AD FREE 7.2 Mending Teachers with Karen Gross

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Shannon and Mary have an informative and inspiring chat with Karen Gross.  They learn details about how the Covid-19 pandemic affected teachers and students.    Karen shares why the role of teachers is more difficult today, and she provides tons of specific ways teachers can fill their cups and take care of themselves and their class.   If you've experienced stress or trauma, you'll discover ideas from this discussion with Karen about healing.

RESOURCES MENTIONED DURING THE EPISODE:

1. Mending Education: Finding Hope, Creativity, and Mental Wellness in Times of Trauma by Karen Gross and Edward K. S. Wang * Amazon affiliate link
2. Trauma Doesn't Stop at the School Door:  Strategies and Solutions for Educators, PreK-College by Karen Gross * Amazon affiliate link
3. Virtual Teachers Lounge
4. Yoga with Adriene on YouTube (This is Shannon's favorite yoga channel)
5. Mirror Neurons (article by American Psychological Association)
6. The Other 3 Senses You Never Knew Existed but You Should:   vestibular system, proprioception, and interoception
7. Understanding and treating a dysregulated nervous system: signs, symptoms, and rebalancing techniques
8. Karen's website
9. Follow Karen on Facebook @karengrossedu

• Get Literacy Support through our Patreon

Transcript

7.2 Mending Teachers with Karen Gross

Shannon Betts: Welcome to the Reading Teachers Lounge. Mary and I are here today with a new friend, Karen Gross, and she's going to be here talking with us about a topic that we've wanted to cover for a while, as we've noticed some trends talking with our teacher friends and our, you know, our own children's teachers and, you know, our own experiences with students in the school systems and.

Karen has just written a new book about this topic called Mending Education, Finding Hope, Creativity, and Mental Wellness in Times of Trauma. And as we've talked to you teachers in the last few seasons, you know, we've mentioned, you know, [00:03:00] we see that Everybody's feeling burnout. Everybody's feeling frustrated.

There's a lot of teachers leaving the field. We've ourselves changed some of our roles and we're just really excited to delve into this topic with Karen today because she's been talking to so many teachers in the field as well. So welcome to the Reading Teacher's Lunch, Karen. 

Karen Gross: Nice to be here with you both again.

Shannon Betts: We're trying to think of it again. We're looking back at our old catalog to see if we've met before or not because you seem so familiar, but we will, we will answer that later. So why don't you start by introducing yourselves if it is the first time you've been here in the reading teacher's office, Karen, and tell us you know, your teaching experience, what your current role is in education, just, Tell our listeners who you are.

Karen Gross: Sure. So I define myself as an educator and an author and an artist who deeply believes in trying to promote student success, both academically and psychosocially. [00:04:00] And my particular area of expertise is trauma and its impact. on learning, as well as its impact, not on students alone, but on teachers, on educators in all the roles they play within our school systems.

That would include coaches and food service workers and school nurses and school social workers and school psychologists. And I come at this having been a professor myself for 20 years but I also student taught and periodically teach in schools with teachers. I was the artist in residence at an elementary school for five years where I shared my art and my writing and the children's books that I write.

I'm a former college president, I was the senior policy advisor to the U. S. Department of Education in the [00:05:00] Obama administration. But I think what defines me in particular is that I link theory and practice. Theory is wonderful and I do empirical research on education and survey educators. But what really matters is what happens in the trenches.

Thanks. and understanding what teachers are experiencing. And one of the most difficult things for me Is the recognition everybody who has been educated thinks they're an expert on education. And just because you've been to school, which is really good, doesn't mean, you know, all about education. So my, man, 

Shannon Betts: say it louder for the people in the back, 

Karen Gross: my view.

Wait, hang on one second. If we can break the. Recording. I'll get the dog up [00:06:00] here. So I was saying what I was saying, and I hope you'll cut and paste as needed to make it coherent. Is that many people who are educated think that makes them experts in education. And as much as I appreciate are all being educated, the people who are actually in the trenches now who are working with students, have a very rich and thoughtful understanding, and we need to listen to them.

We need to listen to our teachers. They are there. They are seeing what's happening. And so, as much as outsiders, including parents and school boards, and even administrators, want to comment, what really matters is listening to the voices of educators. 

Shannon Betts: And you've been listening to those voices. So tell us where have you been listening to [00:07:00] them?

Who have you been listening to? And what are they saying? 

Karen Gross: So I've been doing a lot of listening. And I did it before the pandemic, but certainly during the pandemic. And the listening that I did during the pandemic has Enabled me in a very powerful way. I hope to understand the impact of the pandemic on students and on teachers.

But let me just share with you the concrete ways that I've listened to teacher voices. The first is that with three other educational colleagues we run something called the virtual teacher's lounge, which we love that, but a great title. And it started because during the pandemic, teachers didn't have the opportunity to get together, share and vent.

In a teacher's room in their own school, and many of them felt isolated and felt like their voices were not being [00:08:00] heard. So we opened an online virtual teacher's lounge that has been so successful that it continues to this day, even though schools are back to brick and mortar learning and teachers have a teacher's lounge.

room or staff room or whatever one wants to call it where they can engage with others. And the virtual teacher's lounge has been a place where teachers not only can get some suggestions, but can share what's happening in their lives in school and actually out of school, and how the pandemic impacted them and their students.

