I Wish My Teacher Knew

by Kyle Schwartz

  And when I looked in the face of a hurting child and said, “I know where you are coming from,” it would be true.

  I want teachers to know you don’t have to have walked in a child’s shoes to support them, but you do need to be honest. Like me, many of your students who have suffered from abuse or neglect cultivate a deep distrust of adults and each well-meaning, but broken, promise builds up their defenses. With the children and families I now serve, I strive to only make promises I can keep.

  2. Promises We Can Keep

  Sophia’s story speaks volumes about the impact our words can have on children when they are in the middle of a crisis. It is so tempting to reassure students and tell them everything will be okay, but that is simply not something we can guarantee. However, there is plenty we can say to children that is both reassuring and true. I encourage teachers to think about true statements they can make to students and have them at the ready.

  3. Regulation Activities

  Students who have been exposed to adverse childhood experiences may react differently than others in your classroom. Even long after a traumatic event, children can reexperience fear and terror when sensory input reminds their brain of the previous trauma. For example, a door being slammed, the lights shutting off, or an unexpected touch may seem normal to those of us who have not experienced trauma, but can trigger an intense reaction from children who have. Trauma exposure can cause a student to enter a hypervigilant state in which their body is responding as if there is still an active threat.

  When a student is in this heightened state, talking usually doesn’t help because they aren’t able to think logically. Resist the urge to lecture a student or offer advice. Instead, teachers can respond by offering regulation activities. It is a good idea for the child to practice completing regulation activities before he or she is in a hyperattentive, agitated state so they will know how to do the activity when they need it.

  A powerful way to teach self-regulation is simply to model it. The act of teaching can be arduous and frustrating, which presents a great opportunity for teachers to model the self-regulation skills we want to develop in our students. While I am a teacher, I also happen to be a real person who gets frustrated and irritated when I am interrupted. There was a time when my class had not yet developed the self-control to not shout out their thoughts. I kept track of how many times I had to stop and redirect the class; it was forty-two times while reading just twelve pages of a picture book. That’s almost once a sentence! I was at my limit and felt overwhelmed and frustrated. So I stopped reading the book and did a breathing exercise.

  I often stop my class to calm myself and other times to refocus my students. I might do this three to ten times a day. Really. I say, “I am frustrated and in order to teach you I need to be calm, so I am going to breathe slowly.” This signals to the kids that there needs to be a change in behavior and gives them a living example of how to do it for themselves.

  Regulation Activities for the Whole Class

  Music

  Research shows that classical music can help calm students. Upbeat pop music has a similar effect if used thoughtfully. Many popular artists’ songs express positive themes such as gratitude, self-appreciation, and kindness. Janessa Malisani, a fifth-grade teacher at my school, uses a new popular song each week to practice fluency, learn figurative language, and discuss how each song’s themes relate to her students’ lives: “By the end of the week, many of my students are singing the song and dancing in their chairs. It’s so great to see the classroom grounded in positivity and joy, while teaching necessary skills.”

  Breathing Activities

  Slow and meditative breathing can help a student regain a sense of calm. Former third-grade teacher Susana Moening introduced the Cortices breathing practice to our school. As a class, we take about forty-five seconds after lunch to breathe slowly as we lightly tap our head and heart. There are so many breathing activities that can be used in a classroom. Find one that works for your students.

  Positive Self-Talk

  Having a mantra or a class chant can help establish a culture of self-regulation. This can be as simple as “I know I can be calm.” When I worked in DC Public Schools, all the students at Stanton Elementary stated, “What my mind can conceive, my heart can believe, I can achieve” each morning during announcements.

  Regulation Activities for Individual Students

  Bounce-Back Boxes

  Offer a small box with calming activities tailored to a specific student’s interests. The box may contain clay, stuffed animals, or coloring materials. For older students this might be headphones for listening to music or even handheld electronics. For some students I include an egg timer so they can monitor how much time it takes them to “bounce back.” Remember, it may take more time than you think for a student to regain a calm state of mind.

  Safe Place

  As in Jodi Grove’s classroom, a safe place should be established beforehand. Students need to know where to go, what will happen there, and that they will not be in danger. These spots can be established in individual classrooms or can be a single space available to the whole school.

  Video Games

  Yes, video games! Once, a child in my classroom had an intense reaction to his father being deported. This caused him to enter a dysfunctional state several times a day. One day, he even attempted to jump out of a second-story window. While our school worked to support him through this time, we found that allowing him to play a simple race car game on a computer brought him to a calmer, more rational state of mind where he could feel safe and be helped.

