Turning Caring into Principles of Practice
Going beyond caring to true understanding!
Many children today struggle to cope within the classroom or school setting and may display withdrawal and anxiety, or disrespectful and explosive behaviours. Challenging behaviours can often be a result of intergenerational trauma, chronic stress and its developmental effects on the brain and body. Increasing resilience, retention rates and school completion rates of our most at-risk students requires an understanding of ACE Scores, epigenetics, trauma, chronic stress and resiliency.
“The brain is asking three important questions at all times: ‘Am I safe?’ ‘Am I loved?’ ‘What can I learn from this?’ In order to focus attention and problem-solve (learn), the answer to the first two questions must be ‘yes.’”
- Becky Bailey, Founder of Conscious Discipline
The Backfire Effect: Read This Before We Start!
The Misconception: When your beliefs are challenged with facts, you alter your opinions and incorporate the new information into your thinking. The Truth: When your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger.
“In disputes upon moral or scientific points, ever let your aim be to come at truth, not to conquer your opponent. So you never shall be at a loss in losing the argument, and gaining a new discovery.” Benjamin Franklin
●The backfire effect must be understood when dealing with at risk students because you will need to challenge their core beliefs. Many students will hold fast to their understanding of the world
●Be wary of triggering this effect in students, parents and colleagues!
Behave
Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst
●It is important to note that behaviours have proximal and distal factors i.e. the moments and hours before something happens, the preceding weeks, years and childhood and intergenerationally.
●Family, culture and experience interact with our genetics to define our behaviours
Free Will
Are we rational actors in the world? Or are we programmed?
●Free will could all be an illusion, scientists suggest after study shows choice may just be the brain tricking itself -Research adds to evidence suggesting 'even our most seemingly ironclad beliefs about our own agency and conscious experience can be dead wrong'
●This information is important to note when confronting our own decisions beliefs and biases as we help our students with theirs!
●We need to become aware of our unconscious beliefs and conscious schemas and question whether our beliefs serve the student we are trying to help.
Understanding Dropouts
An overview of dropout theories:
Schemas
"A schema is a cognitive framework or concept that helps organize and interpret information. Schemas can be useful because they allow us to take shortcuts in interpreting the vast amount of information that is available in our environment. However, these mental frameworks also cause us to exclude pertinent information to focus instead only on things that confirm our pre-existing beliefs and ideas. Schemas can contribute to stereotypes and make it difficult to retain new information that does not conform to our established ideas about the world (Cherry 2016)".
The key elements of a schema are:
1.Everyone (kid or teeanager sic.) uses schemas without even realizing they are doing so.
2.Once a schema is developed, it tends to be stable over a long period of time.
3.Humans use schemata to organize, retrieve, and encode chunks of important information.
4.Schemata are accumulated over time and through different experiences.
●Many students and their parents have limiting or negative beliefs that result from their schemas. The schemas have scripts that are the things the student or parent says to themselves to justify their actions. Try to project what these scripts are likely to be so that you can speak to them.
●Use this technique in the third person i.e. do not say when people like you have negative thoughts.
●Notice how emotional experiences have scripts that arise from the schemas
●Every student has tried to change in the past and have been unable to maintain their goals. As a result most student have a limiting script that says: “You don’t understand I can’t change - I know I can’t”
Understanding ACES:
The CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study is one of the largest investigations of childhood abuse and neglect and later-life health and well-being.
The original ACE Study was conducted at Kaiser Permanente from 1995 to 1997 with two waves of data collection. Over 17,000 Health Maintenance Organization members from Southern California receiving physical exams completed confidential surveys regarding their childhood experiences and current health status and behaviors.
https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/acestudy/about.html
Multiple traumas have negative effects on nearly every aspect of a child’s life.
●Everyone has had to overcome tragedies in their life. But, it should be acknowledged that some people have had more stressors to overcome.
●We often make the mistake of judging our resilience against people who have had far more to overcome!
●Understanding trauma students can help you reframe some of your own biases and/or misconceptions.
The graphic below represents the avg. number of aces in a classroom of 30 students in Minnesota.
Epigenetics: How Early childhood experiences are written into the genes
●Moshe Szyf & Michael Meaney
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●Experience ensures different expressions of existing genes
●Social rank affects outcomes
●Future epigenetic treatments
●Epigenetic changes as a result of stress
Prochaska & Diclemente’s Stages of change
A shorthand model of change that teachers can use as a guideline for discussions with students:
Presentation Infographic
Stress & Neurocognitive Development
How stress affects memory
●This information is important to note for youth-at-risk because they have sometimes form maladaptive schemas related to their abilities to learn.
Stress changes your genes by telling your body what kind of world you live in
Memory & the important role of the hippocampus: lack of repetitions & stress effect consolidation to long-term memory!
Understanding Poverty - Students
●Low ses students begin with vocab less than ½ of high ses families
●3 million word deficit by age 3.
