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From the Article, How to support students experiencing adversity during the coronavirus crisis by Brittany R. Collins April 3, 2020

This is a challenging time for everyone, and teachers are concerned. Concerned for their health and their families. Concerned about equity, access, and best practices as they turn to new online learning-management systems. Concerned about curricular continuity. And concerned for students’ physical and emotional well-being.

In recent years, trauma-informed teaching strategies have offered salve in times of stress, giving educators guidelines for supporting students experiencing adversity. But how can these pedagogies translate to an online context? How can we support students’ social-emotional health and help them process these unprecedented events when we are not sitting in a circle or walking out to recess?

I have found it helpful to keep in mind psychologist Howard Bath’s three tenets of trauma-informed care: safety, connection, and emotional regulation. Although the COVID-19 crisis precludes teachers’ ensuring students’ physical safety, there is much we can do to create online learning environments that feel safe—that foster connection and emotional regulation as we all face uncertainty and potential trauma. “Even as you are helping your students through this difficult time, be sure to honor your own limits as well.”

Research suggests that when adversity feels like a shared experience, we cope better—not only emotionally, but neurologically. That’s (partly) why we should be integrating storytelling into online learning. From teenagers who take to Twitter while mourning the death of a close friend, to middle schoolers who whisper to the paper cutout of an ear taped to their classroom door, trauma studies reveal that the very act of formulating and articulating narratives about our lived realities offers reprieve and promotes resilience.

In your online community, be forthright about your care and concern for students and the contexts in which they find themselves. Establish yourself as a safe person to whom they can turn for support. Do this by directly acknowledging the circumstances we are in and being honest about how this situation impacts you.

Though it is always important to maintain appropriate boundaries with students, calibrated reciprocity is a key component of storytelling. Naming emotions (“I’m feeling stressed and confused”) can teach students, by modeling, that it is healthy to experience, articulate, and process emotions in community. Especially in difficult times.

Countless trauma studies also suggest that establishing a sense of routine in the face of stress helps students maintain (or regain) feelings of control, ensuring that they know what to expect. Something as small as a schedule can help give structure to students’ days in times of upheaval, when very little feels familiar. Imbue online-learning rhythms into your routine: Check in at the same time of day; require reading assignments during a set period; build into your schedule times for debriefing, sharing stories of solidarity, or moments of mindfulness. Knowing what to expect helps calm students and quell concern.

Even as you are helping your students through this difficult time, be sure to honor your own limits as well. Secondary traumatic stress, or compassion fatigue, occurs in helping professionals who are routinely exposed to others’ traumas. Stress changes our brains and behaviors, making emotional regulation much harder to achieve. This doesn’t just mean that the young people we teach may be coming to us dysregulated; we, too, may be teaching from a place of dysregulation. When students’ traumas exacerbate our own, we may respond with a number of self-protective but misaligned mechanisms: retreating rather than reaching out, reacting with frustration, avoidance, denial.

Though paradoxical, these responses often come from a place of caring. We care about young people’s well-being, and we feel powerless to change their circumstances as we witness their pain. This—coupled with the distancing inherent in virtual education—can breed feelings of saturation, isolation, and helplessness, which are precursors to and symptoms of secondary traumatic stress.

Build into your remote working routine time away from screens. Call a colleague, friend, or family member. Get outside if you are able. Read. Cook. Write letters. Protect your emotional reserves so that you may receive students’ distress in a way that meets them where they are, validates what they’re going through, and promotes everyone’s attainment of—and attunement to—emotional regulation.

Know, also, that psychological studies reveal perceived support availability—the sense that one could turn to a circle of connection for help should one need to—is critical to, and perhaps more important than, actual proximity and intervention. This means that virtual reach-outs—letting your students know that you are there and that you care—can make a real difference in their lives, no matter how inadequate it may feel to you.

Remember that education transcends test scores and curricular continuity. Sing out in your own way–fostering connections across generations, time, and space. We need each other, now, and our joining together is itself a defense—an inoculation—against that which seeks to divide us.

Four Core Priorities for Trauma-Informed Distance Learning

Taken from the article Four Core Priorities for Trauma-Informed Distance Learning by Kara Newhouse Apr 6, 2020

Trauma-informed teaching cannot be simplified to cookie-cutter practices. Take this example: a teacher worked with a student to develop a silent signal that he could use when he needed extra breaks during class. Hearing how well it worked, another teacher tried to apply the signal without first building a relationship with the student. It bombed. With the second teacher, the signal became “an angry ear tug instead of a trauma-informed ear tug,” said Alex Shevrin Venet, who shared this story during a recent webinar on trauma-informed distance learning.

