The following is adapted from Brittany Collins’ Learning From Loss.
The teenage brain is especially vulnerable to the effects of grief and trauma. Even though teens lead with their emotional brains, they may become less expressive about their emotional lives. How do we support students dealing with grief and trauma?
With time and consistency, teachers can support grieving students as they make their way back to higher functioning. Schools have the opportunity to intervene in loss processes by creating spaces that are supportive of students’ adaptation and offer stability amid a new and swirling world. Here are some strategies that are readily implementable in classrooms; we will explore more in chapters to come.
Apply an Asset-Based Lens to Challenging Behaviors
Rather than punish or judge behaviors indicative of emotional or behavior responses to trauma, recognize that they are adaptive coping mechanisms meant to serve a purpose: dulling pain, fulfilling an unmet need, reclaiming control in the face of instability. Maxwell’s temper might serve him well when he is protecting his cousin from an abusive partner, just as Miranda’s attention seeking might eke out the focus of her recently widowed mother who works two jobs to keep their family together in a one-bedroom apartment. We have all lived through hard things, and in the face of hard things, we do our best. Teens, too, are doing their best. We can help them by creating supportive environments, teaching and modeling healthy coping mechanisms, and respecting their own efforts to seek salve and survival. Challenging behaviors are almost always creative solutions; they just become maladaptive outside of the contexts for which they were developed.
Consider Context
Although we will investigate strategies that fall within the realm of trauma-informed, grief-responsive teaching, we must not oversimplify or turn away from the complexity, nuance, and pervasiveness of those factors that lead to grief and trauma in the first place. “We are in a tremendously tumultuous time in education,” shared Priscilla. She continued:
In every single classroom we go to, there is trauma. It’s not just urban—it is urban, rural, suburban. Sometimes it is pervasive. Sometimes trauma is event-based, and sometimes it is environment-based. The ongoing level of trauma really impacts the way students learn.
Considering the contexts in which students’ losses occur reminds us to take a step back and appreciate the complexity behind any behavioral changes we see in the classroom. We can then respond to those changes more compassionately while remaining mindful of students’ unique needs, too.
Promote Safety, Connection, and Emotional Regulation
Because students’ losses are often born out of difficulties beyond teachers’ control, it is critical to note that grief is not a problem that teachers should try to fix for their students, but rather a reality to embrace and work through with them. Knowing this, we can take an additive approach to curricular and cocurricular work, asking ourselves, “If we cannot get rid of students’ grief or trauma, how—instead—can we supplement and counteract it? What can we facilitate for grieving students? How can we make classroom communities oppositional to the stressful environments that many students—not only those who are grieving—endure beyond school (and, in many cases, at school)? How can we soothe and steady students in times of stress, without pity or placation, while recognizing the systemic intricacies (violence, poverty, inequity, injustice) that may undergird their losses? Can we cultivate resilience rather than teach grit?”
Redirect Risk-Taking Behaviors
Even without considering for trauma, adolescents are prone to risk-taking; their brains are not fully capable of forethought or impulse control, and these abilities are further diminished in states of grief, stress, and trauma (American Federation of Teachers and New York Life Foundation 2012, 4; Magliano 2015). This means that the outlets teens turn to for relief may involve risk: substance (ab)use, unsafe driving, precarious sexual behaviors, self-harm, and eating disorders, to name a few examples (Nakkula and Toshalis 2006, 42).
But this doesn’t have to be the case. School is a critical environment in which students might find a plethora of alternative coping mechanisms and positive risk-taking opportunities that provide control, relief, and community—what students are likely seeking (if subconsciously) when engaging in potentially harmful activities. Grief outlets might look like rugby, rap, meditation, or the debate team. Activities integrating mindfulness, writing, art, connections with nature, and positive psychology can offer starting points for introducing students to pro-social alternatives to risk-taking behaviors and for building a classroom culture that is supportive of everyone’s regulation, teachers’ included.
Empower Students’ Awareness of Emotional Regulation
Trauma-informed educators Kristen Souers and Pete Hall write in their book Fostering Resilient Learners that students who present challenging behaviors in the classroom (like those listed in Figure 1–2) “are, in essence, having normal responses to not-OK things.”
“To climb out of survival mode,” they tell us, “it is helpful for students to identify the feelings, name the function of their brain, and attune to their biology” (2016, 31).
Teach students about the impact stress has on their brains and bodies by giving them language for the why behind their feelings: Introduce the terms sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system, and discuss how both systems influence the way we feel.
