This is the third in a four-part series in which we consider what innovation in the classroom will look like going forward. Thank you to today’s contributor, FFT Board Member Jonas Zuckerman. With over 25 years in education, Jonas is dedicated to building the capacity of educators and providing disadvantaged students a high-quality education by closing equity gaps.

As we emerge from the coronavirus pandemic, American education is facing significant challenges, including the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on historically underserved populations. While we know that the pandemic has exacerbated already existing opportunity gaps, we are still assessing the full magnitude of the impact, partially due to disruption to statewide assessments. At the same time, schools and districts do have local data and are able to use that data to identify student needs. It is critical that schools focus post-pandemic efforts on serving all students, and work to mitigate the impact of the pandemic and school disruptions.

There is also no doubt that the pandemic has changed classrooms and schools, and some of these changes may be part of the solution moving forward. Teachers and schools want to come back to a better future that will permanently close the equity gaps, and there are some opportunities coming out of the pandemic that may have a positive impact.

For example, due to the pandemic, investments have been made in infrastructure, including expanded internet access in rural and urban areas. While there is still not equitable access to the internet, an essential in today’s world, there is better data on the precise nature of the situation including which areas do not have reliable internet service. This thorough understanding of the problem is necessary in order to make change.

Similarly, there has been an investment in hardware devices, which is also essential for an equitable educational system. These, and other investments, were made possible by unprecedented funding provided to schools by the federal government, almost $300 billion across three stimulus bills.

It is also important to note that much of this funding will be available to schools for the next few years, until 2024, as we know that recovery will not be immediate. As a requirement tied to this funding, schools will need to address “learning loss” or “learning disruption” that occurred due to the pandemic. Specifically, schools are required to focus on learning loss, and they must do so in consultation with stakeholder groups. In an even more direct attempt to address equity gaps, Congress required schools to not just address learning loss generally, but specifically to focus on historically underserved populations, including racial and ethnic groups, students with disabilities, students experiencing homelessness, students from low-income families, and other specific student groups. There is a clear and direct mandate from Congress to ensure that schools are attending to the students who need the most support, and it will be the responsibility of schools and districts, with support from states, to fulfill this mandate.

Schools are also required to use evidence-based strategies in their efforts, and there is ongoing research around what the best strategies will be. One specific recommendation for a post-pandemic evidence-based strategy comes in a new report issued by TNTP, in partnership with Zearn, titled “Accelerate, Don’t Remediate,” which offers strong evidence that the best way for schools to help students get back on track is through “learning acceleration,” ensuring students have access to high quality, grade level curriculum and that targeted help is built into the grade level assignments. This report demonstrates why the practice of remediation, or utilizing curriculum from lower grades, is not effective at helping students recover from learning loss. The federal funds provided can help schools both adopt high quality materials and provide professional learning so teachers can implement them effectively in classrooms. This is one example of the type of evidence-based strategy that will need to be implemented post-pandemic, and it is informative because it challenges conventional wisdom about what practices are best. In this case, the remediation strategy has long been used, but this evidence shows it is not effective. In order to move to an equitable, post pandemic world, we will need to continue to challenge conventional thinking about what practices work best, as we cannot utilize the same strategies that created the inequitable system and expect to see different results.

The global pandemic has irrevocably changed the educational system and it is up to all of us to work to ensure that the new system is truly equitable and just.

This is the second in a four-part series called “Fellow Voices” in which we turned to our grant recipients for their insights into what innovation in the classroom will look like going forward. Thank you to today’s contributor, Kari Baransky.

Teaching in this post-pandemic world has been, to say the least, challenging.  There are many times when I think about and question my skills as an educator. Am I doing the best that I can for the students that I teach? Am I creating lessons that help students improve their social skills as well as meet content expectations? Am I being supportive to my colleagues during this trying, ever changing, challenging time?

After asking my students what they miss about their “old” lives, several students were concerned about not remembering how to get along and socialize with their peers. Others were just worried about missing out on the connections that they had built before the pandemic changed their lives.  I wanted to find ways to support the psychological well being of my students.  I researched brain development and how the brain changes when met with adversity.  

After searching for any type of research on SEL and how I could apply it to my students and colleagues I found Richard Davidson’s work.  He spoke about  the four pillars of the science of training the mind: awareness, connection, insight and purpose.

