During many years of my teaching career, I often wondered why it took so much time for some of my students to learn how to regulate their emotions in the classroom setting. Most, but not all, settled by the end of the first term and felt safe enough to voice their needs in a more acceptable manner. I thought my colleagues and I were well prepared to welcome our students. At the end of each school year, we shared the details about all children and discussed successful classroom management strategies. Very often, I spent a big part of my summer researching and making notes on what would work with individual children. I felt as if I fully understood how to help them.
The reality was different from my wishes. Every year, I faced months of hard work with my students and many meetings with parents and specialists to discuss my pupils’ abilities to pay attention, learn, and regulate their behaviour. I didn’t know what I was missing. I thought that I couldn’t do more than I was already doing.
Since I’ve retired, I’ve spent plenty of time reading professional literature and trying to find out what would help other teachers going through similar obstacles and difficulties. In my research, I came across a book by Dr. Bruce D. Perry and Oprah Winfrey titled What Happened to You?
The book is a series of deep and meaningful conversations between the psychiatrist, who spent many years helping traumatized children, and Oprah, who went through childhood trauma as a very young girl. If this book had been available when I was still teaching, I would have concentrated on two strategies that I learned from the authors’ discussions.
The first strategy relates to how long children know us and if they feel safe with us. Very often, children don’t know their teachers at the beginning of the school year. Perhaps they had seen us in a hallway or knew us through their older siblings. Perhaps we visited their classroom during the previous school year on the 100th Day of School or Halloween Day celebrations. That’s not enough time to feel comfortable and ready to learn for students who have gone through traumatic experiences due to their family situations or their neurological or developmental conditions.
According to Dr. Perry’s expertise, it takes up to twenty sessions in therapy for a client to feel safe. With children, we need to engage at least ten to twelve times before they feel familiar with us. Dr. Perry wrote in What Happened to You? (pages
145 – 148): “In every person-to-person interaction, there are complex calculations going on in each person’s brain: Is this person safe? Are they an ally or enemy? Will they hurt me or help me? What are they planning to do? What are they trying to do? What do they want?”
Children are going through the same thinking process. If they don’t know us, they don’t feel safe. Sometimes, we remind them of a person in their lives that caused trauma to them. It happened to one of my students who didn’t want to participate in my lessons and was hiding from me. When I came closer to him and asked how I could help, he reacted with aggression. Soon after the incident, I learned that a couple of years before coming to my classroom, he was temporarily taken away from his mother by a social worker who might have looked like me. Dr. Perry described a similar case in What Happened to You? (pages 38 – 41). In that case, nobody knew why the child didn’t feel safe around his teacher until Dr. Perry discovered that the boy’s abusive father and the teacher used the same Old Spice product, which triggered a trauma response.
While teaching Grade 1, I supervised the Senior Kindergarten classes during lunch. Once a week, I had outdoor duty in the kindergarten playground. My role was to ensure all children were physically safe and their behaviour was acceptable. I had neither enough time for nor full awareness of engaging with children in a purposeful way that could help them develop a close relationship with me, their next year’s teacher.
What if our schools assigned one day a month when a Grade 3 teacher would visit a Grade 2 class for the whole day? The Grade 2 teacher would teach a Grade 1 class on the same day. The Grade 1 teacher would meet with the Senior Kindergarten class. The Senior Kindergarten teacher would replace the Grade 3 teacher.
Swapping teachers would have a very specific purpose—to engage, connect, clarify, play, (and) disengage with individual students (What Happened to You? page 145). Ten all-day visits in one school year would allow teachers to know their next year’s primary students. The students would start a new school year with a teacher who would not feel scary or mysterious. For children or teachers new to the school, the same strategy—engage, connect, clarify, play, disengage—would have to be carefully planned during the first month of school.
Dr. Perry listed one more important strategy that he described as any friend of yours is a friend of mine. Here, we must include parents who can signal acceptance and familiarity with their child’s teacher (What Happened to You? page 145). In addition to or instead of meeting the new parents at the beginning of each school year, perhaps it would make sense to meet them before summer and explain the value of connection between teachers and parents, so they can put a good word to the children for their next year teachers.
These two simple strategies might change the dynamics between students and their teachers, improve the ability to regulate emotions, and consequently get our students ready to learn, leaving anxiety behind.
Reference
Bruce D. Perry, M.D, Ph.D., Oprah Winfrey, What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience,
and Healing, Flatiron Books 2021
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anna Nike Leskowsky
Anna Nike Leskowsky is a retired elementary school teacher. Her writing has been featured in several Canadian magazines, papers, and college textbooks. Anna lives in Toronto.
This article is featured in Canadian Teacher Magazine’s Fall 2024 issue.
