now that most states have ended systemic safety guidelines.

Second, recognize that things have changed. Our adaptations helped us survive a pandemic, but survival isn’t the whole story. We might feel we learned lessons or new skills. We might be worse for wear. We carry grief and trauma from the act of surviving, and the fact that so many did not. Adaptations to stress can permanently shift how we interact with the world. Don’t expect yourself or your students to have the same patterns or personality that we did before.  

Third, we can recognize that the work of unlearning our survival adaptations isn’t simple or easy. We have to recognize our patterns, evaluate whether they still serve us, and practice other ways of being. For me, some of this work will take the form of mindful noticing and self-reflection. We can also lean on friends, family, and other support systems to process and make sense of change. This can be as simple as a quick conversation: “I went into the store without a mask today, for the first time since this all began. Here’s how my body felt during those five minutes.” “How did it feel to hug your sister?” “I’m trying to decide whether to stay virtual for this workshop or go in person. How would you decide?” As we build our self-awareness, we can make choices about where to go from here. 

Supporting students 

For educators supporting students, we should remember that this process is personal, it’s messy, and we can’t necessarily dig into the details with each of our students. We can foster moments of self-reflection, but we can’t unpack everything. Students may need or want to lean on their own support systems. And just because the pandemic crisis is abating (in some places, at least) doesn’t mean that crisis is over in general. We don’t know what students are going through, and more crises are sure to come. As some students work to let go of pandemic adaptations, others may still be actively in survival mode every day for unrelated reasons.

This means that we need to show up for students with flexibility and care. Survival adaptations aren’t “disruptive,” “inappropriate,” or “disobedient,” even though that’s how we might label them at school. They are behaviors and actions that literally keep us alive. 

The best we can do for students is the same we try to do for ourselves: build self-awareness and make choices about where to go from here. Just as we reflect with our own colleagues, friends and support system, we can offer moments of reflection for our students. 

I recommend that teachers find ways to do this that are not connected to a grade or evaluation (don’t make it worth “points” or anything!), keep it private, keep it optional, and have a plan for connecting students to additional support if needed. Building self-awareness can look like simple prompts: how do you feel today? What does your body feel like when you walk into the school building? What are some of the ways that you cope with hard times? 

You can also model this for your students by commenting on the moments you notice your own adaptations: “oh wow, I just noticed that I keep inching away from you while we’re talking. It’s not about you; that’s one of the things I started doing during the pandemic to try to stay distant from people.”

Remember: there is no timeline for healing, and it can’t be rushed. Some students may be able to establish a sense of a “new normal” relatively quickly, while others will be impacted for a long time. There is no moral value to how fast you adapt, so we need to unconditional create space for how all of our students show up any given day.  

Striving for safety 

We can’t let go of survival adaptations until we are actually and truly safe. Teachers cannot create true safety for our students, because no one can define safety for someone else. But we can do the work of striving for safety, especially through systems change. We can advocate for our schools to follow public health guidance, to adequately staff and fund our classrooms, and to support families. We can push back against the current wave of harmful laws being passed in many states, banning discussions of race in schools and dehumanizing transgender children. 

We must take up this structural work with the same vigor and enthusiasm as we bring to creating our cozy corners, bulletin boards, or classroom check-ins, because true safety can’t be accomplished within our individual classrooms alone. When we do this systems-level work, we move closer to the possibility that schools are a place where students (and teachers) can do the hard work of adapting to something new.

I think again of Loller’s TikTok: people struggle when we leave them to their own devices to adapt to a changed world, and it doesn’t have to be that way. As we approach the fall, let go of “back to normal” or “learning acceleration” and embrace the mess instead. Let’s join alongside our students and view this next school year as a transitional time, and support everyone to adapt to what’s next. This is how we move forward: with care, together.

Photo by Stefan on Unsplash

The Challenging Student Challenge

Alex Shevrin VenetLeave a comment

If what we’re doing now to help challenging students was working, we wouldn’t feel so challenged. Teachers are frustrated and burned out. Administrators are searching for options. We all share the collective guilt of knowing we’re not adequately serving the students who need the most support, whether their “challenges” are connected to learning differences, trauma, poverty, racism, or simply a response to a school system that doesn’t fit for them (as it doesn’t fit for so many).

A complex problem with no easy solutions. It’s easy to feel stuck.

