Social Emotional Learning and Toxic Stress
Question in mind: How can social emotional learning help students who have experienced toxic stress? Photo by schaaflicht on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA In trying to think about experiences I have had with students who had high levels of ‘toxic stress’ in their early childhoods, I was left with a big questions mark for, in reality, what tools do we have in our curriculum designs that allow for such data gathering? How are we to know which experiences our students have had which would truly fall in the category of toxic stress when a large part of the population does not know that there are different types of stress? So, instead of tackling this question at face value, I will start to examine the reasons that might bring about a lack of rapport in class that a professional dispositional to engage students, a definition of empathy employed by Warren (2014), should aim at ending with. The first point is time : getting to know students takes time from curriculum content and instr