Teaching to Strengths

Supporting Students Living with Trauma, Violence, and Chronic Stress

Debbie Zacarian, Lourdes Alvarez-Ortiz, Judie Haynes

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781416624639
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

Half the students in U.S. schools are experiencing or have experienced trauma, violence, or chronic stress. Much has been written about these students from a therapeutic perspective, especially regarding how to provide them with adequate counseling supports and services. Conversely, little has been written about teaching this population and doing so from a strengths-based perspective.

Using real-world examples as well as research-based principles, this book shows how to

• Identify inherent assets that students bring to the classroom.
• Connect to students' experiences through instructional planning and delivery.
• Foster students' strengths through the use of predictable routines and structured paired and small-group learning experiences.
• Develop family and community partnerships.

Experts Debbie Zacarian, Lourdes Alvarez-Ortiz, and Judie Haynes outline a comprehensive, collaborative approach to teaching that focuses on students' strengths and resiliency. Teaching to Strengths encourages educators to embrace teaching and schoolwide practices that support and enhance the academic and socio-emotional development of students living with trauma, violence, and chronic stress.

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Chapter 1

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The Urgent Need for a Strengths-Based Approach

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It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being.

—John Joseph Powell

Think back to when you formally trained to become an educator. How much time and how many course texts, readings, and activities were devoted to formally studying the complexities of working with students living with trauma, violence, and chronic stress? We often ask teachers this question when we provide professional development on the topic. Almost universally, across the United States, the common response we receive is that very little time or resources were devoted to studying this critical topic—especially as it applies to teaching students and working with their families. Rather, teachers tell us that they learn about what to do in four general ways: (1) by doing their best to teach students using trial-and-error strategies, (2) by learning from support staff, such as school counselors and others who engage in the psychosocial well-being of students, (3) by listening carefully at a school's child study team meetings when a variety of interpretations about students' and families' circumstances are discussed, and/or (4) by seeking advice from colleagues who have taught children with similar situations.

What exacerbates this situation even further is the reality that most educators have little to no formal education working with students and families who represent cultural, linguistic, racial, and economic experiences that are distinct from their own (Bransford, Darling-Hammond, & LePage, 2005; Darling-Hammond & Rothman, 2015). Whether it is working with high or low incidences of people who represent the rapidly growing diversity among U.S. students and their families, most educators tell us what the professional literature has confirmed for years: Very few in our profession have had any formal training or depth of experience working with the large, growing, and changing population of diverse learners—let alone those living with trauma, violence, and chronic stress.

The absence of any formal training in this area, understandably, has led many teachers to feel quite unprepared to teach and work with this population. Further, many teachers believe that some students' experiences are so extreme that there is little hope for them, despite all of the educators' efforts and good intentions. This perception often puts limits and restrictions on teachers in terms of how they teach and interact with students, as well as how they work with families. In a real sense, it has almost forced many teachers to look at students and their families as "broken" instead of as individuals who already possess inherent strengths and who can make great contributions to their classrooms, their communities, and the world. Indeed, for too long, teachers have found themselves using language to name their perceptions in terms of what they believe are impossible situations for students living with trauma, violence, and chronic stress. Here is an example.

While we were writing this chapter, one of us conducted a schoolwide training in an impoverished industrial city in the Northeast. She asked pairs of teachers to describe strategies that they found to be the most successful in their work with students living with trauma, violence, and chronic stress. While there were many different responses from each pair, one in particular resonated with the group. It went something like this: "I know that I am working hard, but it is impossible when I know that I have students who don't know whether they have a bed to sleep on at night, who worry about one of their parents who is incarcerated, or who come to school hungry." As you read this, you might find that you feel or have felt like this teacher. We acknowledge this reality, as well as the fact that many caring educators spend great amounts of their time and energy trying to minimize the effects of adversity on their students while simultaneously supporting them to succeed in school. Having said this, we also want to share our excitement about more recent evidence-based research that shows promising practices for teaching students living with trauma, violence, and chronic stress and working with their families. The foundation of this book is based on these findings.