So I offer you a small way to get un-stuck: the Challenging Student Challenge. It’s not going to fix anything, but I promise it’s worth your time: it’s the first step to a paradigm shift we all need to better serve our kids.

Ready? Here’s how to participate:

  • Choose one of your challenging students.
  • Make a giant list of that student’s strengths and interests. Find out as many as you can. Ask other teachers, ask the student’s parents, ask the cafeteria staff, ask the students themselves. Write down as many strengths (academic or otherwise) and interests, passions, hobbies as you can.
  • Choose one of the interests from the list. Make it one that you don’t know that much about.
  • Spend 30 minutes researching/digging into that interest – this could look like: watching Youtube makeup tutorials; reading a NASCAR magazine; watching an episode of their favorite show on Netflix and reading a fan blog; learning the basics of how to play rugby – you get the idea. Teach yourself as much as you can about this interest.
  • Go back to your student and have a conversation about what you learned.
  • Reflect on the experience and share it with someone, whether that’s talking to a coworker or friend, or sharing on Facebook or Twitter (if you tweet, tag #challengingstudentchallenge)

 

That’s it! It’s a small investment of time – maybe one hour out of your life. I think you’ll be surprised and delighted at the difference it makes for both you and your student. And it will hopefully spark a mindset shift that gets you thinking about more ways to see and honor the good in all your students, focus on strengths, and get unstuck so we can all move forward together.

What can one teacher really do about trauma?

Alex Shevrin Venet15 Comments

When training teachers on trauma-informed classroom strategies, the most frequent pushback I hear is “I don’t have enough time or resources.”

Maybe this is because we start with defining the problem, and it is bleak. Some estimate that between one third and one half of all children experience trauma. The impacts of trauma on the brain and body can be severe, pervasive and long-lasting. Trauma can contribute to challenging behavior and mental health challenges, and can negatively affect a child’s ability to learn.

It’s easy to feel hopeless.

Something we’ve known for a long time is that consistent, caring relationships are one of the biggest factors in helping children heal from trauma. Enter the teacher’s protest: “I have so many students,” “I don’t have enough time to help them all,” “There are no resources in my school.”

All of those things are true – and I do believe that we need to drastically change the education system in many ways, for the benefit of all students. But what can we do the in the meantime?

The answer, it turns out, is to sweat the small stuff.

In Bruce Perry’s updated version of The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, endnotes add updates from current research to his classic accounting of the effects and treatment of trauma. In one section, Perry discusses the idea of “therapeutic dosing” – the question of the timing, frequency and content of therapy that best supports healing from trauma.

Indeed, long-term and enduring changes to neural networks can be created by an intense period of stimulation that lasts less than a minute. Synaptic splitting, which is one way these connections can change, can occur in meres seconds of intense stimulation – and if the intense experience is repeated four times within an hour, the change will be maintained long term.

Just as a traumatic experience can alter a life in an instant, so too can a therapeutic encounter.  

….The good news is that anyone can help with this part of ‘therapy’ – it merely requires being present in social settings and being, well, basically, kind. An attentive, attuned, and responsive person will help create opportunities for a traumatized child to control the dose and pattern of rewiring their trauma-related associations. … The more we can provide each other these moment of simple, human connection – even a brief nod or a moment of eye contact – the more we’ll be able to heal those who have suffered traumatic experience.

  -Bruce Perry , 2017 edition of The Boy who was Raised as a Dog, p 308-9

This idea of “therapeutic encounters” or “therapeutic moments” should be one of the first things we teach pre-service teachers. What I love about this concept is that it both gives us permission, and it holds us accountable. It gives us permission to play an active role in the healing of others, because that role can be a tiny empathetic moment, a personal question, a joyful high-five. It also holds us accountable, because this work isn’t too hard for any of us: none of us can say we don’t have the training, the experience, or the expertise to have a therapeutic encounter.

Now imagine that every teacher, staff member, adult in a school commits to creating therapeutic moments within the school day. Imagine they all agree to slow down just a little bit, be kinder in the hallways, use twenty seconds of passing time as an opportunity to say a genuine “It’s nice to see you” to a student. If we can create a web of therapeutic moments, interconnected by our unconditional positive regard, we can create the environment for change.

