This is where our journey begins as we begin to shift our thinking by focusing on healing instead of trauma, calm instead of agitation, pleasure instead of pain, and love instead of hate.
And, in doing so we capitalize on our potential as human beings to strive in achieving positive emotional health and well-being for our students and ourselves.
Restorative Healing and Relationships
Teachers can be at the heart of the solution, serving as the catalyst of protection and as healing agents for those students whom trauma, violence, and crisis affect. We see teachers as agents of mediation. Mediation is a process through which the teacher provides support and experiences to assist students in moving from coping with stress to thriving and flourishing.
For some students, an agent of mediation is someone listening to their fears and concerns; for others, it is someone helping them problem solve or learn new ways to handle situations and conflicts. In this book, you will learn how to naturally embed vital mindfulness and mediation into your classroom so that it becomes part of your common practice and daily routine. You will see evidence of healing already happening in classrooms and how true cultures of health and well-being can transcend the walls of the classroom and permeate throughout the school building to the playgrounds or athletic fields, bus rides, and beyond. And finally, we will provide information regarding why more healing is both required and possible.
Anchors of Support
As educators, we have the ability to not only attend to students’ basic needs but also the capacity to mediate their overall desperations and ensure healthy growth and well-being. More important, we have the power to help circumvent the displacement, hurt, loss, and violence that threaten students’ normal development when we learn to be more conscious of ourselves and in-tune to a student’s circumstance on any given day.
A longitudinal study examining youth at risk from birth to age eighteen shows that even those with previous or ongoing trauma have much better chances of achieving success if they have a strong emotional bond with a role model in their community (Werner & Smith, 2001). For many youth at risk, this role model might not be someone in their family, in which case they need someone in the community to step up. Since teachers spend so much time with their students every day, they are primary candidates for this role.
Learning, teaching, and student engagement directorate Cecily Knight (2007) argues that all people have the trait of resilience but that protective factors enhance that trait. These protective factors as previously discussed in chapter 1 (page 13) include having a supportive relationship with an adult and a sense of optimism about the future.
A related review of literature from Howard et al. (1999) finds that the more protective factors a child has, the greater his or her odds of resilience. However, the risk factors work in the same cumulative fashion where the more risk factors present, the more resilient one needs to be. Knight (2007) also writes that risk factors are less influential in children’s lives than protective factors.
In a review of resilience factors, Ryan Santos (2012) at San Diego State University finds that a compassionate, supportive school environment is of utmost importance. This kind of environment helps students learn how to trust, which is a necessary element in any relationship. Students who have experienced trauma often find themselves in a world of chaos, where they may not have set routines or be able to count on parents to be there and be protective. As trauma experts Margaret E. Blaustein and Kristine M. Kinniburgh (2010) explain, “Trauma often involves children being hurt by others [and] not protected by others. When early relationships are not consistently safe, children may develop a sense of mistrust in relationships” (p. 249). If adults in their world cannot be trusted, it becomes difficult to trust anyone. However, when teachers gain mindfulness skills, they become more responsive to individual students. Through their consistently compassionate interactions with students—including having consistent classroom rules and procedures—they establish predictability and trust.
One way to build more compassionate, supportive environments is to first become more mindful or conscious of students’ needs, the needs they bring to school each day. It is important to note, however, that a school does not and should not have to choose between being caring and having high expectations for their students. In fact, Santos’s (2012) review finds that a caring community and a culture of high expectations are both of vital importance as protective factors in schools.
Providing both nurturing and challenging school environments will help all students succeed. While some might lack this environment at home, it is absolutely necessary that they find it at their schools. Our school families have great potential and opportunity in the course of a school day and year to provide a safe haven for all students. Given the amount of time students spend at school on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis, it is possible and also critical that we create the best environment for our students. Consider a simple equation: How many hours do children spend in classrooms between the ages of five and eighteen, assuming nine months of schooling, with perhaps the equivalent of a month of vacation, and classes from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.? Omitting preschool or summer sessions, look at the following numbers.
6 hours per day × 5 days per week × 4 weeks a month × 8 months a year × 13 years = 12,480 hours in class
Where else, other than at home, do children spend as much time? With 12,480 hours, a staggering amount of time, a precious gift, educators have such an opportunity. We cannot afford to forfeit any time we have with our students. When children are in crisis, when their egos are shattered, and their sense of self-worth is minimized, the most hazardous measure educators can take is to ignore their pain. Despite research showing the importance of a caring adult (Center on the Developing Child, n.d.a; Santos, 2012), too often children’s anguish is ignored as we attend to our curriculum pacing guides, high academic standards, and preset agendas (Hargreaves, 2000; Jardine, 2017; Krashen, 2014; Ravitch, 2016). However, to begin the process of healing, we must provide students more time for mediation from a caring adult—some time to pursue something where they excel and some guidance to help them understand their pains, develop self-compassion, and empower them to heal from within (Cole et al., 2005; Ritchhart & Perkins, 2000; Semple, Reid, & Miller, 2005; Singer & Bolz, 2013).
Where and how do we begin to facilitate change?
Mindsight as the Beginning
For some of the concepts this book presents, we recommend that you begin with yourself. Sometimes it is a matter of pausing and mindfully reflecting, reexamining our beliefs, and looking more closely at our own roles and what we might be able to do in classrooms and schools. We ask that you start with yourself so that you will have sufficient perspective from your own frame of reference—and the insights that come from that direct knowledge and firsthand experiences. It is through this personal journey and expanded knowledge that we as educators gain a better understanding of the students and families we serve. After all, checking in with yourself is one of the first steps toward mindfulness.
Sometimes to truly understand the students we serve we need to take a step back to look more carefully at ourselves. We may have our own suppressed childhood experiences; sometimes for a variety of reasons, we may have compartmentalized our life experiences. However, it helps to turn inward and examine even those things that we find unpleasant, or frightening; perhaps even those things that give us a sense of remorse—the times when we wish we had behaved differently. As we do this, for those who are willing to put forth the effort, we may find that we develop what Daniel J. Siegel (2007) calls our mindsight, our capacity to be aware of what we are thinking, enabling us to truly begin to see