And it's a safe place to vet. It's a safe place to share. It's a safe place for support. So that's one access point. Then in addition to that for the book, we did a survey of educators across the United States with both closed end and open [00:09:00] end questions, asking them about how the pandemic affected them and the work they did day to day as teachers.

And it was an opportunity to hear their voices to listen carefully to what they said. In their open ended comments and to give them an opportunity to know that there were people who were willing to share what they had shared with us. So that's the second way. 

Mary Saghafi: The 

Karen Gross: third way is that we conducted a series of webinars.

on helping teachers cope with what was happening during the pandemic. And in each of those webinars, we did a content piece, but we also opened it up for discussion. And in that context, many teachers shared what they were doing, what they were experiencing, what they were seeing themselves and also their colleagues.[00:10:00] 

And more recently, we have done various webinars and conversations about meanness in schools. And one of the aftermaths of the pandemic has been a rise in meanness. Teacher to teacher, student to teacher, teacher and administrator, parent to teacher. The meanness is quite abundant. So that's the third avenue.

And the fourth avenue is both my co author and I actually taught during the pandemic. You know, when I was a college president, I used to teach our students. Why? Because it was very hard for me to answer faculty who had complaints about various things related to our students if I only knew it from the outside.

So I regularly taught so that when faculty could say to me, well, our students. I said, well, actually, maybe you're not engaging [00:11:00] them. And when students would struggle, and I saw it myself, I would understand the need to understand who our students are. So during the pandemic and afterwards, I have continued to teach.

I have taught adults, I have taught teachers, I have taught social workers, and I've actually guest taught in classes of students. So during the pandemic, I did a number of readings of my children's books, in actual classes with kids. So if you put all those together, I think it's fair to say that my co author and I have had a myriad of opportunities To listen to listen carefully to teachers and what they have to say.

Mary Saghafi: I really appreciate the level of detail that you get into about how you listen. How you are able to engage. And so I'm really curious about some of these findings then because you come from it from a lot of different perspectives. So [00:12:00] what are some of these big trauma themes that you have found?

From the teachers that you've been listening to. 

Karen Gross: So I, I think it's fair to say, and this is not an easy observation, that the role of teachers is more difficult. than it has ever been. And the responsibilities of teachers have changed. And the roles they play within the lives of students have increased.

And add to that, that they are increasingly seeing the stresses of their students, and their colleagues, which redounds back to them. So they're not only experiencing their own stress, they're in essence inculcating The stress that others [00:13:00] feel. There's a terminology for this. It's the distinction between primary and secondary trauma.

Primary trauma is when you yourself experienced trauma, which many teachers have, but secondary trauma is when you catch the trauma from another person. It's like a virus. Actually you catch it. I mean, this is like a real thing. You catch trauma. And secondary trauma is in part what accounts for teachers feeling tired, feeling irritated, feeling unwilling and unable to do their jobs as they used to do them, feeling frustrated, wanting to march with their feet out the door.

All of those things are symptomology of secondary trauma. And I should add that there is something called vicarious trauma, which is even beyond secondary trauma. And that is the trauma that you [00:14:00] also imbibe from others. But it's one type of trauma that goes to the essence of who you are and you start questioning your value, your identity, the role you're playing, the satisfaction you're getting or not getting from the work you're doing.

And vicarious trauma is the most difficult to ameliorate. Because it's, it's about people asking fundamental questions. Like, am I making a difference anymore? Or is this work still satisfying? Or can I continue to do this for another five years? So teachers are experiencing all of that. And that's basically what I've seen.

I've seen teachers who are struggling with a combination of. Primary, secondary, and vicarious trauma. [00:15:00] 

Shannon Betts: Have the students then experienced the majority of the primary trauma in terms of learning loss, isolationism, and things like that because of the pandemic? Or are there other things that I'm leaving off?

Karen Gross: So, a lot of the trauma that teachers are getting comes from students who are struggling. So, and have trauma. So pre pandemic, the data were that almost 70 percent of adults had experienced one trauma in their lives and about 50 percent of all children. That's pre pandemic data. If you look at the impact of the pandemic and you look at its myriad of consequences, deaths, illness, fear and the like loss of primary caregivers, loss of secondary caregivers, changes in family [00:16:00] dynamics, family dysfunction, work changes.

The estimates now are that about 90 plus percent of adults have experienced trauma now and over 70 percent of children. But I would add that the trauma from the pandemic is not the only trauma from which we are suffering right now. So, take a word from the business environment. We're living in a VUCA world, V U C A.

And the acronym can be unpacked as follows. V The V is for volatile, the U is for uncertain, the C is for chaotic, and the [00:17:00] A is for anxiety provoking. So we live in a VUCA world, that's not just pandemic related, it's related to all sorts of things that are happening in our society, in our politics. in our social media, in our news coverage.

