Education Week - November 25, 2020 - 19

How to Support Your Grieving Students
What teachers need to know about the science of grief
In a remote environment, it can prove extra
challenging for teachers to not only identify and
understand these manifestations but cater to the
classroom environment accordingly. By emphasizing community, empowering choice, and integrating a mindfulness routine into the remote or hybrid
learning environment, however, teachers of all
levels can lay a foundation for supporting student
success amid stress, especially for young people
who are dealing with a personal loss.
Relationships are our greatest antidote to
loss and trauma. Attachments with supportive
caregivers-family members, mentors, teachers,
coaches-who are available and attentive most of
the time allow children, teens, and young adults to
establish a sense of relational safety that serves as
a salve against challenging circumstances. Such
connections are particularly important for students

who may not have access to attentive adults at
home. Experiencing reciprocity, healthy boundaries, moments of " break and repair " (meaning
resolution and maintained connection after an
argument or relational disruption), and receiving
encouragement as they seek to establish independence all contribute to the likelihood that students
will adapt and recover from difficulty.
Experiences of grief and trauma can threaten
young people's sense of future, which caring
adults can also help to preserve or restore through
relationships. In the remote classroom, especially
in the wake of a loss, build in time for one-onone connection with students, whether through
conferencing, individualized learning games,
or asynchronous communication methods, to
maintain the sense of community you are used to
building in person.
Create opportunities for choice
activities to afford students agency
in their learning, especially when
the experience of loss might
threaten the level of control students have in their lives outside the
classroom (or webcam). You can
even empower students to recognize their own needs through seemingly small strategies, like allowing
choice in literature assignments;
offering multiple " brain break "
activities from which to choose;
being flexible about when in the day
work can be completed; or offering
several options for summative
assessment (i.e., portfolio-based,
project-based, or a research paper).
Finally, analyze your remote or
hybrid learning plan and consider
how you structure routine in
students' days, as well as your own.
Humans crave predictability during
tumultuous times. Consider what
about your class structure remains
the same across time and identify
ways to infuse enrichment activities
into this routine, especially those
that support emotional regulation.
For example, invite students to
begin each day with five minutes
of guided meditation or close class
sessions with 10 minutes of free
writing. Host a read-aloud at the
start of class each Wednesday or invite students to share a favorite quote every Friday.
Such activities imbue the learning environment
with a sense of community, a recognition of humanity, and a commitment to honor the needs of grieving students, while also building into your teaching
routine spaces to support your well-being, too.
Because it can prove challenging for many
students to talk about a personal loss, know that
direct conversation, though potentially powerful
for some students, is not necessarily the goal of
grief support. We should never ignore a student's
grief or pretend that a loss didn't occur ( " Saying
nothing says a lot, " as pediatrician David Schonfeld told NPR in 2015), but we can support students
who are reticent by creating an environment
supportive of connection, safety, and emotional
regulation. These characteristics create a foundation for grieving students to succeed and, perhaps
eventually, tell their story. They are what ground
us all-whether we are 4, 14, or 40-as we face the
unknown and commit to learning in spite of it.
Benjavisa Ruangvaree/iStock

ver the past few decades,
trauma-informed teaching
has gained ground in the
United States, yet rarely
is grief included in the
conversation. In the midst
of a global pandemic,
with teachers and students confronting loss in and
outside the classroom in new and myriad ways, it
is more critical than ever to apply a grief-sensitive
lens to our conversations about curricula and
trauma in the school system. We are not the people
we were a year ago. And understanding the ways in
which grief and trauma intersect with teaching and
learning allows us to better cater to students' new
needs while we recognize and honor our own.
Prior to the start of COVID-19, approximately
1 in 14 children lost a parent or sibling before his
or her 18th birthday. For years,
teachers have not felt equipped
to support students through this
widespread grief. According to one
2012 survey, fewer than 1 percent of
teachers received training related to
grief support during their preservice training, and only 3 percent of
teachers reported access to griefrelated professional development in
their district.
If you've worked with students,
you've likely confronted loss: A
student's parent or grandparent
passes away, or a dog dies, or a
neighborhood shooting occurs
close to home, and a student enters
the classroom with a disrupted
worldview. Grief also intersects
with inequity: Three million young
people witness gun violence every
year, according to an analysis by the
gun-safety group Everytown. The
highest exposure to that violence
takes place in under-resourced
communities where poverty,
racism, and discrimination result
in disproportionate exposure to
adverse childhood events and the
subsequent chance of developing
later-life mental- and physicalhealth problems. We need to
acknowledge the presence of grief
in the learning environment before
we can create a classroom community that buffers the long-term impacts of loss and
related childhood adversity.
But what is most important for teachers to know
about grief to support bereaved students? What of
the scientific literature regarding grief and trauma
is most relevant for practicing teachers?
We can begin by peeking into the grieving brain to
better understand the behaviors that might manifest
in the classroom. For some people, grief can be
traumatic. For all people, it involves a " fight or
flight " response mediated by the autonomic nervous
system, as well as a depressive response. As with
our trauma response, both of these stages affect the
immune and endocrine systems, sleep cycle, and executive functioning, which includes impulse control,
emotional regulation, and attention.
In the classroom, grieving students-like those
enduring trauma-might present with anger, outbursts, attention troubles, attachment-seeking, or
avoidant behaviors, to name just several examples,
all of which impede learning and relationshipbuilding.

Relationships are
our greatest antidote
to loss and trauma.

By Brittany R. Collins
COLLINS is an education
and curriculum writer, as
well as the teaching and
learning coordinator at
Write the World, an online
writing platform for
middle and high school
students and teachers.
RƵȲ˛ȲȺɈƦȌȌǲ‫ة‬ȌȁǐȲǞƵǏ
support in secondary
schools, is forthcoming.

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Education Week - November 25, 2020

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