My favorite part from the quote above, again: Just as a traumatic experience can alter a life in an instant, so too can a therapeutic encounter.  You never know how the small moments can add up to change for a trauma-affected child – so let’s create a tapestry of these small moments within our schools so we all can heal.

 

Unlearning

Alex Shevrin Venet1 Comment

In education, obviously we talk constantly about learning. That’s our job here, right? Fostering learning, assessing learning, innovating learning experiences, understanding learners.

But as teachers, we have a lot of unlearning to do, too, especially when it comes to how we “manage” our classrooms. Many educators replicate the systems of classroom management that they themselves experienced, without often pausing to wonder whether the underlying philosophy of this “classroom management” is the right one.

I recently read Alfie Kohn’s book Beyond Discipline  for the first time. I’ve been familiar with Kohn for a while and my previous school was heavily influenced by his philosophy, but reading his book was invigorating. I highlighted approximately half of every page. Kohn’s overall premise is that a focus on compliance in our schools harms children and adults, and we can do better by developing community instead: “the more we ‘manage’ students’ behavior and try to make them do what we say, the more difficult it is for them to become morally sophisticate people who think for themselves and care about others” (p. 62).

It sounds great in practice – but it takes so much unlearning for educators who have spent their whole lives in systems that value compliance. So many teachers are also in positions where compliance is demanded of them every day by administrators, state decision-makers, federal laws. Kohn quotes de Charms: “When teachers are treated as pawns, they don’t teach, they become drill sergeants.” Teachers need not only to unlearn how they were taught, but also actively swim against the tide of compliance that is the reality of many schools.

So how do we unlearn? First, I think we need to connect to the big picture. For me, this could look like reading books from my favorite educational philosophers, or books that challenge my understanding of the status quo, or seeking out articles from diverse perspectives. I need to expand my worldview, and in doing so, take apart and discard the parts that don’t serve me or my students anymore.

Connecting to the big picture can also look like dreaming together with other educators – whether that’s attending a conference, and Edcamp, or simply talking with a teacher friend over dumplings about the dreams we have for our students.

Unlearning also takes practice. I’ve been thinking about both/and – we need to think about and talk about the big picture, but we also need concrete ways to test things out. In thinking about unlearning “classroom management,” a couple of concrete ways to try it out include the CPS model and restorative circles. I find that when I commit to trying something concrete, I can practice not only the actual strategy, but managing the feelings of frustration and uncertainty that come in the midst of a change of philosophy.

Unlearning is difficult, especially when everyone is telling us that the “way it’s always been” is the way it should always be. But as Kohn says, “to create a classroom where students feel safe enough to challenge each other – and us – is to give them an enormous gift” (p. 77). Unlearning compliance and embracing a messier version of community is the foundation of a healthy democracy. That’s the direction I want to move with my students.

a path on a mountain

The trauma-informed toolbox (and mixed metaphors)

Alex Shevrin VenetLeave a comment

I’m looking forward to teaching a workshop this October on the teacher’s trauma toolbox. The goal is to help teachers get started with trauma-informed teaching and learning. I hope teachers will walk away having developed their understanding of child trauma as well as jumpstarted their thinking on trauma-informed strategies for their classrooms.

Trauma-informed teaching isn’t something you can master after a one-day workshop, or a semester class, or even many years of intense study and practice. It’s an ongoing process to support students who have experienced trauma, because every child is different and every response to trauma is different. Moreover, being in relationship with people with traumatic experience can be difficult, and requires regular checking in with ourselves and recalibrating so we can sustain the work.

The trauma toolbox

We can best prepare to serve students with traumatic backgrounds by developing our own toolbox. Not every tool will work for a given job, but if we maintain a diverse set we are more likely to have what we need when we need it. Some tools will work for many situations, while we save others for a very specific project. When using trauma-informed strategies, the range of tools is essential because one student’s response to trauma will never be exactly the same as another’s. This is especially true when “challenging” behavior comes up; I may need to try a dozen different tools before I find the one that works.

As most handy folks and homeowners also know, sometimes our own toolbox isn’t enough, and it’s essential to know when to call the plumber or the electrician. An essential aspect of our trauma-informed toolbox is knowing when to call on others – whether they be school counselors, psychologists, or social workers, or your local mental-health or child welfare agency. There’s also something to be said for the home-improvement show, youtube video or internet forum where we can get a refresher on how to use the tools we already have, or get unstuck when we’re frustrated.