And if you put all that together, the VUCA, and by the way, you can change up a little bit the meaning of each word. So vulnerable could be one of the V words chaotic changing could be the C words. I mean, you can flip them around a little, but it's a pretty standard acronym now to explain the difficulty of the world in which we're living.

And we could add to that not only pandemic, social media, politics, but natural disasters. Which have added a layer of difficulty to all of [00:18:00] this between fires, floods, tornadoes, mudslides, and the like heat waves. All of which are impacting people and families across not well the globe to be sure, but certainly across our nation.

Mary Saghafi: This is eye opening because I think that it gives language to what many of us have just been experiencing and we often I often hear teachers, parents. Adults blaming the pandemic for many things, but I think that the compounding of circumstances, trauma, chaos, unpredictability and I think that this really kind of gives some language to how and why we are so vulnerable.

Thank you. Anxious. Anxious, unbalanced, 

Shannon Betts: [00:19:00] fight or flight, kind of poised. 

Mary Saghafi: Yes. So 

Karen Gross: the, the ability to have a language is a remarkably good point. So I use the following three words to help people navigate. I say name, tame, and frame. So first name, what's going on, give it a word or words so that you can understand it.

If you can't name it, then it's this amorphous force. that makes you really uncomfortable and uncertain and uneasy. So you have to name what's happening. Once you name it, you can start to tame it. In other words, find strategies to ameliorate it. Now trauma never disappears. [00:20:00] That's one of its downsides, among many.

But what's important is it can be ameliorated. So if you can figure out how to tame it, That helps, but first you got to name it so you can tame it. And then if you name it and tame it, you can do the third piece, which is frame it in two senses of that word. The first is to literally put it in a frame, like in the wall on the wall, as in it's important, this matters.

This is really key stuff. Like you frame important pictures, like of your kids, or your family, or your parents, or something. And the other is, framing it as in like you frame a house. Create a structure in which to think about it, that enables you to know that there are things you can do, ways to process, ways to manage.

A structure, just like the frame of a house. [00:21:00] So if you want to rebalance your life, you need a structure to do that. You need the frame. So if you name, tame, and frame, that's the sort of three word strategy for how to navigate forward. 

Mary Saghafi: That's perfect. I think 

Shannon Betts: that's what we're doing right now, right? Like, you've just named and defined, you know, the trauma that students and teachers are experiencing since the pandemic and to today.

Can you give more details about taming and framing? 

Karen Gross: Sure. So there are, if. If teachers are struggling from secondary trauma, there are a number of things that they can try to do to ameliorate it. That's taming. And if you want to encapsulate it in large part, it boils [00:22:00] down to self care. And sadly, many of us who are in the service fields feel guilty when we take care of ourselves.

But it is very difficult to pour from an empty cup. And so one of the things I say to teachers all the time is you need to take care of yourself so that you can take care of the many students that you serve. Now how you take care of yourself when you're traumatized. Experiencing secondary trauma is not a simple one size fits all solution.

In part, it depends on who one is, how old one is, one's background, one's race, one's ethnicity, one's gender, one's sexual orientation. [00:23:00] But the easiest way to sort of summarize self care, In a way that works effectively is to focus on our senses. And most people talk about the five senses, our basic senses, sight, smell, taste, touch, hear those senses, but actually I would add several senses to that, which are on some of the more broader understandings of what are our senses.

I would add balance, which is a sense. I would add intuition, which is a sense as well. And then I would use proprioception, which is the ability to see [00:24:00] oneself in space. 

Mary Saghafi: One's 

Karen Gross: body awareness. There is also what's known as interoception, which is understanding one's insides, understanding what's going on within oneself, not just psychologically, but physiologically.

So if you take the basic five senses and you add to them balance and intuition. and then interoception and proprioception. You have a list that if you find ways to use those senses, you can start to feel better and more able to navigate. So there are countless examples, but take touch as a sense. So fidgets work.

They, they work for a reason. [00:25:00] They work because they activate. your sense of touch, your kinesthetic sense. And if you can do things that in essence distract you in a positive way and allow you to step away from where you're stuck, then you can start to heal. So fidgets actually work. That's why schools in teachers rooms and in classrooms should have just buckets of fidgets.

And they should have them because they actually work. There's a very funny story about this. I, I did some work with a college on the west coast and I suggested the use of fidgets by both students and educators. Okay. So one educator goes off and buys on his own, a bunch of fidgets, puts them in the classrooms.

I did this work with them over a year. And he comes back and [00:26:00] he reports that, Oh my goodness, you know, the fidgets are like unbelievable. Students are actually paying attention, and they're engaged, and I'm doing better, it's wonderful. And then he says, and I went to my department chair and asked to be reimbursed for the fidgets.

And the department chair said, What proof is there beyond that you saw at work in your classroom? That fidgets work so he says to me, do you have any citations about bidgets and digits working and why they're working. So anyway I round up some work that both I did and others did on why fidgets work and why they activate the senses and What's the sort of brain chemistry around fidgeting and fidget toys.

And I gave it to him and he writes back in between one of our sessions and he goes, success. I've just been reimbursed. So there you go. So that's [00:27:00] using one of the senses. Another example is balance. So if I were to tell you right now to stand up, and lift, stand on your non dom, so stand on, stand up and lift up your dominant leg.

