Battling Stress & Building Relationships
Written by: Alisa Kaczorowski
As educators, we’ve heard the words “trauma,” and “stress,” and “trauma-informed practices,” and “social-emotional learning” a lot over the past few years. While it is a fantastic thing that we are thinking about our students’ social-emotional and mental health needs in the school context, do we really even know what those terms mean? Have they just become the latest buzzwords in education, thrown around for optic’s sake, soon to be replaced by the next latest and greatest fad or “program?” I hope not!
While I happen to believe that being a trauma-informed and responsive educator is critical these days, I also agree those terms are overused and seldom understood. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, childhood trauma is “the experience of an event by a child that is emotionally painful or distressful, which often results in lasting mental and physical effects.” Trauma can be the result of something that is done TO a child, something the child is MISSING or as a result of dysfunction in the household.
Chronic stress, on the other hand, is “a consistent sense of feeling pressured and overwhelmed over a long period of time,” according to Yale Medicine. Anyone can experience chronic stress, including children. In fact, it’s likely that many of you reading this can think of periods of time when you’ve experienced chronic stress.
Here’s the thing that we, as educators, need to remember, though – the way we experience, or process, trauma and chronic stress varies from one person to the next, thanks to a variety of factors, including our past experiences, our genetic makeup and the protective factors we have in place. Therefore, chronic stress can be just as impactful on a person’s brain and body as a traumatic experience. Likewise, we don’t all process similar events in the same way. What causes you days of overwhelm, stress and anxiety may be another person’s minor nuisance.
For some of our students, the stress response is getting a constant workout, causing them to live in a chronic state of activation. This is better known as the flight/fight/freeze response.
Take a minute to visualize this situation – you’re driving to work and sitting in your car at a red light when another car slams into you from behind. What are you thinking and feeling in that situation?
Many of us would be white-knuckling the steering wheel, feeling scared or confused. Perhaps your heart would be racing or your palms would be sweating. Very likely, your brain would be thinking a multitude of things at once – Is everyone ok? Am I ok? Is my car ok? Now I’m going to be late for work! Ugh, now I will have to deal with the insurance company and car repairs.
Now think ahead to the end of the work day when you have to get back into your car and drive home. What are you thinking and feeling now? You are likely anxious about driving, and this feeling could last for days, weeks or even months. Eventually, though, you are able to get behind the wheel of your car and drive to the grocery store without feeling any sort of emotional or physiological response. This is the brain responding to stress in a normal manner.
Imagine living, day in and day out, with that white-knuckled, hands on the steering wheel feeling that you had immediately following the car accident. Does that sound like fun to you? Of course not! That is how many of our students are functioning on a daily basis, though. They are stuck in a chronic state of activation, and any little trigger sets them off. These are the students who have a (seemingly) unbalanced or impulsive response to something small that happens at school. In other words, it seems like they overreact. However, their response is normal, given that their baseline is elevated.
So, how do we help these students have more reflective, thoughtful responses? How do we help them to identify and avoid their triggers? It isn’t easy or quick, but the answer lies with the Vagus Nerve.
“How do we help these students have more reflective, thoughtful responses? How do we help them to identify and avoid their triggers? It isn’t easy or quick, but the answer lies with the Vagus Nerve.”
The Vagus Nerve is a cranial nerve that’s been getting a lot of attention lately, thanks to its critical role in the mind-body connection. One of the primary functions of the Vagus Nerve is to “turn off” the stress response, and we do that by “turning on,” or activating, the Vagus Nerve. While this might sound complicated, it’s actually pretty simple. We activate the Vagus Nerve by practicing strategies such as deep breathing, meditation or yoga, and those activities send a signal to the brain to calm down, thus deactivating the stress response.
These “calm down” strategies can be used reactively, as in the example above, where we are escalated and need to activate the Vagus Nerve, in order to deactivate the stress response. They can also be used proactively, as when we are practicing mindfulness and trying to keep our body and brain in balance. The great news is that the strategies are all the same; we just use them at different times and for different purposes.
This is particularly beneficial for kids because we can teach the strategies when they are calm and responsive to learning. We should NEVER try to introduce a strategy to a child when they are already escalated because the brain is not receptive to learning when it’s in a state of activation. However, taking just 5 minutes at the beginning of the school day, after lunch, recess or gym, during a restroom break, or at the end of the day can go a long way toward strengthening the neural pathways in the brain to encourage more reflective, rather than impulsive, responses.
By introducing and explicitly teaching these strategies as part of a mindfulness practice, we can encourage kids to choose the strategies that feel “right” or good to them and add those to their toolboxes. It’s important that we point out to our students that not all strategies will feel right to them, and that’s ok.
“It’s our job to introduce our students to a wide variety of strategies so that they can choose the ones that work well for them.”
Take a minute to think about what YOU do when you are feeling angry, sad, overwhelmed or anxious. What helps you to feel better? Perhaps you go for a walk, read a book or listen to music. Is there a strategy that you wouldn’t ever choose? Maybe for you it’s exercise, baking or meditation. That’s ok! We all have strategies that work well for us, as well as ones that just aren’t our thing. It’s our job to introduce our students to a wide variety of strategies so that they can choose the ones that work well for them.
