Adapting When the Plan is Interrupted - Focus on the Goal

Friday, I was psyched about the playlist I was going to use as I subbed for Jay's indoor cycle class.  It was as close as I would be subbing to Juneteenth, so I had constructed the class around Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Tina Turner, Otis Redding, Della Reese, Jon Batiste, Fantasia Barrino, even Della Reese and Bobby McFerrin.  I always play some music at a low level while people are arriving, but I didn't know until a few minutes before the start of class that I couldn't make the volume go any higher.  (Coincidentally, one of the pieces of feedback I got after last week's observation was that I should make the music louder, and here I was unable to do so.). I tried a few trouble shooting ideas, but none of them worked.  I attempted to change to a portable speaker, but I didn't have the right cord to connect with my iPod (yes, I still use one).  I started class and apologized for how quiet it would be.  One of the directors came in a few minutes later to attempt to fix the system, but she couldn't make it work either.  A person entered with a cord for the portable player.  It did make it louder, but there was some kind of glitch in it that wouldn't allow it to play the vocal track.  I kept going with the class while attempting to make things better with the music.  Thankfully, the members of the class were very patient, and we all got a good workout (but I was bummed that my great playlist wasn't be heard - I'll definitely use it another time).  

Throughout the class, I remembered several of the questions Julie had asked me when she interviewed me for the job. "What experience do you have with adapting to things when they don't go according to plan?  How do you adapt?"  As with most questions, my teaching experience had a lot to inform the answer.  Things interrupt the plan all the time in the classroom.  It turns out that students don't have the prerequisite knowledge they need to understand today's lesson.  The fire alarm goes off while you are in the middle of a critical problem, or worse, mid-lab experiment.  A spider crawls across someone's desk (if you aren't an educator, trust me, this VERY much interferes with whatever plan you have for the day).  My answer to Julie when she asked was that I stayed focused on the goal, not the method for achieving it.  That's definitely what I had to do on Friday, but it was not the first time, and I'm sure it won't be the last.  

Students need to see that the goal is what matters.  It's okay to get a little flummoxed while you figure out how to shift gears when the video won't play or internet is down when you had a great digital activity planned, but you shouldn't spend the whole period on it.  You should ask yourself what the learning goal of that experience was.  Can you accomplish it through direct instruction even if you didn't plan to?  Can you teach tomorrow's lesson today and hope the internet will be back in strength tomorrow?  Can students work on a project today so you have time to try to make the video work for tomorrow?  Moving the learning forward is the main goal, not the ideal order or method you had planned.  

In addition to students seeing that the goal matters, they will see that setbacks don't have to be fatal.  In his new book, Uprise, Kevin Washburn talks about having A and B goals.  The A goal is what you want to achieve if everything goes as planned, but the B goal should be your definition of success if conditions are not ideal.  If you model this for students, they will benefit on something larger than the academic level.  They will see resilience, a characteristic they will very much need "in real life," as they say.  And people do notice.  Young or old, students notice the teacher's response to things.  On Friday, one of the senior gentlemen in the room came up to me afterward and said he liked that I maintained a good attitude and wanted to know when I would be teaching again.  Teenagers will notice too.  

Reflections on Learning and the Brain 2022 - Resilience

My raw notes are posted earlier on this blog, but they don't do much for me unless I mush it all together in my head to summarize and synthesize.  With that in mind, the next few posts will be my own reflections of some sessions.  This one is mostly out of a presentation by Dr. Deborah Gilboa, but there is a little from Dr. Jessica Minahan in here as well.

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Mental health is a spectrum, from healthy to coping to struggling to unwell.  There is a wide range of what is acceptable for physiological conditions (between dehydrated and overhydrated, for example).  There is also a wide range of what is acceptable for mental conditions.  Being sad for a couple of days, dealing with some changes, and having a day where you overreact to small annoyances is still within the range of acceptable.  The same is true for students.  Don't overinterpret one off day here and there, but if something surprises you, match your level of surprise to curiosity about the cause.  All change is stressful (even very good changes), so the surprising behavior may come from a minor cause or a major one, but it is a good idea to ask some questions.