Where the metaphor falls apart

a path on a mountain

While your home toolbox may be used to fix broken stuff, we aren’t “fixing” students and they certainly aren’t broken. Here I’ll use a different metaphor for our role in supporting students who’ve experienced trauma – the hike.

Ever been hiking with someone who hasn’t really been hiking much before? You’re both walking on the same path, but maybe it’s slightly easier for you, because you have more practice. You don’t need to tell your hiking partner how to walk, because they already know how to do that, but you might make some suggestions if there’s a tricky uphill scramble.

As you walk, you’re paying attention to the other hiker, and guiding the way, but the two of you are also connecting, together, and noticing, together, what’s going on in the woods around you. While the less experienced person might need your help at times, you might also need them and rely on their expertise as you cross obstacles together.

You might need to prompt your hiking partner when to stop and take a break and drink some water, but it’s also essential that you pay attention to your own needs, as well. Supporting our students through trauma is something we do together, walking side by side, while ultimately respecting the autonomy of the journey.

The path through healing from trauma can be difficult and complicated, and we do best when we walk it together, whatever the metaphor.

I hope you’ll join me on October 7 in Keene, NH for the Teacher’s Trauma Toolbox workshop. Can’t attend? Check out resources for getting started with trauma-informed teaching or get in touch to schedule a workshop at your site.

Social-emotional learning can be simple

Alex Shevrin Venet1 Comment

While the buzzword factor may loom large, it doesn’t have to be complicated to get started with social-emotional learning in the classroom. SEL “programs” or curricula may certainly be helpful in providing a common language or structure for educators across a school, but you don’t need to buy anything to provide social/emotional learning opportunities. It can be as simple as acknowledging emotions, making space to understand them, and reflecting on the intersection of academic and social/emotional learning.

I teach a community college first semester seminar. The goals of the course are around reading, writing, and research for college, and there’s an overarching mission that the course will help students start their college careers successfully. We learn good habits of college work and identify resources. I also incorporate social/emotional learning because I value emotional self-awareness as a key tool of college (and life) success.

Social skill-building in 5 minutes or less

In an ongoing way, we do a quick rose-and-thorn check-in at the start of each class. Rose- something good that’s going on for you. Thorn – something not so good. It brings everyone’s voice into the room (even if just to say “pass”) and it acknowledges that we’re all bringing things to the classroom that evening with us. It helps set the stage for our interactions with one another – if you shared about your really bad day, I can offer you some extra kindness. If you shared that you’re feeling good this evening, I can borrow some of your enthusiasm. It also provides a platform for creating social connections. I’ve watched students connect with one another over shared interests that they might not have known about if not for check-in. You have a two-year-old too? You also play soccer? You drive a motorcycle? Healthy social interactions are easier when you have a place to start, and this structure provides a platform for students to share something authentic with their community. It’s a really simple structure that takes less than five minutes, but the benefits are huge.

Incorporating emotional awareness into content

For a more focused social/emotional learning experience, I’ve been slowly transforming the section of the course that explores the concept of systemic oppression and privilege to incorporate emotional self-awareness as a key concept. We begin by reading Margaret Wheatley’s essay “Willing to be Disturbed.” We discuss the emotional barriers that can get in the way of hearing one another’s stories. Then, students read and dig in to the concept of privilege and write a reflection – not just on the content, but on their emotional experience with the content. They answer the question, “why is it so hard to talk about privilege?”

When students arrive in class to discuss privilege with one another, we start with a self check-in: what emotions am I feeling right now, and how is that going to impact my ability to listen? I use a chart with a list of common emotions arranged by intensity, and students reflect on how intensity of feeling might help or hinder your listening skills. I’m transparent when we do this activity: I know this may feel childish or unrelated to academics, but at the heart of academic discussion lies empathy. Our healthy emotional management supports our capacity for empathy, and our social skills support our capacity to build empathetic relationships. Students take this reflection seriously and bring the self-awareness into their conversations.

With all of these proactive steps, I’ve experienced an improvement in the depth of conversation, the risks students are willing to take when trying on a new perspective, and their ongoing growth as learners.

SEL is just like any other teaching strategy

None of these social/emotional learning strategies are complicated or groundbreaking. They don’t take a lot of prep work. They cost nothing. Social-emotional learning is an investment of time – but it doesn’t have to be that much time. It’s an investment of energy – but as with all new classroom strategies, after the first go-around it gets easier. It doesn’t need to take time away from content, but rather can enhance students’ ability to dive into content and skill.