  When a child is in an agitated state, a simple video game can be a perfect way to have them shift their focus from a trauma-triggered hypervigilant state to a calming activity. Simple games like Pac-Man or Tetris are engaging, but don’t demand a ton of cognition or attention.

  4. Take Care of Thyself

  If there were commandments for teaching, the very first etched in stone should be “Take care of thyself.” Oh, what a difficult commandment this is to follow. I still struggle with it. Most of my evaluation and feedback conversations end with my caring principal urging me to “Take more time for yourself. We don’t want you to burn out.”

  If we are going to help our students through challenging times, we must make sure we are working to resolve our own issues as well. We all have experiences and feelings we need to work through, confidences we need to build, stresses we need to release, and interpersonal conflicts we need to manage.

  Dealing with what our students share with us has an effect on us. A while back, a fellow Denver teacher asked me how I deal with the difficult realities I learn about my students’ lives. How do I manage knowing about tragedies and traumas children should never have to experience?

  He said his high school students completed an exercise similar to “I wish my teacher knew.” He helped his students compose personal memoirs that told stories of significant moments in their lives. From this one assignment, four of his students were brave enough to confess they had been sexually assaulted.

  As teachers, we wonder if we can possibly support our students through the challenges and problems they face. How can we even bear to hear about all the heartache in our classrooms? I confess I do not have a complete answer to this. I too feel overwhelmed at times by knowing some of the realities my students face.

  I go back to a wonderful educator who was my mentor teacher, Rachel Bernard. She told me, “I get the courage to listen and be supportive during the most traumatizing events in my students’ lives from the children themselves. If a child is courageous enough to open up to me about what they have experienced, I can be brave enough to listen. My strength comes from their strength, my hope comes from their hope.” In the end, I would always rather allow a student to feel heard, even when it hurts to listen.

  We can and should take comfort in the fact that by working through our own doubts, insecurities, and traumas we are helping our students do the same for
themselves. And we are creating a safe and secure environment in our classrooms.

  What would this actually mean? Certainly, teachers need to take responsibility for maintaining their own mental health. But there is also an opportunity for us as educators to create understanding cultures in our schools that are supportive of teachers dealing with some of the same struggles and challenges we want to support our students through.

  We can push our school districts and local governments to provide our education professionals with the programs and policies that support their mental and emotional health. It’s also important to remember that we can find support from fellow teachers, commiserating and celebrating with others who know the unique realities and responsibilities of our job.

  It may seem counterintuitive that, in order to take care of our students, we must first take care of ourselves. There is always so much to be done for our students each day. At least for myself, it is hard to justify taking time, even outside of the school day, to focus on my needs. Yet teachers need to have the emotional and mental space to truly teach and help their students.

  The verb in “teacher” is “teach.” If we want to do this we must meet our students where they are. Some might say that educators should leave the work of supporting students through trauma to others. But the truth is that teachers are at the front lines of child abuse and endangerment. We are truly the first responders. We see students every day and are in a position of trust. In some cases a teacher is the only adult an abused child trusts; to a child in your classroom you might be the only adult they have a relationship with who is safe and stable. In fact, according to the Department of Justice, “Of all professionals, teachers are the most likely to be told” by a child about abusive situations.

  Tell Me Something Terrible

  In sharing my students’ words, I have been asked if the “I wish my teacher knew” lesson goes too far. Some worry that it might get too personal, might blur the imaginary line between school and home. People wonder, “What if you find out something you don’t want to know? What if you find out something terrible?” The truth is, I want to find out something terrible.

  My greatest fear as a teacher is that a child will feel forced to hold a painful secret, a secret that if not released could mean they live in fear or harbor a sense of deep shame; that they would be condemned to bear this secret alone. I worry that a child might be going through something I could help with, some trauma that could be addressed if only I knew about it.

  The “I wish my teacher knew” lesson is an invitation for these secrets to be released if a student is ready. Children are given permission to open up about whatever they feel is most important. If that means they are brave enough to tell me about a trauma, however terrible, I welcome it.

  A fellow educator recommended to many teachers at her school that they try the “I wish my teacher knew” lesson. She told me that of the hundreds of students who completed the activity, about ten children gave answers that were truly cries for help. In one instance, a teenage girl opened up about being sexually abused. When given the opportunity to ask for help, she was brave enough to do so. She is now protected from her abuser and is being given the help she needs to heal.

  We want to know kids in all their facets, all their experiences, wonderful and terrible. We teachers want to know the terrible, the heartbreaking, the painful. We do not run away from scary or complicated situations; we run toward them, as a first responder would. We can only support our students in overcoming these difficult situations if we are aware of them.

