Returning, Re-Integrating and Regulating ( Pandemic School Transitions)
Returning, Re-Integrating and Regulating
Brain Aligned Practices and Strategies During the Pandemic
As I work with families, educators and students during this pandemic time, we are trying to figure out “how” to do school in a way that feels safe, comprehensive, and doable with limited technology, internet accessibility, while many families and communities are just trying to survive! The traumatic conditions of isolation, chronic unpredictability, and physical/emotional restraint are affecting all of us at some level. How do children and youth express their feelings of abandonment, loss, grief, and confusion? How do adults express these same feelings? Often, our behaviors tell our stories, signaling the pain we can barely speak of or understand. Our behaviors are always communicating our needs, our feelings, and quite possibly our fears that feel too big to contain. And how does the world receive and tolerate these expressions?
All children and youth experience several small potential traumas during each day and, as Bonnie Badenoch describes, “these shards of these accumulating experiences that linger in our muscles, belly, hearts, brains, and body systems gradually shape our perceptual systems and how the world looks.” Referring to these events as "small traumas" is not intended to diminish or disrespect the horrific experiences so many youth carry into our schools. Trauma and adversity are experienced in such unique ways.
We can plan E-Learning curriculums, create new ways of presenting content, innovate assessment protocols for virtual learning, but with so many unknowns in this time, our emotional and social well-being must be a priority. We do not know when or how schools across the country will transition back, but we do know that the conditions every student is going to need upon return are felt safety and connection- but many of our students are going to walk in relationship resistant and this is why we will need to create blocks or short chunks of time for regulatory practices! We do not hesitate to create reading blocks and math blocks, but our students are going to need some space, deep breaths, time, rhythm, movement, and attention to the millions of bits of sensory information that have landed in our nervous systems at a rate that is too much, too fast, and often experienced alone! Meeting our students in their emotional/ brain states, will be the most critical component of the teaching and learning process now and in the months and years following the COVID-19 pandemic. Regulatory practices and strategies are just as important for adult well-being and social and emotional health as they are for our students and children. These brain -aligned practices and strategies can modulate lower systems in the brain that have received aberrant input during this pandemic time escalating the amounts of stress and dysregulation we have experienced. Below are strategies and mini brain aligned practices intended to prepare the brain and body for a calm regulated state, improved focus, and attention while strengthening connection with our students. These strategies and brain aligned practices are intended for E-Learning, for families during this COVID time and for educators as we rethink our procedures, routines, and rituals when we return to school. Patterned predictable repetitive experiences allow us to release tension and stress through a predictable routine within a safe environment.
Expression, Predictability, and Closure
This pandemic has created some dis-stress for us all as our routines have changed, and we forfeited closure to the activities in our worlds a few months ago! Without closure within our experiences, we can feel lost, confused, and spinning inside an endless cycle of the “unknown.” The below activities are ways to create touchpoints, (moments of connection) release anxiety and worry, build stronger connections while creating much needed closure at home, through virtual learning and when we return.
1. Express Yourself- Say it! Write it! Draw it! Or Act it out!
When we can share our sensations, thoughts, and feelings, we feel a sense of relief, safety, and calm. Artistic expression is one of the most powerful ways to regulate our nervous systems during stressful periods of time! We are implementing these questions before an E- Learning lesson, sharing them in packets sent home so students can have some time to express how they feel before the academic part of the lesson. These questions are also great discussion starters that can be implemented during family time when we need to release some of our worry and anxiety!
· What are two images or pictures that pop up in your mind when you think of this pandemic? What do these look like, sound like, smell like and feel like? Can you draw them, write about them, or act them out?
- What are two ways (through images or words) this pandemic has affected you and/ or your family?
- How does your world feel different now compared to six months ago?
- We cannot see this invisible virus, but if you could, what does it remind you of, and how does it look? What are its colors, its lines, its images? If this virus could talk, what would it say? What would you say to this virus?
- If you could help create a better world as we go through this pandemic together, what is one change you would like to help create or see? What would your plan look like?
2. Dual Drawings- Parents, educators, and students can create a shared drawing as each takes a turn and draws a line or shape and then passes the drawing to their partner as they add their line or shape to the drawing within a specific time, adding shapes, lines and color watching this shared activity morph into a collaborative design. We usually create together without words and when the time is up, we talk about our creation! This activity could be shared with students through E-Learning packets over a longer period of time as the teacher begins a drawing and sends home to the student as a weekly or bi-weekly design unfolds.
3. Dual Story Writing/ Journaling - This activity designed for closure is similar to the dual drawings except we create a story together. This story could be created with images or words and could be a 30 minute, one day or weekly family or E-Learning collaboration as students and educators design a fictional story or a dual writing assignment that could take the form of dual journal writing as we share experiences from our moments, days or weeks together!