So I see social-emotional learning more as holding a central value about how I see my students. We do this already in the classroom. If I understand my students to be emerging critical readers, I’ll make room for skill-building. If I understand my students to need practice with the writing process, I’ll build in opportunities to learn. When I understand my students as whole and emotional humans, practicing their self-regulation and social skills, of course I’m going to make time to attend to their needs. It can be that simple.

Wellness: A Guide for Teachers

Alex Shevrin Venet2 Comments

 

To sustain our work as teachers, we need to take care of ourselves. Wellness as a whole is important, but it’s also essential to look at specific elements of wellness that are all equally necessary to sustaining when the going gets tough.

Coping strategies

These are the tools and skills we need to make it, on a basic level, through a tough day. Coping strategies can be big or small, but we need to have a variety in our toolbox so we can access them as needed. These might be things you do in the middle of a stressful class, during a small break in your day, or right when you get home and need to transition from one part of your day to the next. Many of us have fall-back coping strategies and might benefit from expanding on them – sometimes it takes a little practice.

Examples:

  • Focusing on breathing
  • Drinking a cup of tea
  • Stretching, yoga, other physical movement
  • Texting a supportive friend
  • Looking at a funny comic or silly cat picture online

These are just a few tiny examples, but coping strategies are essentially anything that can help you manage a strong emotion and get yourself regulated. It’s important to remember that not all coping strategies are healthy ones, and it depends on the person and situation (example: eating a snack might be a good coping strategy for someone, but might be problematic for another person). The essential thing is to develop your own list of strategies that are right for you.

Coping strategies are also great to model for students who are having a hard time. If I normalize stopping class for a minute to take a few deep breaths, my students can begin to internalize some healthy coping strategies of their own.

Self-care

Rather than disparate strategies, self-care to me is a more general frame that I am doing things that help me stay well and sustain me as a person. Self-care helps me fill my cup and stay connected to who I am as a person, not just as a helper. Self-care looks different for everyone, but here are some common areas of self-care: 

  • A physical activity practice (running, yoga, cycling, team sports)
  • Spending time with animals or living things (gardening, taking care of fish, snuggling your dog)
  • Spending meaningful time with friends and family
  • Reading, watching TV or movies you enjoy, doing puzzles
  • Making and creating – music, crafts, projects

Self-care requires ongoing attention to balance, and committing to spending time that fills up the well rather than draws from it. Self-care isn’t selfish; instead, it’s what allows us to be of use to others. You can’t give others energy you don’t have, and self-care is what allows us to generate that energy.

Making meaning

This is one area of wellness that often gets missed in our narrative about taking care of ourselves. In addition to coping in the moment and self-care in an ongoing way, making meaning is required when we’re faced with challenging work. When something intense happens, whether it be a challenging class period, a student blow-up, a conflict with a coworker, or at tragedy in the school community, we need to not only cope with our emotions, but to make sense of what happened. Making meaning is the act of grappling with how challenging experiences fit into our sense of self and our worldview, and how they change us and change our work.

As an example, if a student explodes at me in class and ends up hitting me – I will need to cope in the moment, for sure. Beyond that immediate moment, though, I’m likely to be shaken up as a person, and coping alone doesn’t address that core disruption. I will need to use self-care to help me stay grounded in my sense of myself as a whole person. And I will need to make meaning of the big questions that come up from intense experiences: why did that happen? What does it mean about my student? What does it mean about me? What does it mean about my sense of safety at school – and my student’s sense of safety with me? How should I proceed? It takes time, introspection, and support to think through these questions.

Some supports that may be helpful in making meaning:

  • Meeting with a therapist, counselor, or clergy person
  • Supportive coworkers or supervisors
  • Journaling or reflective art practice

Wellness is ongoing

Wellness isn’t something we work on once and then say it’s done. We can’t attend one training and get certified in wellness; we can’t develop a wellness routine and expect that it will hold through all of life’s changes. However, when we put in the work – when we attend to coping, self-care and making meaning, we give ourselves the gift of wellness – a gift that requires maintenance and reinvention, but that gives us the vitality to sustain ourselves in the service of those we help.