  I am an educator. I am not a social worker or a therapist. I do not have expertise in trauma or abuse. Since that is the case, I know my boundaries. Part of developing my practice as an educator is understanding when and how I can serve students within my own skill set and abilities. If an issue a student brings me is not within ability to support, I seek resources and the expertise of others.

  However, as a third-grade teacher, it is always within my capabilities to care for and listen to the voices of the children in my classroom. I choose to be an ally for my students even during times of hardship. By striving to create a trauma-informed classroom environment, I know I can ameliorate the effects of abuse and trauma, which I see as both moral and legal imperatives.

  Teachers are truly on the front lines. We act as first responders to identify and report concerns, as well as provide healing to students simply by listening, understanding, and empathizing. As teachers, the relationships we build with students matter. Every day in their very own classrooms our students deserve to have access to an adult who is genuine, consistent, and reliable. We can buffer trauma and prove to students there are adults who can be trusted, so that we can support rigorous learning in our classrooms.

  6.

  Value-Driven Classrooms

  A School Culture That Develops Character

  If you don’t work in education, you might not understand what a teacher’s job really is. If you think our job is to teach students reading, writing, and math, you’re wrong. Teachers teach students, not subjects. We are in the business of growing people by creating situations in which students collaborate, think critically, and solve problems. This requires that our schools and all teachers take an active role in developing the children in our classrooms not only as scholars, but also as human beings with strength of character.

  Developing a Moral Code

  Psychologists understand morality not in terms of its inherent presence or absence, but rather as something that develops as a child learns and grows. The initial leader in the field of moral development was psychologist and researcher Lawrence Kohlberg. His research, which built on the theories of fellow psychologist Jean Piaget, presented participants with a series of dilemmas and identified three different stages of moral development. While there has been criticism of Kohlberg’s work (especially given that it focused on the experiences of Western males), his three stages are a useful tool in understanding how children develop moral reasoning skills.

  In Kohlberg’s levels of moral development, children begin at a preconventional stage where their moral reasoning is focused on obedience and “avoidance of punishment.” Then they shift to look at moral decisions based on the rules of society and how they will be perceived by others. This stage, focused on being “good,” is called the conventional stage. We have all had students in our classroom who built their identity around being the “good kid.” I once had a girl in my class who was visibly nervous at the thought of “getting in trouble.” I talked with her and staged reprimanding her in front of the whole class, just so she could see that making a mistake and being corrected was nothing to fear.

  Ultimately, some children will reach a postconventional stage where they examine societal rules to determine what justice means to them and begin to follow “self-chosen ethical principles.” It is important to note ethicist and psychologist Carol Gilligan’s theory, which adopts the same three levels, but contends morality is care based and that people follow ethics based on their care of others.

  Theories of moral development help us teachers understand that morality exists on a continuum. But I also see another key takeaway from analyzing how moral development fits into our classrooms. If we want to develop highly moral students, our goal should not be to create compliant, rule-following “perfect students.” Our ideal should not be schools with silent hallways, where students never interrupt. These schools might have obedient students who avoid punishment, but they are not necessarily the most morally developed.

  According to this theory, a student with advanced moral development will create their own code of ethics. It might align with the values of the school, but it might also be different. A student with advanced moral development might be someone who questions the authority of a school, especially when the school or its policies are inequitable. And, given the reality of the achievement gap in American schools, it would be hard to make the argument that our nation’s schools are equitable. I am not saying t
hat schools should do away with rules or expectations for behavior, but I do think a highly moral school culture might also value productive rebellion based on strong and solid principles.

  Impact of Character Education

  The term “character education” can be a bit ambiguous, since it is an umbrella term, and because its meaning has changed over time. The US Department of Education has defined it as “an inclusive term encompassing all aspects of how schools, related social institutions and parents can support the positive character development of children and adults.” The definition continues: “Character education teaches the habits of thought and deed that help people live and work together as families, friends, neighbors, communities and nations.” Character.org, a privately funded nonprofit organization that works with schools, districts, and other organizations to develop character in students, adds that it “addresses many tough issues in education while developing a positive school climate.” For me, character education means an effort by the whole school community to positively develop a strength of character that will help students live in our society both today and tomorrow.

  What My Teacher Doesn’t Know

  Katherine Ocaranza Cortés

  All throughout school I was the kind of student teachers loved having in class. Always studious and attentive, I took the utmost care with my schoolwork and participated in clubs and academic contests that extended my learning as far as I could. But, in my senior year of high school, my classmates and I pushed our learning far outside the classroom, so far that we shut down our school—for nine months.