So you're standing on your non dominant leg. You should be wobbly. I see you wobbling. Yes. Shannon and I are actively doing this right now, by the way, and I'm barely 

Shannon Betts: standing up. 

Karen Gross: So you're on your non dominant leg. Okay. Now make sure there's a table or something in front of you. And do the same thing.

Stand on your non dominant leg, lift your dominant leg, but close your eyes. Just make sure you have a table in front of you because you'll really wobble on this one. Okay, so with your eyes closed, Stand on your non dominant leg, lifting your dominant leg. [00:28:00] Oh, don't fall over there. I 

Shannon Betts: know I'm making noise.

It's 

very wobbly. I'm noticing my eyes are supposed to be. Okay. Remember I have a 

brain injury. You guys. 

Mary Saghafi: That's true. 

Karen Gross: All right. Mary, are you doing it with your eyes closed and lifting? Yes. Are you wobbling? Yes. You're wobbling. I am wobbling. Okay. Now open your eyes. And now do the same exercise, put your feet down, but now stand again on your non dominant leg, lift your dominant leg, but this time with your eyes open, you should be doing it better.

Much 

Mary Saghafi: better. 

Karen Gross: Yeah. Much better. If you do that exercise on your own as an educator for two minutes, you can have your students do it with you. It, it mimics internal balance. by asking you to balance externally. 

Shannon Betts: No way. Yeah. 

Mary Saghafi: I do feel calm. I can't lie. 

Karen Gross: Yeah. It's like tree pose and yoga. [00:29:00] And the advantage of it by the way, is you get better at it.

Which is a good thing, right? That's what learning is all about, right? And you don't always see it. You sort of. fiddle around for a while while you try to get better at something and you make mistakes. But the, the other piece of this is that you have to concentrate. You actually have to pay attention.

You can't be thinking about your trauma. You actually have to be able to focus on, oh, I might like fall over here. I like have to like struggle here to stand. And so those are examples of using your senses. So let me give you one more. So one of the antidotes. is to feel connected. And we can feel connected by activating various senses.

So if you turn on music, that means a lot to you. You can quote, feel [00:30:00] connected to the music. If you touch someone else, like put your hand on their shoulder, give someone a hug, you feel connected. One of the downsides, by the way, of the pandemic is that there was no touch. There was social distancing. So you lost connection.

But if you can connect in some way, it helps. So here's a kinesthetic way to connect. So it relates in part to touch and it's also visual. So it uses two senses. So if, if you happen to have some paperclips, do you have any there? 

Mary Saghafi: I do. 

Karen Gross: Paperclips. All right. Okay. Now hook them together. Make a chain of paper.

I'm understanding your earrings now. Your listeners should know I'm wearing paperclips as earrings. 

Mary Saghafi: Very cool, paperclip earrings. [00:31:00] 

Shannon Betts: We're going to have to, right before we finish recording, or after we record, but before we get off the Zoom, I want us to un You know, we have our screens kind of blurred, but I want to unblur your screen so we can get a photo of your earrings.

Okay. All right. I'm hooking some paperclips together. Okay. 

Mary Saghafi: I have a little chain. I have four paperclips right now. 

Karen Gross: If you had 10 or a box, you could create a whole chain. 

Mary Saghafi: Yes. 

Karen Gross: And then, If you were near another person, you could connect to them and together you could wrap them around your chair, your table, your neck, your arm.

And here's what you're doing. When trauma hits, your neural pathways literally fragment, they disconnect. But the good news is, our brain has the capacity, the plasticity, to build new neural pathways. So, [00:32:00] the way to build neural pathways is through connection. So, putting together paperclips is doing the physical act of what you're asking your brain to do in a psychological way, in terms of rebuilding neural pathways.

Amazing. It also connects you to yourself because you're actually connecting. And it connects you if you're with others to others because you can share your paperclip chain. So I have images of doing this exercise with educators. where after they get their own box of paperclips, they break into groups and create something.

They've created amazing things. Like they drape them around things on a wall, they drape them around tables. I've had students take a pillar in their room where they meet and wrap the paperclips there. And they kept them there for days after I had left. It allows you to [00:33:00] see connection, to make connection.

Feel connection, to do connection, all of which will help you tame trauma. So if you name and tame, those are examples of taming. 

Shannon Betts: That reminds me of making those clover flower necklaces. when I was a kid. We used to have really long clover and with a little white bud at the end and I would we would you would we would tie them together on the playground and we would make like bracelets or really long necklaces or rings and we would sometimes get together as friends and like tie each other's to make the chain longer.

Karen Gross: But dandelion chains did that. Okay. People used to also do them with paper, colored paper. 

Shannon Betts: Yes. Right. Like at Christmas time. Yeah. 

Karen Gross: Yes. 

Shannon Betts: You would 

Karen Gross: like 

Shannon Betts: hook them all together. Yeah, but it's the same [00:34:00] thing and it's actually doing something to our souls. Yes. That's why as children were maybe called to do that, to that kind of type of play.

