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.