●Parenting styles are different less affirmations to prohibitions
●Parents are subject to pervasive low-level stress related to finance issues. This stress leads to higher levels of depression and less energy when interacting with children
●Amount of cognitive stimulation had far more effect on intellectual development than the other factors measured
●Positive Stimulation vs. Uncertainty & lack of novel experiences
●Sub optimal work schedules of parents who as a result struggle to regulate the behaviour of their children
Fetal Origins Research: What children learn while in the womb!
“The body changes in myriads of ways!”
Physiology adjusts to the environment that awaits it
Patricia Kuhl: How Children Learn to Read
●Children take statistics on language (s) they hear
●Face-to-face contact is essential - from a human being
●The Social Brain: we as human beings are programmed for human contact
●Many if not most at-risk students have had less face time and fewer repetitions
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FNMI Students & Intergenerational Transfer of PTSD
Research shows that the consequences of trauma are not limited to the person immediately exposed to the traumatic event. People close to the individual may experience vicarious trauma, which can have impacts similar to the impacts of personally experienced trauma. The concept of vicarious trauma emerged in the 1960s from studies of the prolonged effects of the Holocaust on survivors and their families. This area of research now includes survivors of natural disasters, Japanese internment camps, war, Indian residential schools and child abuse. Intergenerational trauma is any trauma, including historical oppression, that has an impact across more than one generation. This impact includes shared collective memories that affect the health and well-being of individuals and communities and that may be passed on from parent to child, and beyond.
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●Rachel Yehuda: Trauma of Israeli Soldiers & 911 study
●Amy Bombay First Nations people:
●Why don’t they just get over it?
●Complex PTSD amongst First Nations Community members
●https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3810370/
●Many FN still elders think about trauma daily - for them trauma is not historical
●Lateral Violence
●Intervention programs
Us vs. Them
●Understanding the inherent human programming that underpin racism, bullying and in and out groups at school.
Evolutionary basis for Understanding Risky Adolescent Behaviours
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.459.8678&rep=rep1&type=pdf
●There is a function for risky behaviours
●Adolescents make a cost benefit assessment of their chances for success educationally and give up and worry about social hierarchies amongst their subset of the population.
●Bully behaviours are part of an evolutionary mechanism that is used as a hierarchy mechanism by some students.
●Sex as a motivation factor of/for struggling students
●Social hierarchies amongst at-risk behavioural students
●https://nature.berkeley.edu/garbelottoat/wp-content/uploads/machluf-and-bjorklund.pdf
●The first 5 years of a student’s life affect the outcomes of youth during their teens Uncertainty is more of a predictor then harshness low ses
The Marshmallow Test
Self-control is the single most important factor that can be measured early in childhood and virtually predicts the child's fortune in his/her years to come.
The bad news is the default efficiency of one's willpower is determined by his/her genes and the nurturing environment between ages of 1 to 6. The good news is that this default willpower is malleable and can be cultivated through education and practice.
●Hot (limbic system) vs. Cool thinking (pre-frontal cortex)
●Stimulus control vs. Self-control
●The self pattern you in the future vs. stranger in the future (students who are at risk cannot envision a future self).
●If then choice?
Grit
How do we help at risk kids!
●Teach kids about Growth Mindset: Praise effort not outcome
●Begin with relationship
●Teach students how stress affects their memories
●Reframe schemas
●Connect to future self
Dropout Typologies
There are different types of youth who are at risk of dropping out of school These differing typologies require different types of interventions and teacher/administrator interactions.
Cultural & Class Divide: understanding poverty - resistance to assimilation
●Native students feel that white teachers would never be able to fully understand the circumstances of their lives.
Willing and Unwilling Assimilants - resistance to assimilation
There is a difference between cultures that have willingly come to Canada because Canada provides a hope for a better future and those people who have been forced to assimilate i.e. First Nations peoples.
http://faculty.washington.edu/rsoder/EDUC310/OgbuSimonsvoluntaryinvoluntary.pdf
Iatrogenic Effect: The unintended consequence of an intervention
“The Iatrogenic Effect of Juvenile Justice”
The results show that youths who are poor, impulsive, poorly supervised by their parents, and exposed to deviant friends are more likely, for the same degree of antisocial behavior, to undergo intervention by the Juvenile Court, and that this intervention greatly increases the likelihood of involvement with the penal system in adulthood. The results also show that the various measures recommended by the Juvenile Court exert a differential criminogenic effect; those that involve placement have the most negative impact.
●It is important to know that student peer groups will interpret your intervention efforts amongst their peer groups
●Negative peer groups sometimes misinterpret or mock intervention efforts within their subset of the population.
●Tell students that you understand that this sometimes happens but, this does not change the fact that…………...
Depression
Robert Sopolsky’s Stanford lecture on Depression
●Great for understanding the neurochemical processes in everyday language
Going Beyond Caring to Mentorship:
Trauma Informed Teaching