What is your current level of awareness about the impact of trauma on the lives of students?
Can you think of times when any of your students were triggered into a fight, flight or freeze response? How can you help your students see situations from the viewpoints of others?
Questions such as these – and many more – are helping supervisors of College of Education student-teachers to provide stronger guidance in trauma-informed and restorative practices.
Supervisors participated in four monthly workshops throughout the fall led by three counseling faculty from the Department of Counseling and Higher Education along with the Department of Curriculum and Instruction’s Megan Gerken, Director for Equity Eric Junco and former Senior Director for Student Success Jenny Johnson.
Discussions also explored burnout in the student-teachers – a topic brought to the table by the supervisors.
“There is a certain way we should be talking to our students, and teaching our students, when disciplinary measures are occurring. The first training session involved having people understand what adverse childhood experiences are, how adverse childhood experiences affect the brain and how we as educators can prevent trauma in our classrooms,” Junco says.
“Next, we generated a list of about 20 different questions to help have conversations with our student-teachers,” he adds, “and then we went into scenarios of behavior management issues in the classroom: ‘How does using a trauma-informed lens influence your response to student misbehaviors? What are ways you can help your students regulate their emotions?’ ”
It began with Gerken, who hatched the concept as her project for the Racial Equity Academy.
Knowing that some of the supervisors wanted a better toolkit to coach their students in areas that included adverse childhood experiences (ACES) and social justice, Gerken approached Junco and Johnson.
“Many had not heard about ACES or what the impact is,” Gerken says. “Our ultimate goal was that they’re better equipped to have a conversation with their teacher-candidates – to be open about equity in the classroom and connecting with students so that they’re able to better connect with their own students and that we’re modeling that for them.”
First, they chose a book to anchor their work: “Fostering Resilient Learners: Strategies for Creating a Trauma-Sensitive Classroom” by Kristin Souers and Pete Hall.
Second, they approached new CAHE faculty Yenitza Guzman, Injung Lee and TJ Schoonover, all of whom could address the questions from a counseling perspective.
“At the beginning, we talked a lot about what trauma looks like in the classroom for kids,” Schoonover says. “Sometimes it can look so much like ADHD that they fall into a special education program, or they get IEPs (Individualized Education Programs), when they could just stay in the classroom and get the support they need.”
Educators should focus not just “on the behaviors but also the reason the behaviors are there,” he adds.
“What happened? Why are these behaviors emerging? How can we use our counseling skills in validating and reflecting on just how that student might be feeling rather than just moving to the consequences?” he says. “Some of the behaviors can be so extreme, and teachers just don’t have the time to be able to get all the knowledge they need. It’s very much on-the-job training that they get with this, and it can be very overwhelming.”
Guzman, who previously taught English at Curie Metro High School in Chicago, provided insight from the inside.
“My background is that I was a high school teacher, and then I transitioned to a counselor, so I feel like I have a good understanding of both positions,” Guzman says. “As a teacher, you’re not always fully trained on the social-emotional support that students need, and it’s inevitable that you’ll face that in the classroom as a teacher.”
Newly trained supervisors who share this knowledge with their student-teachers “will have a trickle-down effect.”
“When their future teachers are in the classroom with their students, they’re able to better recognize some concerns that might come up with their students that are non-academic,” she says. “It’s unavoidable that at teacher would only focus on academics and not on the child as a whole, so that’s the approach we were taking as we came in as counselors.”
She hopes the pass-it-on training also will inspire the new teachers to form relationships with the other professionals in their schools.
“It was interesting for me to go back and think about how I started my career, how all of these roles in our schools are so significant and important and how we need to be able to support one another as teachers and school counselors,” Guzman says.
“We really should do a better job of supporting one another and working together,” she adds. “A lot of times, teachers get caught up on the academics and school counselors have 100 things going on. It would be wonderful if we were able to collaborate more.”
Schoonover, who also previously worked as a school counselor, appreciated the glimpse he received of a teacher’s life.
“For us, we see a kid for half-an-hour, and then we move on. I’m in and out in 20 or 30 minutes, and it’s over for me,” he says. “These teachers are with these students for seven to eight hours a day, and so learning more about those experiences and really empathizing more with the stress they go through each day was something I took away from this.”
All of the presenters were grateful for the request to address self-care, something teachers must practice as they inevitably will struggle with their own personal issues as adults and perhaps bring those into the classroom.
Coaching that could take this form, Schoonover says: “ ‘So, this has been a hard day. How are you now going to take care of yourself? What do you need to do to structure the day to help the student and help yourself to get through the day, because it can take a lot?’ ”
Future teachers require the same advice, Junco says, and now will receive it.
“They have a lot of work on their plates. This year, more than any other year in the program, some feel burned out because not only are they doing homework, but it’s the first time that they’re doing all of this heavy emotional lifting in classrooms. It’s the first time that they have to really take this theory from class here at NIU and put it into practice,” Junco says. “And so, because some are feeling burnout, we have to talk about what it means to support them.”
Meanwhile, he adds, “some of the supervisors themselves were burned out because they had all these new stimuli coming to them with all these students with different needs, so we had to start pivoting our training to this idea of boundary work.”
“When we’re in burnout, and when our students are in burnout, our mantra becomes, ‘We can’t take care of our students until we take care of ourselves,’ ” he says. “We started talking about this idea of how we set firm boundaries so that we have a better work-life balance and how we set boundaries with students so that they can really help repair relationships in classrooms.”
Although the workshops concluded in December, a book club that Gerken launched during the fall continues.
“Several people were interested and really liked the book club. We did a poll at the end of the workshops to pick a book,” Gerken says. “Now we’re diving into culturally responsive teaching, and we’re picking a new book each time. We read a chapter and then we talk about it.”