Right. That's really neat. So these taming strategies. Oh, what type cleaners? Yes. Yes. So these taming strategies. Like, it does soothe. Like short term in the moment. Do you have to do a bunch of them, like a big recipe of them to like add up to a lot that's gonna have like a lasting effect, or is it just a short term effect?

Karen Gross: No, what I'm giving you right now are the strategies to handle short term stress that comes when your autonomic nervous system is active. So 

Shannon Betts: to calm that fight or flight, you 

Karen Gross: know, blood pressure pounding. Yes, the fight, flight, freeze, and then there are two more, fawn and faint, [00:35:00] which most people don't talk about, but they're actually five F's, not three, as I see it.

But there are longer term strategies. to deal with. So what we've just talked about is what I would call acute trauma symptomology. Acute secondary, if you want the fancy name, acute secondary trauma amelioration. There is amelioration for deferred trauma symptomology. And deferred trauma symptomology tends to fall into three categories.

When you're struggling with longer term trauma, people tend to dysregulate and dysregulation means different things depending on where you are and who you are and what's happening to you. But dysregulation in young children is everything from temper tantrums, to screaming, and older children, it's throwing [00:36:00] things or breaking things or pounding on things or disruptive things in a classroom.

For an educator who dysregulates, it's when you notice yourself yelling when you normally wouldn't yell. Like, A teacher who normally is calm and quiet, who suddenly sees a kid acting out and starts saying, What the hell are you doing, sit down! Now they're dysregulating. The teacher is dysregulating. Or a teacher who suddenly says, I can't believe you're doing this!

Like, what is wrong with you? We know better than to say something is wrong with someone when they dysregulate. The question is what's happening to you, not you. It's not like you did something, it's something happened to you and you're exhibiting it. Behavior is the language of trauma. That's the language trauma speaks.

So watch your [00:37:00] behavior, not, not as in watch, as in oversee it, as in perceive what you're doing and what others are doing. And your behavior will give you a pretty clear clue as to what's going on. Now the other way, the other two ways that you display sort of deferred trauma symptomology one is dissociation.

Dissociation is when you isolate yourself, like you want to be alone, you don't want to engage with your family, you, a teacher who's disassociated will, for example, come home from work and just not want to cook dinner, not want to be around people, want to go alone into a room just to be by themselves.

Shannon Betts: That's my default reaction and then I'll numb out with TV and books. 

Karen Gross: Okay. Those are all dissociative. Staring at your computer screen, staring at your cell phone, playing cell [00:38:00] phone games, looking down when people talk to you. Those are dissociative behaviors. And by the way, at its worst, you dissociate from yourself.

Stop feeling. You stop connecting with who you are. And the third, so there's dysregulation, there's dissociation, and then there's overregulation, which is, by the way, not paid attention to. That's when you cling onto others and become completely obsequious. You do whatever is asked of you and then some.

What can I do to help you? Can, can I do more work? Can I work harder? Can I do any extra activities here at school? As if The added activity will keep you from thinking about and processing [00:39:00] what's going on in your head. So when children do this, when they over regulate, they actually are praised for it.

It's the goody two shoes kid. The one who, like, can't do enough for the teacher. Yeah. Right. The over helper. And you ought to be saying, as a teacher, when that happens, ooh, like, mm mm, not so good. Like, kids are not supposed to be like this. Kids are supposed to act out a little bit and, and be a touch disobedient or worried about authority or playful or, you know.

Something like that. When adults over regulate, they tend to take on more. They do more work. They suddenly are on 42 committees and find themselves at more meetings than they could possibly be at. And they're masking by doing that. Which, by the way, their [00:40:00] behavior is rewarded by those who are administrators.

But it means they have less time for family, less time for themselves, less time to process. 

Mary Saghafi: So true. I, I feel like I, when I know Shannon and I speak about these topics regularly, this very much is a lot of, we talk 

Shannon Betts: about this off, off, off, off the microphones too, just from where we're like chatting about our personal lives and how burned out we are.

By the 

Karen Gross: way, you can have all three. I 

Mary Saghafi: was going to say, I think that. Yeah, it's likely that teachers you know, are often people who want to be purposeful. And so I think that it's common for people who are in this service, to have one all or some of these kinds of things also probably throughout their lives as well.

And I do think, especially in the field of teaching you get rewarded, [00:41:00] especially for this over regulation behavior. I, I see it very common in a lot of my teacher friends, especially myself. And it's also something that I think that more people are more commonly talking about in the more recent, you know, last couple of years.

And I think that it is really important to discuss this more openly. And, and as you said before, you know, name it. Not just praise it, but name it and and also frame it for how positive it can be and also how detrimental it can be on the opposite side where it may take away from your family, it may take away from your ability for your own social life and I think that this is a really important topic that's, that's really coming to light and I think that teachers are very good at observing student behaviors, and you may be able to identify it in student behaviors.

Adults, I don't think are [00:42:00] as great at observing either there. We don't want 

Shannon Betts: to hold up the mirror to ourselves about this stuff. 

Mary Saghafi: Sure. 