What we propose is to take it a step further and look beyond "what is lacking" to find "what is already there" to effect change and sustain progress. Renowned pediatrician, professor of pediatrics at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and director of youth services at Covenant House Pennsylvania, Kenneth Ginsberg (2015) tells us that our students are "not broken" despite the many odds that they face. He urges us to look at our students in a different way so that we can see their many strengths and assets and tap into their natural resilience to improve their outcomes in school and beyond. An example that Ginsberg uses to illustrate this important point is his work with children who are chronically ill and their families. While he acknowledges the effect that chronic illness has on children's lives, he also points to the many strengths that the same children possess. Pushing his thoughts further, he discusses the importance of using these strengths to support students to become more confident, more competent, more connected and contributory to others, more committed to integrity, more able to cope, and able to have more control over their lives to make healthy choices.

In this spirit, we created the following question to embark on this transformational journey of teaching students living with trauma, violence, and chronic stress:

How can we move from feeling defeated, helpless, and hopeless in our beliefs about students experiencing trauma, violence, and chronic stress to being lighthouses of hope, high expectations, and appreciation of our students' and their families' inherent strengths?

Weaving Three Elements to Form a Braid of Understanding

In this chapter, we explore three critical and foundational elements for working effectively with students living with trauma, violence, and chronic stress. We use the illustration of three strands to show how interweaving these elements together forms a tight braid or bond. We have separated this chapter into the following three sections to reflect our braid framework.

1. The first section includes key evidence-based tenets of strengths-based teaching that we use to identify and acknowledge the inherent assets and capacities of students and their families to help us in creating and/or strengthening our teaching practices.
2. The second section is devoted to exploring some key principles for working with dynamically changing student and family populations. We examine some of the key concepts for understanding culture as a way of being and acting as it relates to child development.
3. The third section focuses on the importance of supporting student learning and thinking through interactions. We do so by drawing from the seminal contributions of developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978), who posited that student learning occurs through two interdependent systems: cognition and social interaction.

The intent of this chapter is to explore the possibilities that can occur when we use this braided framework. We draw from it to build on students' inherent strengths, connect with their cultural ways of being, and create opportunities for students to learn through interactions to expand their ability to cope and help them become confident learners and active members of their classrooms, school communities, and beyond.

Let's begin by engaging in a reflection activity intended to help us explore some key principles about students living with trauma, violence, and chronic stress. As we stated in the Introduction, all of the reflection activities found in the book are intended for applying and extending the key ideas to our personal and professional lives. They are also intended for two types of audiences: individual readers and groups of readers, such as those in a college course, professional learning community, or book study group.

Time for Reflection

Read the following descriptions of three different 9th grade classmates attending an urban high school in a southwestern U.S. state and respond to the subsequent reflection questions.

David was born in the United States. Many years ago, his older brother and parents crossed the Mexican border without documents. For this reason, they live in constant fear of being deported. David and his family have moved many times. In school, David generally earns B grades with an occasional C, and his teachers describe him as a pleasant and hardworking student.

Brianna is the oldest of three siblings and lives with her grandmother. When Brianna was in 7th grade, her mother was killed in a car accident. We have been asked to observe Brianna in class and see that she tries to follow her teacher's directions diligently. We also observe Brianna's mathematics teacher correcting her on a problem set that she has just completed. Pointing to the board at the correct formula for solving the problem, her teacher says to Brianna, "You will want to use this formula for substitution on the Pythagorean theorem." Upon hearing this, Brianna breaks down in tears. We also note her classmates moving away from Brianna and a few stating, "There she goes again."

Jasmine is an only child who lives with her parents. Jasmine's father has been in and out of drug treatment facilities for alcohol and drug addiction and the prison system for related offenses. Most recently, he was released from the local jail after a fistfight that he instigated at a local bar. We learn that Jasmine has witnessed several acts of violence between her parents—particularly her father against her mother. Her teacher reports to us that Jasmine rarely misses school and that when she works in groups with other students, she often seems to pick an unprovoked fight with her classmates.

1. What assets can you identify in each student?
2. How might you draw from these assets in your work with students?

Using a Strengths-Based Instructional and Interactional Approach

Research points to the urgent need to approach the topic of students living with trauma, violence, and chronic stress from a more positive stance, as opposed to looking at it through a deficit-based lens. The field of psychotherapy suggests that focusing on people's inherent strengths (what they bring) has been proven to lead to better outcomes than focusing on what we perceive as their weaknesses (Seligman, Rashid, & Parks, 2006). In educational settings, additional research shows that we can help students be more successful and engaged when we draw from their internal strengths and capacities (Biswas-Dienera, Kashdan, & Gurpal, 2011). Part of our thinking needs to shift from what we believe is not happening and impossible to what is happening and possible. To do this we must take time to

• Identify students' existing strengths.
• Honor, value, and acknowledge these strengths.
• Help students become aware of their strengths.
• Build instructional programming that boosts social ties and networks by drawing from students' strengths.

