As schools reopen for in-person instruction, there is a need to acknowledge the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on students, families, and educators. With a partner contribution from the California Teachers Association (CTA), the July edition of the CCEE Connection features resources, strategies, and tools to get back to the basics of building trauma-informed schools that address the social-emotional needs of both students and staff.
Karen Taylor, Region IV Instruction & Professional Development (IPD) Staff, California Teachers Association (CTA), Certified Trauma-Informed Yoga Instructor
The amount of time it takes to re-establish routines and services like returning to school or work, being able to go to the grocery store, etc.
The amount of support during times of emotional distress can significantly impact the amount of time it takes to recover from the stress response. As schools reopen for in-person instruction, there is a need to acknowledge the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on families and individuals.
It is normal for students and educators to feel anxious, depressed, or even nervous about returning to full-time in-person instruction. If you experienced burnout or additional stress this past year, it’s important to acknowledge that your tolerance for stress may not be as high as it once was. For others, coming back to in-person instruction may provide a huge sense of relief.
When the school year begins, teachers and administrators can incorporate the following strategies to foster healthy learning environments.
Establish and follow routines.
Make time for personal relationships and connections.
Set boundaries. Rather than throwing yourself back into work after hours, take the time to practice self-care. Pursue your hobbies, exercise, or just enjoy your downtime.
Use intentional breathing to manage the physical stress response. Try this simple breathing technique! Breathe in through your nose for four seconds, hold for four seconds, exhale for four seconds, and hold again for four seconds. Do this ten times when you feel anxious or overwhelmed. Check out this 30-minute workshop on breath work! Just as teachers may have a variety of emotions about the return to in-person instruction, so will students. Educators can begin the year with a trauma-informed approach.
Put building student and family relationships at the top of your list. Create space in your classroom for relationship building and dedicate time to establish real connections. The investment you make in student and family relationships will pay dividends in the long run.
Provide consistency and structure. Routines can create a sense of safety and control for students who may not experience it at home. Explore tools, resources, and strategies from Educators Thriving to develop your classroom management plan!
Take the time to teach self-regulation. Even though students may be excited to return to school, their nervous systems may be dysregulated as a response to the pandemic. Take the time to practice intentional breathing, incorporate mindful practices, implement “time-ins” instead of time-outs, and create a safe space where students are free to be themselves.
Acknowledge that learning did take place last year. It’s easy to dwell on what didn’t happen with online learning, but students did learn at school and at home, and have a lot to contribute this school year.
Administrators and school employees can work together to create trauma-informed workplace. In a trauma-informed workspace, all employees know what trauma is; can recognize the signs of trauma in students, staff, and families; and are able to respond by sharing resources, etc. Additionally, a trauma-informed workplace provides a safe working environment through its policies and practices by addressing cultural, historical, and gender issues, and by providing choice—not just for students, but for school employees as well.
“The first step is to sit with yourself.”
SALINA GRAY, PH.D., TEACHER, MOUNTAIN VIEW MIDDLE SCHOOL IN MORENO VALLEY UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT
On Trauma-Informed LA’s Our Stories Matter Podcast, Dr. Salina Gray, a teacher with 24 years of experience in traditional public, charter, and graduate schools, shares her story and vulnerability on how she has made her way to heal through mindfulness. Click here to listen!
Right now, we have a golden opportunity to not just go “back to normal”, but to reimagine school and classrooms in ways that are sensitive to the needs of students and educators, with equity at the center of it all. The California Teachers Association (CTA) offers resources and professional learning opportunities to support educators, including upcoming webinars this fall on mental health related topics and an online mental health & wellness hub for CTA members. Additionally, a large coalition of organizations, including CTA, Association of California School Administrators (ACSA), and CCEE, are supporting a “restorative restart” approach. Click here to learn more!
CTA/NEA MICRO-CERTIFICATIONS
This fall, CTA will be offering six micro-certificate stacks—sequences of related self-paced micro-certifications—featuring important topics for educators in California public schools. CTA will also be hosting communities of practice (CofP) to allow educators from across the state to connect, share ideas, and support one another throughout the process in fun, practitioner-led, collegial cohorts. Click here to learn more about the micro-certificates within each of the following stacks:
Assessment Literacy
Diversity, Equity, and Cultural Competence
English Language Learners
Classroom Management
Family Engagement
Five Core Propositions (NBCT)
Questions about CTA/NEA micro-certifications? Contact Adam Ebrahim, Region I Instruction & Professional Development (IPD) Universal Service Staff at CTA.
Arts education provides an opportunity to engage students in meaningful learning opportunities that unlock their creativity and passion, support their social-emotional well-being, and positively impact student achievement. With partner contributions from Turnaround Arts CA and the California Arts Project, the June edition of the CCEE Connection features resources, strategies, and tools to support arts integration!
Malissa Shriver, Co-founder & Board Chair, Turnaround Arts CA
Barbara Palley, Director of Program and Strategy, Turnaround Arts CA
The arts create the pathways to healing and learning that students from communities greatly impacted by the pandemic and racial injustice need right now. Yet, students who could benefit from the arts the most, including students with special needs and of low socioeconomic status, get it the least. As schools reopen this summer and fall, let’s not return to the old normal that reinforces inequitable access to the arts.