Karen Gross: That's very true. 

Shannon Betts: And these responses seem to perpetuate. You know, the burnout cycle, because if you're over functioning, you're just going to keep burning yourself out.

You're not going to recharge. 

Karen Gross: So let me give you one completely counterintuitive strategy. Okay. Helps. And by the way. While some of this is in the book, we, we haven't really gotten to the meat of the book. We may have to meet again. Well, no, we want to get to the meat of the book. So we'll talk about that as soon as you finish this point.

It's about the pandemic positives, but anyway, let me give you one more strategy. It's completely counterintuitive and it involves something called our mirror neurons. Another way of understanding those is to [00:43:00] call them our empathy engines. So, if we do something when we're experiencing trauma, whether it's primary, secondary, or vicarious, that helps someone else, not our students, but somebody really in need, like baking cookies for a nursing home person, or visiting the neighbor whose spouse just died.

You would think that would overtax you when you're traumatized. But actually what happens is That when you help someone in need outside your normal helping profession, so this isn't about a nurse taking care of one more patient, this isn't about a therapist providing one more therapy session, it isn't about a teacher doing one more [00:44:00] special tutoring session with a student.

This is a separate set of actions. What happens is that when you do one of these kinds of empathy invoking activities, the benefit and joy and pleasure that the person getting what you're giving redounds back to you, mirrors back to you, even without your trying. So, when you go to that neighbor and leave the cookies at the table, door and they open the door and they smile and they say thank you and they say you made my day.

Their positives by your, by virtue of your mirror neurons, your empathy engines flip back to you and you feel better, more grateful, more appreciative. [00:45:00] And it's totally counter intuitive because we tend to tell people who are struggling do less. Stay by yourself. Don't engage with others. Don't take on more.

This is one thing you actually can take on that will help. 

Mary Saghafi: Amazing. That makes sense to me too. I think that that's that is when I have friends who say stop doing so much. I'm like, I'm not doing it. Necessarily, you know, taking on something else. This might fill my cup. This might be something that is actually, you know, something that I am looking forward to doing.

So I, I appreciate you saying that. I think that's a wonderful example. 

Karen Gross: So let me I'll give you one concrete example. When there are natural disasters. And whole communities are wiped out or there's a school shooting somewhere other than in one's own [00:46:00] community. People often come to me and say, how do I help my students and myself deal with these horrors?

And the answer is to reach out to that community. Put together a card that everybody signs and you decorate. Come up with some vigil that you do where you share that vigil with the school or community that's struggling. If you do that, the, the benefit to them redounds actually back to you. It, it's not what people would think to do, but it is really helpful for navigating trauma.

Shannon Betts: So, is that the antidote to. To this trauma? I mean, how do teachers do the deep mending, the deep healing, and bringing back their wellness? 

Karen Gross: First of all, it's [00:47:00] not easy and then it's not fun. Mm-Hmm. And it's not one thing. Okay. You actually have to do a, a myriad of things and you have to do the ones that work for you.

So it's not like there's a, a single recipe. That will bake the wellness cake. There are different ingredients for different people that work. But, if you try, you'll see that some things work better for you than for others. Like, what works for Shannon may not work for me. Or some of what works for her may work for me, but not all of it.

So you have to kind of try it and you have to be willing to say, okay, well, this one, this balance thing. Oh, not for me. I'm not doing that ever again. But there are others, for example, if you're artistic or even if you're not. [00:48:00] Doing art helps. Why? It fosters creativity. So anything that fosters creativity works.

But for some people, it might be strumming on a guitar. For some people, it might be throwing paint against a wall. For some people, it might be clay. So the other thing that I think is of critical importance is actually what I call reversing the negative bias. positivity. So one of the downsides of feeling traumatized is that one tends to complain and one tends to be miserable.

And if you say to somebody, if you say to teachers, share how you feel, most people will start out with, I am miserable, tired, fatigued, anxious, grumpy, [00:49:00] the list is quite long. So I think you have to ask a different question, name one positive and one negative thing you're feeling. See if you can shift from a negative bias to a positive.

And There is no question but that psychologically we do better when we have a glass half full as opposed to a glass half empty mentality. But it's really easy when one's struggling to focus on the negative. But almost all the time we have something good that's happening if we allow ourselves to articulate it.

So think about a feeling tree. That you put up on a wall in your home or I actually have a tree branch, and you put on it when you're struggling, one positive thing that day and one negative thing. But you gotta make sure that for every negative, you put up a positive. You can't just [00:50:00] leave the negatives to be your reigning discourse.

You need something positive. So I, I do two other things that I'll share with you. The first is I keep this on my desk. It's called a hoptimist, optimist, but with the word hop optimist. Okay. So I keep various symbolic things in my home. I carry with me a stone. That I can use in my fingers that says hope, because hope is a positive if you have hope, it's what allows you to move forward.

So if you can't generate hope, it's very hard to continue doing what you're doing. If you think everything is like a disaster and will never get better. It's very, very difficult. So I want to give you an exercise that reinforces what I'm [00:51:00] saying. So to do this, you need a pencil and piece of paper. I'm ready.

