Teaching Coping Strategies

 On Tuesdays I meet with a small group of fifth graders to follow the Unstuck and On Target curriculum, which addresses executive functioning skills such as using coping skills, creating plans around set goals, and dealing with the unexpected.

When I do this group with younger grades the coping strategies usually center around taking deep breathes or going to get a drink of water. The much younger grades can even refer to Daniel Tiger and Elmo's coping strategies of belly breathing or counting to four before you roar. This group of fifth graders however is more mature and somewhat beyond my typical go-to list.

As I listened to one student talk about how her family responds to her irrationality with food because she often forgets to eat I found myself describing the term 'hangry'. Because, let's be honest, this is a common adult problem. If you are a person who forgets to eat and then gets cranky you should probably be able to identify when you get 'hangry' and be able to fix it yourself. Just as much as you should know to take a deep breath or get water when you are angry in kindergarten. I once worked for a women who often forgot to eat. It was commonly known that you should only approach her 20 minutes or later after meals. Anywhere between 11:00 am and 1:30 pm was a danger zone because most likely she hadn't eaten lunch yet and you would be yelled at. Wait until after she'd eaten? She was lovely.  Hangry is a real thing. We should all be able to recognize it in ourselves, right? It was not a term I expected to be describing to a group of fifth graders, but it seemed appropriate at the time.

As I wrote it on the board another student looked at me in horror. "Isn't that just comfort eating?" he asked, "Are you now telling us to eat our feelings? We're all going to get fat." The other group members looked at me curiously, as though in their mind I was suddenly the witch in Hansel and Gretel, out there trying to fatten up children.

Cue the talk on our individual differences in our coping strategies and how I am NOT telling them to go home and eat whenever they are angry or frustrated. Listen to your body, know yourself, and no, don't just eat your feelings! But don't forget to eat! Daniel Tiger anyone? The whole stumbling discussion found me wanting my own coping strategy- Starbucks.

"That's me. Sad." My personal reminder to respond to students' emotions

When I arrived at the door of a classroom to pick up my reading group of upper elementary students with intellectual disabilities I was met by some unhappy faces. It was a Friday afternoon after a very long week (the first full week we'd been in school since January because of all the snow days) and it was clear that the week was just as long on the students as it was on me. One of the students in particular was having a bad day.

He mopped into my room, begrudgingly sat down at the table with his book box, and reluctantly went through the lesson. He got up occasionally to get a tissue to wipe the tears from his eyes. After he completed the assignment he spontaneously drew a picture of himself, crying. "That's me," he labeled. "Sad."  Once he had my attention he stood up and walked over to the feelings target we have hanging on our wall from the Unstuck and On Target program. "I'm number four" he stated. "Four."

I've worked with the student since September but I've known him for three years now. I don't think we've ever had a conversation about emotions. What he likes, his weekend, what happened in his reading book, but never how he's actually feeling. Then again, he is usually a fairly happy fifth grade boy.

I looked at the picture, the feelings target and then at his writing. It wasn't his best work. In fact, he'd left out a lot of words out of his sentences. My entire goal for the activity was for him to write complete sentences, so I was going to have to ask him to redo the work. Then again, he clearly was not in a space to begin to re-write. "Why don't you write about how you feel?" I suggested. He nodded vigorously and then got to work, head down, pencil flying across the page. He filled five pages of pictures and writing, drawing how he felt, how he wanted to feel, and writing phrases and sentences with his thoughts. He included numbers from the target- 4, 4, 4, around the pictures to reinforce how he felt. Some words he wrote even included, "Go home to cry. I'm done. The end."

When he finally put his pencil down he was smiling. I went over each page with him very seriously, taking time to make eye contact with him and ask questions about why he drew what he drew and what had happened that day. At the end I asked him how he was feeling now. "Happy." he said. "Happy?" I asked, almost confused because he was not anywhere close to happy when he entered the room. I pointed to the target just to make sure that's what he meant. "Yes, number 1."
Taking a risk I asked him to go back to his work and re-write it. He did, almost perfectly.