There's a reason all change is stressful.  Your brain has a lot of functions, but it only has one job - to keep you alive.  Right now, sitting here, reading this, you are alive.  Your brain likes this state, so it says, "Why don't we just stay this way?"  When a change happens, no matter how good, your brain responds with, in the words of Dr. Gilboa, "Okay, cool.  Could ya die, though?" While she was speaking, my mind also remembered listening to the book Peak over the summer.  He talked about homeostasis as our reason for growth.  When you exercise, for example, the demand of your muscles for oxygen remains the same, but you are trying to distribute it to more places.  Your body grows capillaries to maintain the amount of oxygen the muscle gets.  So, paradoxically, your body changes in order to keep things the same under changing conditions.  

In order to keep you "safe," your brain preserves the status quo through three safety mechanisms, recognition of loss, distrust of those causing change, and avoidance of discomfort.  If you look at the trends of the pandemic, you can definitely see this.  In the spring of 2020, we all cried about lost events and opportunities (lost proms and plays and graduations and wedding ceremonies and family dinners).  After a few weeks, you begin to see distrust replace the loss.  People started, not just questioning the experts, but calling them evil and threatening them.  But where we got stuck was in avoiding discomfort. We were all at varying degrees of discomfort with masks or social distancing or plexiglass (the one I hated most), so we complained about them, petitioned against them, or just gritted our teeth until they went away.  To get beyond these mechanisms without getting stuck in them, we must build the skill of resilience.

First, it is important to define resilience.  Many of us would use some kind of phrase like "bouncing back" from a challenge as defining resilience.  The problem with that is that we are not elastic, and we should not expect to return to the exact same shape we were in before the change happened.  We need a definition that helps us understand adaptation as opposed to returning to the previous state.  Dr. Gilboa's definition of resilience is

"The ability to navigate change and come through it the kind of person you want to be."

It's about character goals.  Define what kind of person you want to be in your life, not what circumstances you want to have.  Then, build the skills necessary to maintain those qualities even as the circumstances change.

So, how do we do that?  There are things we can teach students to do (or do ourselves when we are stressed) to help break the loss, distrust, and discomfort cycle.  

• Storytelling - I'm not talking about teaching kids to write (although that could certainly help).  This is about having students state the truth from their perspective.  Can they accurately describe what is happening?  Sometimes, when we are stressed, we can have distorted perceptions and inaccurate thoughts.  When a student says, "I just cannot do anything right," having them list a lot of things they do well will make them better truth-tellers, and having a more accurate picture of reality will help calm the amygdala stuck in the fight, flight, or freeze response.  I once watched a colleague do this with a student.  She was going to speak in chapel and was understandably nervous.  He said, "What's the worst that can happen?"  She said, "I could freeze up and not be able to speak."  He replied, "Will I stop loving you?  Will your parents stop loving you?  Will Jesus stop loving you?"  As she answered "no" to each question, she started to giggle and recognized that her reality was not as scary as she had previously thought.
• Problem-solving - Most secondary teachers do teach kids to solve problems all day long, but they are math problems, physics problems, tech problems, and writing problems.  We need to look to elementary teachers to help our students continue to develop their ability to solve their life problems. Helping a student identify something they can actually do helps them figure out how to navigate the change in their lives.  Dr. Gilboa talked about her friend who teaches first grade.  For those who don't know, first graders ask for help with a problem 478 times per day.  Multiply that by 20, and you can make a teacher absolutely crazy.  So, she asked her friend how she handled that.  She said, "I look up from what I am doing and say, 'You're a good problem solver. What do you think?'"  That's brilliant, and I will be using it on Monday.   
• Asking for Help - We give students mixed messages about asking for help.  Kids will do something outside of their capabilities and make a huge mess, and we will say, "Sheesh, why didn't you just ask for help?"  However, sometimes, when a kid asks us for help, we will respond with, "Well, have you even tried?"  Understandably, they are confused about when they should ask.  I loved Dr. Gilboa's criteria.  She said, "If someone is in physical danger, they should ask an adult for help immediately.  That's above their pay grade, and they should not attempt to solve it first."  If that does not exist, they should try two things before they ask for help from an adult.  That causes them to develop problem-solving because they have to come up with a couple of ideas and see how they work.  It also helps them identify the right people to ask when it comes to that.

