Written by Professor Kelli Green

Dear Educators,

Remember the beginning of the school year? When we spent extra time each day creating a warm and structured learning environment for our students, a safe place for them to express themselves and take risks required to grow and belong as part of a community of learners? In the past month, our world has completely changed due to the coronavirus, moving our classrooms into our homes, where we interact over a distance through technology. Our once-normal teaching and learning environments, full of the expected school day routines and the safety we had so carefully created, have moved into an online audio and video environment with which we have little experience.

The World Is Affecting Students
The statistics are alarming to anyone, of any age, watching the news or daily government updates. Millions of students have been affected in our nation. Families are struggling to pay bills while filing for unemployment. The CDC reports daily updates on the number of American coronavirus cases and deaths. We must be mindful of the tension that is building in some families who have experienced job loss and financial distress, sickness and death of a family member, absence of one or more parents as essential workers in the healthcare field working around the clock, and limited access to technology and the internet.

Our students cannot be with their friends, and their daily routine has been altered drastically. They feel the energy and anxiety between the people in their homes. Parents who can are working from home as their children are learning from home. We wear masks to go out for groceries, wash our hands excessively, and wonder about this new virus that has us living with caution. As Christian educators, we have the unique opportunity to share the comfort of God’s presence and steadfast love in the midst of so much uncertainty.

Getting Students to Use Their Learning Brain
When God created us, he specifically formed our brains to protect us, then to feel emotions, and finally to learn. In this order. He designed our brains to wire and rewire, grow, and heal through connection. Understanding our neurological wiring helps us interact with our families and students within the stay-at-home orders and distance-learning environment of our world today. As we navigate the educational system in the spring of 2020, we can see firsthand why social-emotional learning is important to keep in mind now and at all times. These steps will ensure distance educators and learners are ready for school:

1. Create a culture of connection. Safety and belonging are the first steps toward helping students move into the use of their thinking brain. Just as you did at the beginning of the school year, take the time to get to know what stay-at-home life is like for your students. After all, their home is the classroom. Know your students in this new environment. What is their daily routine? Remind them you are there for them as you have been. Re-establish the safe environment for them and assure them of their belonging in your classroom community. They miss you and their friends. Help them see the faces of their familiar people. Safety and belonging allow for the next step.
2. Support self-awareness. Teach or reteach basic emotions and help them label the emotions they are feeling regularly. We all have feelings about what is going on around us during this unique time in the history of the world. We will remember the year 2020 within the cells of our bodies for years to come. Our ability to feel these feelings is a valuable and important part of our humanity from the youngest among us to the oldest. If we do not feel, then we disintegrate from the inside out. Establish a routine of checking in with how you and your students are feeling.
3. Develop an action plan. We have created a safe environment for our students to share their emotions and taught them to name their emotions. Now, what can a student do with these emotions to clear the path for focused learning? Each emotion offers an opportunity to strategize. The Zones of Regulation by Leah M. Kuypers and The Incredible 5-Point Scale by St. Cloud, Minnesota, author Kari Dun Baron, are flexible, visual tools we can use with students to understand and communicate what emotions feel like to them. We can adjust the scale to rate the intensity of emotions. In response to the intensity within the scale we can develop an action plan of coping strategies to use when a particular emotion rises to an intensity that keeps a student from the use of their learning brain.

Helping Students Develop Coping Strategies
Each person has coping strategies that work best for them individually. We can help students acquire a set of strategies they can rely on. Secret strategies can be used anytime and anywhere without anyone knowing they are in use: deep breaths, count to ten, replace thoughts, and deflecting. Sometimes coping requires a timed break away from the person(s) and location to a quiet place. Even with a stay-at-home order we can creatively find ways to reset with a break from stimuli. We can be proactive and reactive about taking movement breaks, calming the chemical flow through our muscles contributing to emotional response. Calming emotions through actively coping is a learned process.

Educators are easily reminded to use these strategies in their own lives as they teach them to their students of all ages. Modeling these strategies with our students in times of calm and in times of crisis will guide them using co-regulation to independent coping over time. Remember, our students are young, learning, and will make mistakes, as adult educators still do from time to time. Forgive them and co-regulate with them, reminding them of the calming process no matter the age of the student.

Taking These Strategies Back to the Classroom
This is a great set of tools to take back into the classroom once we are together again face-to-face. The goals remain that our students are safely part of the community, able to feel their feelings and communicate them, and be self-regulated and ready to go about daily learning and interaction successfully. For those who are having a traumatic response, it will take time to get to this learning-brain space. Be patient. Remind them you are there and their community is continually present for them. Healing happens through connection. After all, we are the body of Christ. Ultimately, God created us to connect with him in his word and through prayer. What a blessing that we have the eternally healing connection to the one true, all powerful, all knowing God through Jesus Christ.

Professor Kelli Green (MLC ’92) serves as a professor of education at Martin Luther College—New Ulm MN.