4. Brain Scavenger Hunt- This activity creates movement, shared and expressed feelings, connection and could become family ritual or through virtual learning! We have played this through zoom with fifth grade students and they find objects around their house in a specific amount of time that address these five brain- aligned items on the scavenger hunt list! We place our responses on a padlet so everyone can share what they discovered!
1. Can you find something in you house that can change its shape, is malleable, and stretches like our brains when we learn something new? This represents the brain’s amazing neuroplasticity! Every experience structurally and functionally changes our brains! We are always growing and learning – repairing and healing!
2. Can you find something that feels calming and soothing to you? When we calm our nervous systems, we create projection pathways to the regions of the brain that can regulate, think clearly, remember and pay attention.
3. Can you find and share something in your home that stresses you out? What you can name, you can tame!
4. Can you find something in your home that creates a memory for you? What experience does an image, or an object invoke that creates feelings of joy or peacefulness?
5. Can you find and share something in your home that makes you feel smarter and focused?
Our Neuro-anatomy- We teach students about their neuroanatomy, so they can understand what happens in their brains when they become stressed, angry, or anxious. When we begin to understand how our brain’s structure and function affect how we feel, behave, and think, we begin to feel relieved and empowered. We are very intentional about using the language of science with our staff and students. The science is empowering and repeatedly addresses activated stress states. We explain how trauma and adversity are not disorders, dysfunctions, or disturbances, but are instead a reordering of neural networks in the brain’s structures.
During morning meetings or whole-class time, we spend a few minutes discussing and exploring the prefrontal cortex, the amygdala, and neuroplasticity with students. We identify and create lists of our emotional triggers and coping strategies, and we teach students to use their breath, movement, or any sensation that feels calming and comforting in times of heightened negative emotion. Students can create a personal routine of regulatory strategies that is theirs to implement when they begin to feel anxious, irritated, angry, or simply rough. We help our students create this routine ahead of time and model how to use these regulatory strategies. At the end of this chapter, you'll find a chart of strategies that address safety and connection. Students and educators can add to this list and share with one another.
6. Focused Attention Practices- A focused-attention practice is a brain exercise for quieting the thousands of thoughts that distract and frustrate us each day. When the mind is quiet and focused, we can be present with a specific sound, sight, or taste.Research repeatedly shows that quieting our minds ignites our parasympathetic nervous system, reducing heart rate and blood pressure while enhancing our coping strategies to effectively handle the day-to-day challenges that keep coming. Our thinking improves and our emotions begin to regulate so that we can approach an experience with variable options.
7. Body Reflection/ Sensations are the Language of the Survival Brain - stuffy, breathless, tight, tense, open, flowing, teary, numb, edgy, jittery, soft, dizzy, dull, tender , stretchy, fluttery, hot, cold, brittle, puffy, suffocating, pounding, shaky , quivering, buzzing, racing, tired, burning, jagged, raw, heavy, racing, hard, stiff, mushy, soft, etc.
We are learning more each day that the best way we can care for our children and students is to care for ourselves. We begin with noticing and naming the sensations we experience in our bodies as trauma and adversity become lodged and embodied in areas where we feel tight, tense, knotted up, numb, empty, brittle, and therefore rough. Therapist Bonnie Badenoch shares that we encode 11 million bits of information per second implicitly, while we store only 6 to 50 bits of information consciously. These 11 million bits of unconsciously embodied experiences are living within us, and we struggle without conscious awareness to integrate a felt sense of experiences. Fortunately, our own bodies can be our greatest teachers, so when we're able to share and name these sensations, they begin to lessen. A body reflection begins with a body scan during which we allow ourselves to notice how we are experiencing these sensations. We have traditionally talked about self-reflection and self-awareness through the written word or conversation, but in times of heightened adversity, it becomes more important to delve deeper into where these experiences are held and buried. We can identify and draw household objects to help us visualize and reflect on our inner sensations of experiences. For example, a bar of soap might show that we feel refreshed, a knotted rope might show tension and tightness, or an empty container might show how depleted we feel. Creating a simple or even playful representation of these ideas can help us better understand how we are experiencing these moments of great anxiety or discomfort. This is a wonderful routine that we can also do a few times each day as a check-in with our children and youth.
Remember that the one tool we all carry in all moments is our tone of voice. Non-verbal communication is 97% of our total communication with another and being aware and adjusting our tones, while gentling our facial expressions provides a safe place and a compassionate presence for our students.
We calm another through our regulated presence, and rarely with words.
Dr. Lori Desautels
Assistant Professor
College of Education
Butler University