So that's what the stressed person can do.  How can we respond to stressed people to help them build resilience?  First, respond with

• Empathy - Don't stop reading (looking at you, Ben).  We have badly defined empathy over the years, calling it "feeling with them" or mirroring.  That's a terrible idea.  Empathy really just means communicating that you care about them and what they are feeling.  Even when instituting a consequence for poor behavior, you can validate a feeling.  You share humanity, so communicate that.  Dr. Jessica Minahan gave a couple of simple examples:
• "You seemed stressed.  How can I help you?"
• "I hate it when that happens."
• "I have some ideas. Would you like some advice?"
• Transparently sourced information - As teachers, we spend a lot of time trying to teach kids about the credibility of sources and where they get their advice.  We need to model that as well.  When kids ask why we are doing something different, it's not disrespect; it's engagement.  They are trying to participate in the thinking process.  If we say, "Just do it because I said so," we rob them of understanding why the change is happening.  If we read an article that says something will improve learning, we should tell them that.  If you just saw it on Pinterest, own it with some humility, and then get your information from better sources.
• Processing time if possible - Sometimes, we can't give students time to adjust to change.  If the fire alarm goes off, we have to respond immediately, and we'll deal with the stress it caused later.  But, if we can give them some warning, we give them time to adjust.  "Hey guys, I'm going to change the seating chart next week" gives your anxious student time to anticipate it and deal with their stress about it.  Elementary teachers often give five-minute warnings before a transition; it isn't going to hurt secondary teachers to do the same.  One thing we need to consider, though, is that screens are so absorbing, time tends to slip.  As a result, our students don't have an internal sense of what five minutes means.  Consider adding an interpretation of five minutes - like "We only have five more minutes on the playground.  That means you can go on the slide three more times."  
• Reasonable autonomy - Giving kids a choice, any choice, even small ones will give them a sense that they can adjust to change.  You can say to a kid, "Would you like to go get some water before we talk about this?"  Have your class vote on whether they would like to learn their new seats at the beginning of class or at the end.  We do not give them unlimited freedom (that would actually cause more stress), but when we give just a little bit of control, it turns down the amygdala and gets them back into their prefrontal cortex, where thinking happens. 

Resilience is a skill, not a character trait.  Teach them the skill.

We Don't Know Yet

Do you know anyone who grew up during the Great Depression?  Pause for a moment and think about that person.  Think about the ways in which they are different from other people.  Listen to their stories, and you will understand that their childhood experiences very much formed their current personality and way of living.  They save things the rest of us throw away.  They find joy in small things the rest of us don't notice.  While no one would have wanted them to endure the struggle they had to endure, it also made them the most gritty, resilient, and resourceful generation America has ever produced.

The 24-hour news media runs out of new ways to talk about the pandemic, so they have switched gears.  They are now bringing on psychologists to predict what our kids will be like when they are adults as a result of masking and remote learning.  Given that neuroplasticity takes time, there is no way to know what is happening.  They might as well bring on a psychic to have an argument with an astrologer to talk about what these kids will be like as adults.  