Ready? Okay. So I want you to write these three sentences. Anger curbs wisdom.

Doubt curbs confidence. and fear curbs dreams. Okay, so just read me the three sentences. 

Shannon Betts: Anger, Anger, Curbs, Wisdom, Doubt, Curbs, Confidence, Fear, 

Karen Gross: Curbs, Dreams. Now read them in reverse. Instead of reading left to right, Read those same sentences, right to left. [00:52:00] 

Shannon Betts: Wisdom curbs anger. Confidence curbs doubt. Dreams curb fear.

Cool, I didn't know you were taking that direction. 

Mary Saghafi: I did not either. I'm authentically surprised. 

Karen Gross: That's really helpful. It's a really good exercise. It's a hugely powerful exercise to show people the power of the positive. And it's the same sentence. You're just reading it differently. Same words. And I have done this exercise with groups of people who take it.

I, I'll give you a concrete, I just did it with a group of, so I, I, I consult with organizations that are experiencing trauma, right? Where the people are experiencing trauma and in particular, often organizations [00:53:00] that do, you know, community based work where they're struggling. So they're dealing with immigrants or they're dealing with suicidal kids.

So they're dealing with people who are addicted or, I mean, any number of difficult situations, and they imbibe the trauma of the people with whom they're dealing. So one of these organizations with whom I had worked during the pandemic reached back out and said help us help our team. We're in trouble.

We need help. Tell us what to do. Okay. So these are trained trauma workers, right? I mean, they know what they're doing. They've done this a lot, right? Their daily job is ameliorating trauma. But they do it for others. Yeah. So they, this was about them. How do I help this? And, and the nicest part, by the way of this was that when the head of the team called me, she said, I learned from when we work together that I should ask them what would help.

Which is like [00:54:00] the perfect thing to do, right? What can I do to help you? I mean, she did exactly the right thing. By the way, more administrators should say to teachers, what can I do to help you? Anyway, so she said, I went to them, I went to this team of 10 and I said, what can I do to help you? And they said, go find that woman who helped us two years ago during the pandemic, go find her and see if she'll help us again.

So I did this exercise with them, this sentence reversal exercise. And to a person, not only were they surprised by it, they had no idea what was coming. They said, I'm going to put it up on my wall. I mean, I'm going to keep these sentences with me as a reminder that how you perceive what you're doing, how you articulate what you're doing, makes a difference in how you feel.[00:55:00] 

Mary Saghafi: I think that's so true. I think that this is such a powerful exercise. And I was even imagining it with last year, I noticed that the third grade group of students that I was working with was very upset and worried and more anxious than I've seen in previous years about their milestone testing their state high stakes testing and I could see this being a really successful activity to do even with, you know, young children.

The power of positivity, I think you're right, is, is an antidote to anxiety, stress, fear. 

Karen Gross: So there's a pandemic positive that we've lost. I'm going to just give you one from the book. Sure. Okay. One of the things that happened during the pandemic is that the [00:57:00] standardized testing didn't happen. Okay. And it didn't happen for any number of reasons, but not the least of which is everybody was remote or hybrid or something.

Okay. Now what's interesting is that many educators then turn to other methods of assessment apart from standardized testing. Oh, they did portfolio testing, evaluation, not testing. They did portfolio evaluations. They did conversations to gain an understanding of students levels of knowledge acquisition.

They did informal reading opportunities with text that they weren't used to. They did all sorts of things that enabled them to see not just a measured number, but student progress, right? The standardized test stuff gives you a number. What really [00:58:00] matters. is progress. Like, are you doing better as a student from the day you entered school three months later?

Yes, we want certain minimum levels of competency, but are you getting better? Are you, so the kid who can do it all but hasn't even grown, that's not success. Okay, so all, not all, many teachers came up with wonderful ways of evaluating their teaching and the students learning and psychosocial development.

As soon, that's a pandemic positive. They found alternative ways and many of them. Pre pandemic had complained about the anxiety and the horrors and the pressure and the negativity of standardized testing. Post pandemic, when [00:59:00] schools reopened, what got reinstituted? Standardized testing. So, here was an opportunity with a pandemic positive that we could have identified, replicated, and scaled.

And instead, we discarded it. 

Shannon Betts: Not only discarded it, but seemed to amplify it because then it was like, let's measure the learning loss. Yes, that's a very good 

Karen Gross: point. Absolutely. Yes, we doubled down. Yeah, yeah. Yes. 

Shannon Betts: That's really sad when you put it in that perspective. So we lost an opportunity. 

Karen Gross: We lost many.

And what was, what's, what the book rests on, the new book, Mending Education, is that during the pandemic, educators exercised remarkable creativity, innovation, capacity to learn, adaptability. And in the book, we identify [01:00:00] almost 30, it's about 30 pandemic positives. Unfortunately, when the pandemic waned. Many of those positives were either not listened to, not adopted, not embraced, not utilized.

