Cultivating Resilience

1. The need to reflect on one's racial beliefs and behaviors.

2. The challenges posed by the banning of books by black authors and limiting the teaching of black American history

3. How educators need to collaborate with families and communities to address systemic issues and how that effort will take time and persistence

4. Why it's essential to incorporate anti-racism training in pre-service teacher and administrator education programs.

5. Why it's important for educators to take care of their whole selves.

6. Connect with Afrika

   Website

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   Referenced

   Open Windows, Open Minds

   TEDTalk

Horacio Sanchez, President and CEO, Resiliency Inc.

Horacio Sanchez is a highly sought-after speaker and educational consultant, helping schools learn to apply neuroscience to improve educational outcomes. He presents on diverse topics such as overcoming the impact of poverty, improving school climate, engaging in brain-based instruction, and addressing issues related to implicit bias. He is recognized as one of the nation's leading authorities on resiliency and applied brain science.

Horacio has been a teacher, administrator, clinician, mental health director, and consultant to school districts across the United States. Horacio sits on the True Health Initiative Council of Directors, a coalition of more than 250 world-renowned health experts committed to educating on proven lifestyle principles as medicine. He is the author of the best-selling book, The Education Revolution, which applies brain science to improve instruction, behaviors, and school climate. His new book, The Poverty Problem, explains how education can promote resilience and counter poverty's impact on brain development and functioning.

1. Poverty-related stress can have a significant impact on the brain, leading to changes in memory, emotional regulation, and decision-making abilities.

2. Societal biases, particularly those related to race, can be subconscious and influence our perceptions and interactions with others.

3. Strategies for regulating emotions in the classroom include pre-planning, ritualizing the environment, and using rituals to help students regulate their systems faster and adjust.

4. It is important to build protective factors and concrete skills for vulnerable students, especially those from poverty or who have experienced racism and bias.

5. Teachers should have an understanding of how the brain learns and establish foundational knowledge for students before moving on to more complex topics.

Connect with Horacio Sanchez

Twitter - Horacio Sanchez @ResiliencyInc Website - https://resiliencyinc.com/

The Education Revolution

The Poverty Problem

Equity, inclusion, and justice should be critical goals of education today. To effectively work toward achieving them, though, the mental health and overall well-being of children and school staff must first be addressed. Following the success of Season 1, the podcast series, Cultivating Resilience: A Whole Community Approach to Alleviating Trauma in Schools continues to explore various ways to reduce anxiety and stress that are so prevalent in many of today's schools.

This podcast series supports the work of the Compassionate Schools Leadership Academy (CSLA), a research grant to the Center for Educational Improvement, and Yale University's Program for Recovery and Community Health from the U.S. Department of Education. (Award Number S423A220092).

For this series, Christine Mason, Victoria Romero, Jesse Kohler, and Jeff Ikler are collaborating as podcast hosts. Complete bios are available here: https://www.queticocoaching.com/trauma-in-schools-development-team

Topics in Season 2

1. Season 2: Overview and Welcome

2. Racism, poverty, and neuroscience: implications for educators

3. Open Windows, Open Minds: promoting more reasonable conversations about Racism

4. The Education and well-being of Native students: recommendations for equity

5. Promoting educator well-being

6. Communicating, collaborating, and problem-solving to dissolve barriers and build esteem

7. Affluenza: drug addiction, fears, anxiety, and other concerns of students from prosperous families

8. Promoting well-being and mental health for students, faculty, and staff

9. Why diversity programs fail

10. Moving past the fear of losing control

11. Case study: promoting mental health in one school district

12. Implementation of SEL

13. Case study: promoting mental health within a large urban setting (the NY DOE Department of Mental Health)

If COVID has an upside, it's that it has brought attention to the emotional needs of students (and faculty members). Indeed, if a student doesn't feel emotionally safe in the classroom, their ability to learn is severely impeded. And if an educator is experiencing extreme stress, their ability to work effectively with kids is compromised. The bottom line is that educators must work toward balancing a student's academic needs with their social and emotional needs.

Our three guests from the Elizabethton School District in Elizabethton, TN provide the details.

Dr. Myra Newman — Assistant Director of Schools for Academics, Elizabethton City Schools, Elizabethton, TN

Dr. Jon Minton — Principal, Elizabethton High School, Elizabethton,

TN Megan Ellis — Counselor, Elizabethton High School, Elizabethton, TN

One of the clear takeaways from our series on trauma in schools is that few teachers and administrators receive training on student trauma before they find themselves in front of their kids. Most professional development in this critical area is provided to educators in what are often too-brief training sessions after they are already in the schools. Our guests in this episode, professional development consultants Tamara Neufeld Strijack and Hannah Beach, are helping to disrupt that pattern.

One way trauma grows in the Native American child is through schooling. Native American children attend either schools made up primarily of Native students, or they attend U.S. public schools with the potential for more of a mixed population. As we'll learn during the interview, Native American children who attend U.S. public schools are often criticized for their silence. But their silence doesn't reflect a lack of interest or knowledge, it's culturally driven behavior. Native American children are often silent for two reasons: one, because they're reflecting deeply on the topic under discussion, and two, they're demonstrating respect for the thoughts of others, especially the teachers. Instead of being critical of them, we should see them for what they are. Holly Echo-Hawk, a behavioral health expert for the Pawnee Nation provides the details.

One of the aspects of trauma that needs to be fully recognized is its intergenerational potential: the trauma that a student carries with them can often be further weighted by what their parents and or ancestors experienced. This is particularly true for people of color and indigenous populations. Mary Peter, District Vice-Principal, Indigenous Education, Cowichan Valley School District on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, and Richard Matthews, the District Counselor at the Cowichan Valley School District provide the details.

When we think about trauma and adverse childhood experiences, the conversation understandably gravitates to one of what happened to the student. That approach can focus us externally on the damaging experiences and events themselves. Dr. Scott Ratchford, an expert on equity and the Coordinator of Equity Advancement for the town of West Hartford, CT, helps us shift our focus to see the internal impact of adversity and trauma on a child and how it can affect their identity, sense of safety and well-being, and perhaps most important, their potential.

Most attempts at large-scale change in education fail because of incoherent planning, lack of buy-in of stakeholders, and poor execution. Another big reason for failure is pace: leadership tries to do too much too quickly. Moving too fast can be particularly detrimental when adopting something as emotionally rich and behavior-changing as trauma-informed practices. Dr. Dana Milakovic, a mental health and trauma specialist, and the state-wide advisor for Trauma (K-12) for the Pennsylvania Department of Education, urges a step-by-step approach that includes a multi-system of support.

If our students need to be in a psychologically safe place before they can succeed academically, today's guests — Drs Yvette Jackson and Michele Rivers Murphy — will argue that the same logic of "first this and then that" also applies to the faculty: reducing student trauma starts with improving the well-being of teachers.