The truth is we do not know what impact this pandemic will have on our students.  For that matter, we don't know what the experiences they were having before the pandemic were having.  We know they are experiencing high anxiety, but I also remember that we were talking about their high levels of anxiety before the pandemic.  What we don't know is what effect living through that anxiety will have.  Perhaps, it will make them fearful adults, or perhaps the recognition that they persevered through it will make them strong adults.  We went into remote learning almost overnight, so it is possible this will produce adults that fear sudden change is always around the corner.  It is also possible that change won't be the scary thing for them that it has been for others because they have lived through adapting to them.  The biggest fear seems to be that masking will make them all unable to interpret facial expressions and social cues.  I suppose that is possible, but it could also be that they will be better listeners or people more adept at looking people in the eye to read social cues.  Perhaps they will care more about equity.  Perhaps they will be resourceful in ways we cannot imagine.

What is most likely is that there will be a mix of people coming out of this, some more resilient and resourceful, others more fearful.  There will be some who respond to change well and others who don't.  While we like to speak in broad generational terms (like I did while speaking of the kids of the Great Depression), the reality is that they are individuals.  They will respond, react, and adapt in their own individual ways, just as they would have to whatever might have happened if there hadn't been a pandemic.  

Let's stop pretending we know the future and deal with what is in front of us.  For now, masking is necessary to keep them safe.  Could there be mental health issues that result from that?  Certainly, there could be.  What gets left out of that discussion is the mental health effect that comes from the death of a classmate.  In some places, remote learning is still the norm.  Will there be long-term impacts from that?  Of course, there will be.  It's just arrogant for us to think we know what those impacts will be.

So, instead of attempting to predict the future, let's deal with the present.  If there is a student in front of you that is struggling, support them through it.  If there is a student who is fearful, encourage them.  If there is a student who is showing resilience, cheer that on.  Do what you would have done if a student had been fearful or struggling or showing resilience before the pandemic.  It's all you can do.

Learning and the Brain Reflections - Concerning Behaviors and Traumatized Kids

When I was in college, I took a class in Classroom Management, where I was told that the right set of procedures would prevent most behavioral problems.  While I believe procedures are important, it is naive to think that all behavior issues come from students not knowing what to do next (some are, and you should have good procedures, please don't mishear me).  We don't teach robots that will function exactly as expected as long as we program them correctly.  We teach humans, who each come to us with a personality (not a personality type or Enneagram number, but an individual personality), a family history, a culture, a personal history, and, unless you teach kindergarten, past experiences with teachers.  They will each respond differently to our classroom climate.  Smiling at some students makes them feel secure while smiling at others can make them feel manipulated.  And, of course, it is a room full of sinners led by a more experienced sinner; so occasionally, you will have to deal with students who behave in ways that are concerning.

While listening to Dr. Ross Greene describe the Collaborative and Proactive Solutions model of handling student behavior and hearing his passion for kids as he talked about his organization, Lives in the Balance, I couldn't help but think about my camp kids more than my school kids.  That's because the majority of students he works with are kids from difficult backgrounds or who have experienced trauma.  In her book, The Connected Child, Dr. Karen Purivs called them "children from hard places."  While I have to filter some of what he says through a different worldview than his (my belief that some actions come from our sinful nature and his belief that all behaviors are formed by experience), his model is still a great approach, especially for kids who have experienced trauma.  

He starts with a simple paradigm shift in the adult's thinking.  We have often spent our mental resources asking "What's wrong with this kid?" when it might be more helpful to think "What happened to this kid?"  Dr. Purvis has a similar thought with different wording; she says to view their concerning behavior an expression of an unmet need.  Both of these approaches cause us to focus less on fixing the behavior and more on addressing the source of the behavior.  Rather than a short-term, aspirin-like approach; it is a long-term, antibioticesque approach.

He then recognizes that a person with a difficult past was likely not taught the same skills as we were, so it is likely that the student doesn't possess a skill he might need to help him self-regulate his behavior.  He might be lacking executive function (decision making), communication skills (including language processing), emotional regulation, or even some cognitive processes.  All of these can be influenced by childhood trauma, neglect, or abuse; so it is important not to assume they have the skills they need.  Dr. Greene's website, livesinthebalance.org has an assessment tool for identifying the lacking skills.