These four elements are essential to teaching students living with trauma, violence, and chronic stress. And they bring us back around to the first reflection task.

How easy was it to identify the various strengths of the students? Many educators tell us that it is challenging for them to find any strengths for the last student, Jasmine. They have shared with us that they just don't see how her circumstances and what she does in school reflect any assets. So let's go back to Jasmine for a few moments before we enter into a discussion about the principles of positive psychology. In the description, we share that Jasmine comes to school every day. If we think about this, despite whatever we perceive about her home life (and we have not furnished much about it in terms of the relationships that she has with her mother, neighbors, family's community, and more), she is coming to school regularly, consistently, and routinely. This is certainly a strength that she possesses. It shows responsibility, value for education, value for interactions, hope, appreciation, gratitude, determination, connection, and courage, to name a few of her values and qualities. What this points us toward is the research encouraging us to look for specific student strengths so that we may draw from these in our work.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow's (1999) contributions help us understand the possibilities of what can occur when we look through our strengths-based lens.

Principles of positive psychology. Maslow (1999) pioneered the idea of looking at human behavior through the lens of the assets, capacities, and qualities that empower people and their communities to flourish. He coined the term positive psychology to reflect this idea. Positive psychology is a belief that, as humans, we all want to be the best that we can be and that it is in our nature to strive toward what Maslow refers to as our self-actualized potential. It positions human behavior as being driven by the desire to lead richly meaningful and fulfilling lives. Further, it does not ignore or dismiss the need to take time to understand the difference between what helps us achieve our potential and what doesn't. While not abandoning their roles as scientists of healing, experts in positive psychology (also referred to positivists) argue that we have to give as much attention to acknowledging and building positive qualities as we have given to repairing damage (Morris & Maisto, 2002). In addition, positive psychology expands beyond the self. It looks closely at the human potential for working and collaborating together. Interpersonal relationships, according to Maslow, are made more possible when we believe in each other's worth or value and when we mutually support each other to see our collective human potential.

Earlier, we acknowledged that many caring educators spend great amounts of their time and energy trying to minimize the effects of adversity on their students while simultaneously supporting them to succeed in school. Part of this is our capacity to be empathetic educators; that is, educators who understand our students' circumstances and seek ways to make education meaningful for those students. The tenets of positive psychology require that we be empathetic and asset-based teachers. First, we must have an understanding of our students, and second, we must work from their strengths.

Here is a small example that will be expanded on later in the book. Let's say that we are David, Brianna, and Jasmine's U.S. history teacher. In our course text, students are reading about the U.S. Civil War. The text talks about fathers and sons leaving their families to fight in the war. One of the activities created by the school district's history department asks students to interview their parents about what it would be like to leave a family member behind to fight in a war. As empathetic teachers, we likely would know that some students don't live with their parents. Indeed, Brianna lives with her grandmother. With this knowledge, we would modify the question to be more inclusive of all of our students, including Brianna and others. The same would hold true for making modifications for students who are homeless or living in shelters, or whose parent or guardian is deployed to an area of conflict, so that what we do is inclusive, respectful, validating, and honoring. In addition, if we changed the earlier examples to include a student who is an unaccompanied minor from a war-torn country and learning English, we would make second language learning modifications (such as asking a question that matches the student's level of English proficiency or asking it in the student's native language). We would also modify the question to be relevant and sensitive to the student's background. Furthermore, we would anchor all of these modifications on the students' previously identified assets. While later chapters explore these ideas in much more detail, the point here is that the foundational princip...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Urgent Need for a Strengths-Based Approach
• Chapter 2. Preparing to Work with Diverse Learners
• Chapter 3. Creating a Strengths-Based Classroom Learning Environment
• Chapter 4. Scaffolding Student-to-Student Relationships
• Chapter 5. Fostering Family/Guardian Engagement
• Chapter 6. Infusing a Strengths-Based Approach Across a School
• Chapter 7. Capitalizing on Community Assets to Build Partnerships
• References
• Related ASCD Resources
• About the Author
• Copyright