• Awareness is to be self-aware. How many times have you blindly been going through the motions of your day and not realize the impact that you could have had on others? Davidson stated,  “If your mind is distracted, it exacts a toll on your well-being,” 
• Connection is the key to successful relationships and having a positive outlook on life.  
• Insight is the ability to recover from adverse situations. 
• Purpose is having a sense that life has meaning and is linked to faster recovery from negative events. 

Davidson has hoped that people will make cultivating well-being a part of their daily life, like brushing their teeth. “This is a kind of mental hygiene.”  This statement hit home with me because we go through the motions of our lives never taking the time to take care of our own mental stability. I downloaded the meditation app to start to plan a way of introducing the power of meditation to my students and colleagues.  I know that in order for students to embrace something new, it needed to be quick at first.  The app has a variety of meditations for specific purposes, some are less than two minutes, perfect for the middle school student.  Davidson cited research suggesting that meditation can change their underlying brain function. People that have practiced meditation show changes in key brain connections that help with emotional regulation and a quicker recovery from negative experiences. 

Watch Richard Davidson’s TED Talk “How mindfulness changes the emotional life of our brains” here.

I continued my research and found the Learning and the Brain Foundation that offers research based professional development.  This foundation does not endorse a single research company or specific ideology.  Having a variety of researchers agree upon a concept is reassuring for the direction that I am going in. Be on the lookout for information on ways to implement this great research about brain development through meditation and mindfulness, I am excited to share what I find out this summer with my Fund for Teachers Innovation Grant.

[minti_divider style=”1″ icon=”” margin=”20px 0px 20px 0px”]

Kari Baransky teaches math at Washington Middle School in Meriden, CT. With two colleagues, she used a Fund for Teachers grant to research & analyze restorative practices that are used in schools in three European countries to optimize a preventative approach to behavior issues leading to the improved behavior systems and increased empathy among middle school students. See images from their fellowship and read their summary here.

Kari offered the following resources for more learning on the topic of supporting the psychological well being of students:

1. Richard Davidson’s address to the Harvard School of Public Health on training one’s mind to improve well-being
2. The Emotional, Social Brain in Schools online institute – July 12-16 
3. Dec. 2007 Forum recording with Neuroscientist Richard Davidson, The Heart-Brain
4. Social-Emotional Learning and the Brain: Strategies to Help Your Students Thrive by Marilee Sprenger

This morning, SxSWEdu kicked off virtually with a keynote by Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Bruce Perry on the topic of how childhood experiences change the biology of our bodies and brains. The discussion was based on research comprising a book they co-authored called “What Happened to You?” which will be available April 27^th. Because teachers were busy teaching during this livestream, here are a few highlights…

What is trauma?

• Trauma is an experience that can literally influence the way your stress response system works and, as a result, have long-term impact on a person.
• The experience itself is not necessarily the trauma: It’s the ability to manage that experience based on events that have prepared or not prepared one to do so.
• The trauma doesn’t have to be “huge,” but can be “silent traumas” that have equal impact.
• Our body’s stress response systems housed in the brain are malleable in response to the pattern of stressor that we experience. If our experiences with stress are unpredictable (i.e., we have no control over them) we can have changes in stress that look like a “Capital T” trauma. For instance, if a minority in a majority community experience unpredictable “micro aggressions,” those little events make us overly sensitized and makes us biologically predisposed to diabetes, heart disease, asthma, etc.

Oprah’s Main Message

• Our brain development and decision-making patterns are shaped by the first few years of our life experiences. Not 0-6 years, but the first two months of life.
• This is the “Bing Bing Bing Moment”: Traumatic experiences during development change our biology and make us at an increased risk for health problems, substance abuses, etc.. But if look at WHEN those adverse experience take place, it’s the first couple of months.
• Kids with lots of adversity and few relational supports who get into healthy environments after those first two months have worse outcomes than kids who have nurturing first two months and THEN have trauma.
• Key Thing: The older a child gets and the more they struggle, the more the world misunderstands their behavior. “Your inattention and misbehavior” vs. “Something happened to you.”