Teaching Doesn’t Get Easier

Alex Shevrin Venet3 Comments

Wasn’t teaching supposed to get easier?

Didn’t someone tell me that teaching would get easier? That working with tough kids would get easier? That balance, boundaries, pedagogy, content, all of it would feel easier someday?

I’ve learned so many skills. Doesn’t skill acquisition make it easier? I know now how to assess without a survey, teach without a whiteboard/pen/computer/book, build foundation without condescending, encourage voice and choice without judgement or expectation. I’ve learned so many things through observing teachers who are smarter than I am, through asking students what they needed, through collaborating with parents and families and caregivers. And I learned a lot of things the hard way, by messing up, by disappointing students, by missing opportunities, by reflecting, reflecting, reflecting.

Soooo…isn’t it supposed to be easy by now?

I’ve immersed myself in lenses and frames and tried to incorporate the best lessons to my students’ benefit. I’ve long since dropped the pretense that I know even a fraction of all there is to know, I’ve abandoned the belief that there are silver bullets in education, I’ve embraced the mess and complexity and journey of trying to be more inclusive, anti-racist, feminist, culturally sustaining, trauma-informed. I own that I will never be perfect at any of it. I wear my vulnerability and fallibility.

So I’m comfortable being uncomfortable. I’m okay not being okay. I’m at peace with the process. But like, can it get a little less challenging yet? Don’t I get something for all this work?

Okay. I know. It doesn’t get easier. It doesn’t get easier because teaching is about being in relationship with humans, and more specifically, developing humans. In my case, even more specifically, developing humans who are facing immense challenges every single day. And humans are endlessly complex, and endlessly challenging, and endlessly amazing and resilient and wonderful. Humans are messy and get into conflict and misunderstand and hurt and hate and love and apologize and sometimes say the most astonishing things, like “thank you” and “I care about you” and “I’m proud of myself.”

Teaching will never be easy, because human relationships will never be easy, and that’s amazing. No amount of training or professional development or introspection will ever protect me from the ups and downs of being really emotionally invested in my students, and I don’t want to be numb to the process. I never want to lose the openness that allows for true relationships, those true relationships through which everything is possible.

So my new school year’s resolution is to let go of the idea of “easy.” Bye, easy. I won’t miss the idea of you. Let me embrace the mess and joy of the challenge, instead.

 

 

 

The teacher paradox: it is – and isn’t- about me

Alex Shevrin VenetLeave a comment

The core paradox of teaching is that the work requires us to be both confident and humble, self-assured and self-critical at the same time.

It isn’t about me – it’s about my students. What I need out of a learning experiences comes second to what my students need. Their needs as learners drive my pedagogy.

Yet, it is about me – I need to be a well and healthy person in order to serve my students. So I need to put myself first, find ways to fulfill my intellectual curiosity, and find joy in my day to day experience.

My student’s behavior isn’t about me – it’s about their patterns, their developing brains, their trauma, their mental health, their challenges. When my students disrupt or yell or kick over a chair, it isn’t personal.

And – it is personal. My student who says “I don’t f-ing trust you” – Did I give her enough reason to actually believe that she can trust me? My student who blows out of class again and again – did I create a classroom that was conducive to his self-regulation, or one that increased his anxiety? If I say “it’s not about me” and leave it at that, I’m letting go of my responsibility to meet each student’s needs.

My students’ growth isn’t about me: it’s about their amazing resilience, their families’ years of support, their community and culture and traditions and everything else that goes beyond the six hours a day I see them, and the years of their life they spend in my school. When they are my age, my students might not remember me, nor should I expect or need them to – what matters is that my students grow into the amazing adults I see them becoming.

But? It is about me. And I can take a few quiet moments here at the end of the year to pause and appreciate before I jump back into the work. Sometimes I do make a difference that I can see in the student: he can read more fluently than before, she can more confidently describe the emotions she’s feeling, they can say “I felt cared about this year.” I know I contributed to that and I can feel proud of our work together. And sometimes I make a difference I won’t see, and I can give myself some hope that the student who didn’t succeed while we worked together might carry away some small piece of me to use later when she needs it.

The work continues. We’re never done. It can be easy for the scales to tip into one side or the other, claiming ownership where we should center our students or playing martyr when we should center ourselves. But it’s a beautiful dance to stay balanced in the middle, where the growth happens.