Once you know what you are dealing with, he recommends a three-step approach done in teamwork with the student.  

• The first step is what he calls the Empathy Step.  It could just be called the Listening Step.  It means asking the student what they think the source of the problem is.  You may learn something you didn't expect.  Ask them what they find hard about meeting whatever expectation you have set that they aren't meeting.  
• The second step is to define the adult's concern.  Explain to the child why the expectation you have set for them matters.  Sometimes, kids think we make rules just to make rules (and if that's the case, we should re-evaluate that).  They may not realize why a rule matters until we explain it to them, especially a kid whose experience with adults is one in which the adult has exploited their power.  While you may not feel you should have to explain your rules, it goes a long way in building trust with a child whose trust has been broken.  
• Dr. Greene calls the final step The Invitation.  It involves asking the student "Might there be a way to accomplish (insert expectation) while taking care of (insert child's concern)?"  You then allow the child to make suggestions first.  This step may take a while because the solution must be realistic and mutually satisfactory.  It must result in the student meeting the expectation.  That's a lot to get out of one suggestion, so it may require some time.

If you are thinking, I will never have time to do this with every student every time there is misbehavior, don't fear.  This is not a suggestion for every student and every behavior.  There's a reason Dr. Greene's organization is called Lives in the Balance.  Most of your normal classroom management and relationship techniques will work for most of your kids.  This is to help with that one kid for whom those techniques have not worked.  Other kids will see the change in that one kid, and it will go a long way toward your overall classroom atmosphere.  Taking this approach will take a lot of time with one student, but it will ultimately save you time as the students with these problems almost always possess incredible leadership and superpower levels of observation (because they had to be able to read the mood of their abuser).

Some of the other speakers (Jimmy Casas and Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg, MD) said things that my mind connected with this as well.  I would specifically credit them with each thing they said except I don't remember who said which thing.  (By that point on Sunday morning, my brain had taken in a lot of stuff and was blending it with other things I have read.)  

• One of them talked about remembering the idealistic passion you had when you sat in the chair for your interview.  Chances are, you told them about how much you wanted to help students, not how you wanted to manage them.  You talked about wanting to inspire students, not just wanting them to comply.  When the day-to-day frustrations of the job cause you to lose sight of that, it is a good idea to revisit your core values.  You may have bad days, but what matters is that you never quit on your students.  As Manny Scott frequently says, "Even on your worst day, you may be a students' best hope." 
• It is also is important to remember that uncertainty is stressful, and all of our lives have been filled with uncertainty for at least the last two years.  Be careful of implementing ideas from "the trauma-informed classroom" approach because it is a situation where a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.  While you want to be trauma-sensitive, you don't want to pigeon-hole kids into a place where their trauma becomes their identity (which is happening in much of the trauma-informed practice movement) and do well-meaning damage.  The worst thing you can do is lower expectations for that student because you unintentionally send him the message that he isn't capable of meeting your expectations.  Rather, you should be supporting him in acquiring the skills it takes to meet the expectation.
• 
  The best thing you can do for a student who has gotten into an anxiety loop is to "loan them your calm."  In my life, I have called it having the ministry of normal.  Think about the last time you were on a flight that had some turbulence.  If you look to the flight attendant, and she looks concerned or is doing something unusual, there may be something to worry about, but if she is still serving pretzels, everything is fine.  You are borrowing her calm.  The boy in this photo is a refugee, fleeing danger in his country, and yet you see the picture of resilience and joy because the women in the photo have been telling him stories and signing songs.  They have loaned him their calm.
• Growth is not linear.  They will make encouraging progress and backslide at other times.  If you only tell them you are proud of them when they make progress, they won't want to come to you when they are having a problem.  Praise the work they are doing and the effort they are making to do better.  This doesn't mean that you don't address the problems, just that you don't communicate that you only love them when they are doing well.
• Recognize that repeated experiences establish neural pathways, which then become automatic behaviors.  A child cries to get his mother's attention.  If he doesn't get it, all he knows to do is cry louder.  When that is eventually rewarded, the pathway is established that results in his communication becoming more and more dramatic until the need is met.  If you want to change the neural pathway, you must give them a different experience.  Don't reward the behavior you don't like.  
• Risky behaviors often come from seeking dopamine, so give them healthy ways to get dopamine.  Start with establishing and reinforcing their strengths.