The Brain as a Layered Cake

• Envision brain as upside down triangle.
• Regulatory systems that control breathing involved in the stress response is the bottom layer, the foundation. When activated, we shut down the top layers of our brain responsible for sensory information, motor skills and reason — the cortex.
• When someone speaks with us, that information goes into lower part of the brain first, through the lower reactionary part of brain, then the emotional part of brain, and, finally, reasoning part of the brain.
• As parents, teachers, therapists, we must figure out how to balance students’ regulatory systems (that bottom layer) before we can reach and teach them. We will never get to where we want to be with students if we don’t address the trauma response.

Regulate to Educate

• When a child’s Initial signal from the world is that they are in a place of danger, even when in a safe place (school), the brain is wired to believe everything is a threat.
• Our brains are exquisitely tuned to the relational cues people are giving. We can’t coach, reason, teach students when they are during their anger. Biologically, it will not work.
• Being “regulated” means being in balance. Our bodies have all these systems to keep us in balance (lungs balance oxygen, for example). Our stress response systems in lower part of the brain are continually getting information from the outside and inside world. One of the major set of signals are the relational milieus, signals from people around us. When we get signals from people around us that we belong, we feel safe. When we don’t, when we feel marginalized or degraded, we feel dysregulated.
• Perry’s main message to teachers: “We must regulate first before you can have any kind of reasoning.”

 

The Pandemic’s Impact on Teachers and Students’ Mental Health

• A Center for Disease Control report states that “beginning in April 2020, the proportion of children’s mental health-related ER visits among all pediatric ER visits increased and remained elevated through October. Compared with 2019, the proportion of mental health-related visits for children aged 5-11 and 12-17 increased approximately 24% and 31% respectively.”
• The question: Will the education community and those who support it be willing to do the things to help these kids become better regulated and restore their resistance?
• This year drained the reserves of educators and children. And, there were many who started this pandemic already on empty.
• The way forward is revisiting the “sequence of engagement” – the brain as a layer cake. When the cortex is shut down and dysregulated, no matter how much we teach, won’t change what’s happening in the cortex. The first thing we must do is help kids get regulated, get back in routine.
• Pushing teachers and students when they’re dysregulated will make it worse and everyone will fall further behind.

How to Regulate?

1. Being with other people. When we’re in the presence of people with whom we belong, we feel safer. Kids need to play with each other. We need to reconnect and encourage relational interaction.
2. Take advantage of rhythm. Rhythm is a gift we have. One of the first primal sets of memories we have is the power of pattern and repetitive memory and being regulated in the womb. Let kids run, dance, play.

Signs of Trauma Teachers Can Look For?

1. Inattentiveness: Either hypervigilance or tuning out (disassociation). Both get labeled as “ADD” and students frequently end up on medications that don’t help.

Disassociation: A lot of teachers’ first thought is: “What’s wrong with this kid? I’m teaching and they are daydreaming.” However, we tend to disassociate to protect   ourselves. Usually, the first thing that shows up with people who have been traumatized is disassociation. This is a confusing presentation for educators. One of the confusing presentations of  disassociation is the student who loves reading. They go to another world. But when they attempt math – they can’t do it. Math requires linear, sequential focus and these kids are dipping in and out of focus. When a kid has all A’s in reading and D’s in math, one could think “I know you’re smart and that you can do it, but you’re choosing not to.” It’s really an example of dissociation.

2. Passivity and compliance: It’s easy for teachers to misinterpret passive and compliant students as quiet little learners who are following direction. If one looks carefully, however, the kids who are doing these compliant behaviors (not always, but often) are wanting to get the teacher to leave them alone.

How Can Our History Bring Clarity?

• Teachers often feel as if misbehavior is directed toward them. However, if students have a history of trauma, everything is fight or flight for them. A teacher’s physical nearness (such as coming up behind their desk) triggers a physical cue.
• If we teach educators about trauma and the responses, teachers can shift in the way they understand the child. Teachers no longer take it personally, but ask, “What happened to you?” and the interaction changes.
• Over the years, children have been punished, ostracized, made to feel shamed by the behavior which only makes it worse.

The Hope

• All parts of the brain are malleable, the key is actually reaching the parts of the brain with sufficient repetition to cause change.
• Children who have these early life insults and profound disabilities during development, if they also have exposure to nurturing relationships, can and will get better. It just takes time.
• “All it takes is one person who believes in you,” said Oprah. “I was saved by Miss Duncan in the fourth grade. All it takes is one person who believes in you and for a lot of children in this world that’s all they have…and that safe place is schools for most kids.”