The break to write about his feelings didn't detract from his academic work. It let him decompress, get his emotions out, connect with me, feel as though someone cared and then, get back to work. When he left my room he was smiling, which was a stark contrast to the crying boy who had entered. It was such a strong reminder to me of how important it is to respond to what our students need and remember that they are human beings.

Eric Jensen, Poverty, and Relationships

About two months ago the education blogging community was furiously debating whether or not grit is racist. It brought about some interesting points of view from both sides of the debate, and hopefully added to our larger understanding of what we expect from all students, what it means to be successful, and what students need to achieve that success. Not long after stumbling into the debate I read Eric Jensen's book, Engaging Students with Poverty in Mind. None if it is new information, but what I appreciate is that Jensen does an excellent job of bringing up the many different factors that impact students from poverty, along with the research that shows how these factors interfere with students. I found that much of what he says resonates with Responsive Classroom, and it is reaffirming to read the list of research studies that support the ideology Responsive Classroom is based on.

Instead of just saying "students need grit," and leaving it at that, Jensen lists seven factors that teachers need to consider when teaching students from poverty, which he determined by examining the effect size of these factors in various research studies. The seven factors with the greatest effect size? Health and nutrition, vocabulary, effort and energy, mind-set, cognitive capacity, relationships, and stress level. 

As a special education teacher who has primarily taught in schools with high poverty, relationships is the factor I have always found to be the key to everything. All humans have a biological need to connect, and Jensen sites a 2012 study that links relationships to the size of the hippocampus, which controls learning, memory, and emotional regulation (24). I've found that when I've connected with students everything else falls into place. They believe in themselves, become less stressed, feel more secure and are willing to learn, take risks, put effort into their work. 

Students, regardless of their socio-economic background often walk in our doors in the morning carrying a tremendous amount of life we only see through slumped shoulders, tired eyes, or angry expressions. We never know what they had for breakfast that morning, what fight they overheard between their parents, or what they believe about themselves. Yet it's these unseen stressors under the surface that drive our students' actions and their approach to school. What we see in our classrooms often looks like apathy, anger, frustration, or restlessness. Jensen describes these states as attractor states, which he defines as "the preferred or default state toward which conditions or systems tend to move. In other words, people become attracted to states according to their frequency of occurrence. As the brain strengthens repeated neural networks over time, these attractor states become habitual. Soon these states become comfort zones" (39).

It sounds odd that apathy, anger, or frustration would become a comfort zone. Think of someone you would describe as an angry person. They get angry quickly, argue with everything, and see every event that happens to them as the world working against them. This is where they are most comfortable operating. It's their attractor state, and where their thought patterns go time and time again. It is true for our students as well. Many of them have been reacting to their environment for years and have developed thought patterns to help them survive and process the world around them. They bring those thought patterns into school and use them to process what is happening in our classrooms.

So what do we do? There is so little in our students' lives we can control. We can't change their home lives, and we can't force them to forget their stressors when they walk through the school doors. What we can do, however, is to create an environment that allows our students to relax, take risks, and experience positive emotions. We need to shape their mind-body states within our classroom, the one environment we can control.

What our students need is a place to belong. When our students walk into our schools in the mornings, and then into our individual classrooms they need to feel like they are part of a family. They need to trust us and their classmates, feel safe to take risks, and feel like they are important to their community. They need to feel so strongly connected with us that when they walk in our doors they feel like they don’t have to carry their burdens alone. They need a place to experience and practice a positive mind-body state. A place to feel what it is like to have hope.

Our relationships matter. We aren't just teaching a series of facts or academic strategies, but instead teaching students that it is possible to thrive when the world seems stacked against them.

You Have the Power

  While working through the Feelings Target from the Unstuck and On Target curriculum with a group of fourth grade students I was trying to get the students to identify how they feel when they are a number five, and what they can do to get back to being a number one. After an enlightening discussion on what each student feels like when they are in the five range I tried to change the conversation into what we can do when we feel that way. One student interrupted me, "But Mrs. Lipstick," he interjected with a matter-of-fact sincerity, "I have anger issues." 

Exactly my friend. That's why we are here. Now let's talk about the power you have over your actions.