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 instruction. But if teachers do not make a conscious choice of taking the time needed to survey students’ emotional states and probable causes, then we are not dealing with a human relationship, or are we? I have had numerous encounters with teachers who were at a loss in this issue. Because the institutions they worked at did not allow for some time to be dedicated, at teachers’ discretion, to such anamnesis (to borrow a term much valued in health professions that defines the moment of data gathering about previous experience), they did not know what to do when students overreacted or misbehaved in class. They did not have access to the many variables with which to construct a case scenario and examine the situation form a variety of perspectives – a central characteristic of empathy (Walter, 2012). This lack of valuable information to be able to listen (as in actively engaging with one another- a core characteristic of empathy), led to a disengagement from the ability to truly perceive students’ needs. That disengagement, in turn, turns one’s eyes (and minds) to the solution of one’s problem using the tools that are available in one’s repertoire. Thus, truly capable professionals are left in the dark because using the tools in their rich toolbox for solving problems that are born out of students’ rampant emotions and affective states will simply not fix the ‘problem’.

Another point is emotional investment: developing the capacity we are all endowed with for feeling/ understanding the emotions or states of others (Walter, 2012) does not come with experience of teaching a subject per se. Teachers who do not take the time to investigate their own emotional state to understand how that affects their attitudes and behaviors in class do not share the disposition for understanding feelings or states of other. Without that understanding, and the necessary differentiation that understanding does not equate approval or endorsement, teachers are ill-prepared to teach the students albeit being, at times, fully prepared to teach the content. That is when our curriculum designs, which do not separate one from the other, fail in signposting moments when being a teacher means understanding much more than the subject content to be taught.

I remember once being in a teacher development course (a pre-service that an institution offered) that catered exactly for this matter. The trainer pointed out that the age-bracket that we were dealing with (pre adolescents/adolescents) were ‘primed’ to being emotionally unstable and that had not to do with you (teacher) personally but mainly with the period of development they were going through. Being informed at that time of such developmental basics by the trainer (and coordinator) of the program has given me great latitude as a teacher to adapt content to the needs of my students’ emotional states.

A third point is data gathering: schools and educators do not invest in gathering the kind of information necessary for a good development. Due to the ever-increasing nature of content and curriculum, and the rigidness of standards, education has treated students as buckets to be filled rather than fires to be lighted. In failing to survey what motivates each student, how their development has taken place and the contexts that they thrive in, educational settings and actors perform their work as if they were spectators; as if what they did, the choices they made and the results of their work would not interfere with nor shape students’ choices and lives. In failing to recognize their role properly, and to act in accordance, some teachers and schools have done more harm than good and caused stress instead of alleviating it.

After examining how time, (emotional) investment and data gathering might interfere with empathy, I would suggest that teachers start analyzing the kind of stress that their work, their environment and their students feel. If that stress resonates with any kind of stress that has been experienced before, like toxic stress in early childhood, the consequences might be disastrous. Red lights should be flaring and immediate attention and action should be employed to terminate the source of stress at present. If teachers are leaving their comfort zones and fortress of content delivery and management in search of students’ motivations and needs, then there is room for improvement and an investment of time and resources for professional (and personal) development. The road to influencing thinking and changing attitudes start by recognizing that it is not by doing the same or amplifying the spectrum of what has always been done that results will change for the better (Lamm & Majdandžić, 2015). Change will come when the need for change is felt within.

References

Lamm, C., & Majdandžić, J. (2015). The role of shared neural activations, mirror neurons, and morality in empathy–A critical comment. Neuroscience Research,90, 15-24.



Walter, H. (2012). Social cognitive neuroscience of empathy: Concepts, circuits, and genes. Emotion Review, 4(1), 9-17.



Warren, C. A. (2014). Towards a pedagogy for the application of empathy in culturally diverse classrooms. The Urban Review, 46(3), 395-419.

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