Finally, it is important to recognize that just because kids are resilient doesn't mean they are invulnerable.  The strong student who seems to be handling everything well, the one who never gets in trouble, the one who everyone else leans on, needs your attention too.  He is likely the strong friend for a number of students.  This can be exhausting for them, but they don't usually show it.  Check on the kids who appear to have it all together because they are often carrying the burdens of others.  

Taking Your Education for Granted? Read Educated.

I tend to be a little behind in reading best-selling books.  If there's a hot, new book that everyone is reading, you can bet that I haven't read it yet.  I'm usually a good year behind.  My friend, Meagan Stone, recommended this one to me, and I am so glad I didn't wait to read it.

Educated is the memoir of Tara Westover of Buck's Peak, Idaho.  Raised by a father whose Mormonism was so extreme that even members of his own church thought he was crazy (and, he likely did suffer from undiagnosed bipolar disorder).  Tara had never seen a doctor because her father believed they were in league with the Illuminati or gone to school because, according to her dad, that was the government's way of brainwashing their kids.  They largely supported themselves through shed construction and scrapping from a junkyard, and some of the injuries she describes are astounding, especially when you consider they were treated with herbs and oils.  She didn't even have a birth certificate for the first nine years of her life, and no one can say with certainty when her birthday actually is.

As she described her childhood, I kept imagining a sort of 19th-century scene.  Then, she describes her family's preparation for Y2K and their response to 9/11.  I realized she is younger than I am.  How is it possible that this was happening in the 21st century?

While the story is gripping in every way, from her brother's abuse to her fear of a boy touching her hand for the fear she would get pregnant, the part that sticks with me is how quickly she learned to learn once she had the opportunity.

One of her brothers left home and, while attending BYU, encouraged her to do the same.  While she had been taught to read nd write, she had no education in math or in conveying ideas through writing.  In order to apply to BYU, she had to get at least a 27 on the ACT, so she got books and taught herself.  It took two only two attempts.  I know people who have been in school with excellent teachers their entire childhoods that required two attempts. 

It's not like once she was enrolled, she was prepared to do well in classes.  A friend had to tell her that she could actually read the art history textbook, and when she didn't know the word "holocaust," she upset her classmates by asking about it.  Nevertheless, this 32-year-old learned how to learn very quickly, found some people who believed in her abilities, and she now holds a Master's degree and a doctorate from Cambridge and was a visiting fellow at Harvard. 

There are two things that strike me most when reflecting on this book.

1.  Resilience is deeply embedded in children.  Tara witnessed and was subjected to manipulation, abuse, injury, and a myriad of traumatic events.  Had they been a bit more on the grid, she would likely have been removed from her family at a young age.  Yet, she overcame these challenges with teaching and encouragement from a few important people.  We talk about this in camp training every year.  We are working with foster children, but when they receive unconditional love for a week, we see remarkable growth because God has placed resilience in the human heart.  No one has suffered so much that they cannot thrive when finally placed in the right conditions with the right encouragement.

2.  Don't take your education for granted.  As I said earlier, as I read this book, I kept feeling like it was from another era or a less developed country.  You may have a had a bad teacher now and then, but you had teachers.  You may not have gotten the study skills training you should have gotten at your school, but you probably knew you could read the textbook before you got to college.  You may not know as much math as your peers, but you didn't start from scratch at the age of 16 by teaching yourself.  Whether you attended public school, private school, or had real homeschooling, be grateful for it rather than complaining that someone made you work more than you wanted to.