Venet is a college professor and consultant who facilitates professional development on implementing trauma-informed practices. She offered her webinar after seeing that, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, “many teachers were reckoning with their own experiences of overwhelming stress and anxiety and for some this offered a new window into what it feels like for students who experience overwhelming stress regularly.” Registration reached its max capacity of 300 participants for all four sessions she offered.

As shown by the ear tug story, what trauma-informed teaching looks like varies for different teachers and students. For that reason, Venet has developed “four core priorities,” rather than “strategies,” for trauma-informed classrooms. During her webinars, she explained the four priorities and how to consider them in the context of distance learning.

Predictability

Trauma can create “intense feelings of unpredictability,” said Venet, and whether students have experienced trauma or not, COVID-19 has upended normal life for kids and adults alike. The loss of our usual habits can cause shock and grief, so one way educators and parents can prioritize predictability is by creating routines. Pennsylvania teacher Elizabeth Raff, for instance, posts a check-in video for her students at the same time every day.

In addition to creating new routines, Venet encouraged teachers to “notice what’s normal” and apply familiar practices to distance learning. With her undergraduate students, she has transferred their usual opening activity, “roses and thorns,” to a message board conversation. And just as teachers might normally schedule a calming activity such as read-aloud after lunch or recess, she recommended planning for dysregulation during distance learning. If a class is meeting through Google Meet, for instance, students may be anxious or excited to see their peers. Creating an opportunity to connect before jumping into instruction will help them be better able to engage in learning.

Flexibility

Because trauma involves a loss of control, inflexible teaching methods can trigger some students into survival mode. Venet encouraged teachers to notice what students need and collaborate with them to find routines, resources and strategies that will best support them. While physical schools provide some level of uniformity, at home the learning environment for each student looks different. Some students have limited Internet or computer access. Some may be responsible for caring for younger siblings while parents work. And some may be working jobs of their own. Venet advised teachers to ask what’s really important in education at this time. Does it matter if students are logging on at a certain time? Can grading be switched to a pass/fail system?

When possible, teachers can ask parents for insights into what their children need right now. For some kids, school work gives them a healthy focus. For others, self-care may be the priority. Venet shared an adage for staying flexible: “there are different paths up the mountain.”

Connection

Relationships are key to resilience, “so anything that teachers can do to help foster relationships should be a priority right now,” said Venet. She’s heard from parents that some teachers are sending impersonal emails checking on whether students have logged into online learning. Such emails can have unintended consequences because people affected by trauma sometimes interpret neutral signals as negative. “I invite (educators) to be crystal, crystal clear with students that you miss them and you care about them,” Venet said. And because the coronavirus pandemic has disrupted many types of relationships, she recommended that teachers also consider how to help students connect with each other, with family and with their community.

Empowerment

Trauma takes power from people, so trauma-informed educators need to think critically about not reproducing that dynamic. Venet said that means dropping power struggles, such as the demands she’s seen that students wear certain clothes or sit in certain parts of their house during distance learning. Rigid expectations can create barriers to learning for trauma-affected students. Educators should focus instead on empowering students through shared decision-making and authentic choice. They also need to model consent by not taking pictures of Zoom calls or sharing students’ work without permission, Venet noted.

Empowerment applies to assignments, as well. “Now more than ever, kids don’t need to be doing fake work. They don’t need to be doing worksheets,” said Venet. “Give them problems to solve. Ask what they’re interested in. There’s so much data coming out right now for them to be working with. There’s so many stories coming out … Give them tools to think about ‘How am I affecting the world around me?’”

More advice for understanding trauma

In addition to the four priorities, Venet shared some reminders and cautions for teachers getting started with trauma-informed teaching.

• Use trauma as “a lens, not a label” to understand students.
• Trauma is a response, not an event. Do not assume that any particular child definitely did or did not experience something as trauma.
• Although the COVID-19 pandemic is creating widespread anxiety, not all kids are experiencing it as stressful. Resources and relationships play a role.
• For some students, school closures may be an escape from the stress or trauma caused by racism, bullying, not seeing themselves in the curriculum, test anxiety and other issues.
• Social and emotional learning can help students, but the systemic issues that create stress and trauma also need to be addressed.
• Trauma is not destiny. Healing is possible.

To access more resources and trainings from Alex Sehrin Venet click here.