So, what are these strategies I keep talking about? Check out the chart below for a list to get you started.
According to a study done at Yale University, teaching our students these strategies will not only aid in their emotional regulation but, eventually, may lead to improved academic outcomes as well. How is that possible?
In order to grasp how this works, we need to understand the brain and how it works. It’s quite simple, really. The brain is a hierarchical structure with four levels – the brainstem, the midbrain, the limbic area and the cortical area. The brain develops sequentially, from the lower levels to the higher levels. Think of it like a staircase. You have to proceed up the stairs, one by one. You can’t skip a step. Essentially, the four levels correlate to survival, emotion, attachment and cognition.
In order for our students to reach the highest level (the cortical area), where learning happens, their basic survival, emotional and relationship/attachment needs must be met. In other words, consider the following questions.
- Do they have what they need to maintain autonomic function (i.e. food, water, exercise, sleep)?
- Do they feel physically and emotionally safe in their home and school environments?
- Do they have emotional regulation tools at their disposal?
- Are they emotionally engaged through their relationships with peers and safe, caring adults?
- Do they feel a sense of belonging in their home and school environments?
All of these boxes (and many more!) need to be checked in order for a student to access the cortical or cognition area of the brain and develop effective executive functioning skills. Take a moment to reflect on a few of your students. Can they check off each of these boxes, or do they struggle emotionally, behaviorally and/or academically?
If our students’ brains are stressed, they are not able to learn, and we must work to ensure that the needs of the lower levels of the brain are met. Two of the most critical things we can do, as educators, to help our students reach the higher levels of the brain are: model, explicitly teach and allow opportunities for practice of emotional regulation skills (which we previously covered) and building, strengthening and maintaining strong relationships with students (read on for an overview or click here to listen to me discuss these more in depth).
Not only does a strong relationship aid a student in moving from survival brain to learning brain, but it can also encourage increased motivation and participation, create a sense of safety, build new neural pathways for learning and serve as an antidote to behavioral issues.
There are a multitude of benefits to the teacher as well. Strong relationships with students can lead to increased job satisfaction and improved levels of happiness, among many others.
So, how do we go about building, maintaining and strengthening these relationships with our students? There are six overarching strategies that we can focus on. For some of us, and with some students, it comes naturally, while it can prove quite challenging for others. It is so critical to remember, though, that every single student in a school deserves to connect on an emotional level with at least one adult in the building so the time we put into this effort is well worth it.
First, we need to know our students’ stories – their preferred name and how to pronounce it, their likes, dislikes, interests, hobbies and culture. We learn these things by talking to our students, showing an interest in them as people and using what we know about them to tap into their background knowledge to connect to new learning.
Second, we need to show our students that we too are human. We can do this by giving them small glimpses into our lives – our family, our hobbies, etc. Humans are curious by nature, and kids especially love learning more about their teachers. We also need to ensure we are modeling the behaviors and social skills we want to see from our students, normalizing the feeling of feelings and explicitly teaching students how to respond to their emotions.
Third, we build and maintain relationships with students by creating a culture of community or family in our classroom and/or school. We create a safe space for sharing, learning and growing and provide structure and consistency with minimal downtime. We provide our students with opportunities to collaborate and learn with, and from, one another. We value the diversity of our students and take the time to learn about differences in culture, traditions, etc.
Fourth, we must build up our students. We become their biggest cheerleader by fostering a growth mindset, setting high expectations for all students and embedding student choice into our classroom. We praise effort over outcome and provide students with clear and timely feedback to help them grow. We build awareness around our interactions with students and work to have more positive than negative interactions with them. We celebrate their work and share positive feedback with parents and guardians.
Fifth, we thoughtfully interact with our students by avoiding unnecessary authoritative directives, providing reasoning for directions, using private, nonverbal redirections when appropriate, giving students autonomy in the classroom, being aware of our tone, voice level and body language when communicating and avoiding known triggers and power struggles. We need to remember that we are 50% of every interaction with a student and the way we communicate with them can either make or break the relationship.
Lastly, one of the most effective ways we can build relationships with our students and their families is by being an advocate for them. You know your students better than anyone else in the school. You know their strengths, weaknesses and individual needs and are in the best position to fight for what is best for them, when necessary.
So, how do we get started building a more trauma-informed and responsive mindset and classroom environment? My best advice is to pick just one thing – one strategy, one piece of information, one particular aspect that’s been discussed – and run with it. Focus on that one small thing in your classroom for a quarter, a semester or even an entire school year. Do that one thing really well and then build onto the next thing.
You know yourself, your students and their needs better than anyone else. You know what will make the biggest impact in their lives. You know the areas in which you could improve as an educator (it’s ok, we all have them!). Take a moment to be honest with yourself and reflect on these things, and the path forward will likely come to you.
Now, go out and be the expert educators you are and continue making a HUGE difference in the lives of your students. They need you.
Please explore a full playlist of videos on the topics covered in this blog.
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