And so the crisis that created an opportunity and produced some amazing improvements in education got lost. And were we? to identify, replicate, and scale many of the things that we did in the pandemic, which is not to say the pandemic was perfect for education, but if we were to take the positives and use them, we would mend education.[01:01:00] 

So the analogy, we use two analogies in the book. The is what's known as consugee or juicy pottery. art form. So jiu shi is Chinese, kintsugi is Japanese. They're art forms where you mend what is broken. And in kintsugi, you do it with gold lines across the cracks of the pottery you're repairing. In jiu shi, you actually insert hinges.

To create a way of linking the broken parts together. And out of those art forms, in one fashion or another, you say, more beautiful for being broken. Mm hmm. And isn't that what we could have done had we paid attention to mending education [01:02:00] from the shards that the pandemic left us with? The other analogy that we use in the book, and actually the one that starts the book, is about lobsters.

And there's a parable about a lobster who doesn't like his molting shell. Because it's like really inconvenient and difficult, right? Like, the whole thing has to come off. And then you like, have to get a new shell. And then the new shell is like a little uneasy at the beginning. And so he goes to a doctor and says, I like, I've got to stop the molting thing.

It's like bad. So the doctor says, sure, we'll fix it. So the lobster goes back. And in the beginning, everything's fine. And then after a while, that shell starts to feel really tight. And uncomfortable, and he's having trouble, like, navigating and, you know, having [01:03:00] respiration. So he goes to a different doctor and he says, you know, that first doctor didn't do the right thing.

I told him to keep the shell the same size, and now it doesn't fit anymore. And the doctor says to him, you know, the doctor, the first doctor did exactly the right thing. The shell's the same size. What's happened is you've grown, so the shell doesn't fit. And the reason we mold. It's because we allow change, and we enable change, and yes, it's uncomfortable, and yes, it's a little bit difficult, and yes, there's a sort of transition period that none of us, like, particularly like, but if you mold your shell, you grow, so education needs to mold.

It needs to change shells. And go through the changes that would be needed if we adopt the pandemic positive, 

Mary Saghafi: the beautiful parable. It's really perfect. And [01:04:00] I've actually heard both before which is amazing. I think that It's so spot on and I think that our audience is a group of people who are eager to change, eager to grow, eager to ensure that education has a As many positives and outcomes that we all hope and aspire for.

And I think that's it. You know, education is positive in its own right. Education brings freedom, it brings opportunities, it brings possibilities. And I think that We have a large group, a large audience of people who are willing to do that. And I appreciate so much the work that you are doing to bring into light that change is possible.

And that I think a lot of people are craving that as well. The uncomfortable [01:05:00] piece of it is hard, but we all want to grow into something that is beneficial, helpful, easy to navigate. 

Shannon Betts: Thank you. Yeah, thank you for the work you're doing. Thank you also for sharing just so many specifics today. I know that I'm going to employ some of these myself and I know our audiences as well.

Just keep doing the work you're doing and share that message with as high up office as you can so that we can impact our field. 

Mary Saghafi: Well, happily, our listeners, we can offer a discount code for the book as well. So Karen has shared with us, if you use the code M E B as in boy. M from the publisher TC Press the book Mending Education.

You can get this 20 percent discount from the publisher. So this is definitely going to be a book that's going on my shelf for sure. I'm eager to read even more specifics about the, the positives of the pandemic [01:06:00] because I think we can all capitalize. Yeah. in our own locales about what we all did well at that time and really kind of bring that to light.

So amazing. 

Karen Gross: So the book actually has specifics. You can use what's in the book, literally take it away and employ it in your classrooms. Now it obviously has theory in there too. It has. Artwork that I did and that my coauthor did. And it has many analogies, but it has concrete takeaways that I hope educators will use because you are correct.

Our nation depends upon an educated populace and what better people to do that than your listeners. And all the teachers who work day in and day out to enable students to be their best selves. 

Shannon Betts: And [01:07:00] to, you know, finish on a positive note, you know, I used the term lost opportunity earlier, but maybe I should reframe that as missed opportunity.

And, you know, it hasn't passed us by completely. Like teachers can try these things and mend themselves, you know, and then kind of classroom by classroom, school building by school building. And then hopefully that can work too. You know, enact change and mend the field, even if it's just 

Karen Gross: pieces of it filled with hope.

Mm hmm. Interrupt you there. But the book is filled with hope. It's not about what the pandemic wrought on education. There's plenty that's been written about that. Mm hmm. Nobody would deny that there's been downsides, but very little has been written about what we call the pandemic positives. So it is a book that mirrors our philosophy, [01:08:00] positivity matters, and we can and should make change.

So, Shannon and Mary both got it, got the book, and so thank you. No, we 

Shannon Betts: appreciate you, your perspective and opening our eyes to that perspective, and we look forward to reading it. your next book. What other creative things you're able to come up with and share with the world. 

Mary Saghafi: I really appreciate at the very beginning, you said, you know, you are a person who melts theory and practice.

And that's so evident throughout this conversation. And I do think that it's Such a benefit. So thank you so much for the way you share and what you share. This is critical information. 

Shannon Betts: Nice with you both. We're happy to have you in the Rean Teachers Lounge and we hope to have you again another time. 

Mary Saghafi: For sure.

Karen Gross: I look forward to 

that.