The arts aren’t enrichment—they are education. Drawing from decades of research, we know that learning is at once cognitive, social, emotional, and cultural. Arts in schools create pathways to learning through relationship building, joy, exploration, and self-direction (Darling-Hammond, 2021; CCEE Summer of Joy, 2021). The Visual and Performing Arts are not only standards-based content areas of their own right, but also tools that may be used to meet key priorities across the school site.
At Turnaround Arts: California, we partner with schools in historically marginalized communities across the state to build the capacity of teachers and principals in leveraging the arts to create equity and access for all students and to support whole-school transformation. Prior to and during the pandemic, our 24 partnering elementary and middle schools have not only sustained the arts in their schools, but have creatively innovated to expand their use with wonderful results.
The Arts Motivate Student-Driven Conversation – Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) help classroom teachers facilitate open-ended conversations among students about works of art. By fostering collaborative, inclusive, community-building dialogue that transcends distance, VTS opens pathways to support speaking, listening, and English language development in ways that are culturally responsive, socially inclusive, and visually stimulating. Teachers who integrated VTS in their instruction observed higher rates of participation in distance learning, as students turned on their cameras or added a FlipGrid video to voice their opinions about the work of art. Building off their peers’ observations and interpretations, students actively engaged in and contributed to discussions with their own personal connections, claims, and evidence. Middle school students working with visiting spoken word artists from Get Lit Words Ignite also had the opportunity to find their own voice. Students adopted a poem of their own choosing from the literary canon, and then wrote and performed original response pieces to the classics. Through art, students who have never performed or written poetry before, made personal connections between literature and present-day cultural and social issues that were important to them.
The Arts Create Multiple Entry Points to Learning – Integrating the arts into core curriculum aligns with neuroscientific research and culturally responsive approaches to provide multiple modalities for students to introduce and manipulate concepts to demonstrate understanding. For example, teachers might ask students to create facial expressions and body gestures to represent the emotions of a particular character from literature, as they learn new vocabulary to describe those emotions. Other students may use digital tools to compose simple music that represents the mood of a particular book or chapter. When classroom teachers utilize the arts across their curriculum, they report students engage and learn in ways that they wouldn’t otherwise.
The Arts Support Social Emotional Learning – Partnering with guidance counselors, art specialists, and classroom teachers to integrate the arts schoolwide can create outlets for student expression, stress and anxiety reduction, and relationship building. The arts provide important nonverbal pathways for expression, calming the “fight or flight” mode for students experiencing trauma. Some classroom teachers begin each day with art in their virtual classrooms, engaging students in collaborative drawing or dance challenges to activate their participation and to create a safe space for experimentation. UCLArts & Healing’s Beat the Odds program offers another opportunity to integrate the arts to support students’ social-emotional well-being. This evidence-based program utilizes drumming circles to build students’ core strengths, such as focusing, listening, collaborating, building trust, expressing empathy and gratitude, and managing stress/anger. Turnaround Arts: California partner schools participated in the Cope & Hope Photo Project, which utilizes photography to express how school community members are coping during the pandemic and their hopes for school in the future.
The Arts Reimagine Family Engagement – Synchronous and asynchronous arts-based family engagement activities can strengthen home/school relationships and support families during this difficult time. Schools found that despite Zoom fatigue, families tuned in for activities to build positive emotions, relieve stress, and share joy with their children through the arts. Some examples include take-home art kits, literacy-supporting early childhood music classes with San Diego Youth Symphony, family art, or Latin dance nights with P.S. ARTS.
The results of this work are tangible. One of our partner schools in Marina, CA conducted a YouthTruth survey and found that compared to other schools in their district and county, students in this school reported higher rates of engagement and interest in their school work, along with stronger connections with their teachers and classmates. Another partner school in Los Angeles County is seeing higher rates of academic performance compared to other schools in the area. Since we began this work in 2014, we have seen these positive trends across our partner schools, but to see them over the past year is a true testament to the power of the arts.
If the past year has taught us anything, it’s that creativity is an essential skill that helps us innovate, adapt, and connect. We also know that principals, teachers, students, and families in school communities across the state have a vast wealth of knowledge, cultural assets, as well as the motivation to create new ways of teaching and learning that can support the development of the whole child. By leveraging the arts, we can empower the entire school community to imagine and create better learning environments for our young people—ones that are inclusive, joyful, rigorous, and engaging.
Kristine Alexander, Executive Director, The California Arts Project
Students, educators, and families alike wish for this summer to be filled with memory-making, joyful arts experiences that offer the foundation needed to reengage students and prepare us for the coming year. By thoughtfully and strategically leveraging available resources, educators can design a student-centered, standards-based approach to arts instruction that equitably attends to social and emotional considerations. The joy of arts learning offers a summer infused with creative possibilities!
Students thrive when learning environments nurture respectful relationships and link learning to the learner. Students engage in the learning process when the content harnesses their curiosity, connects to their lives, and amplifies their voice. These are the environments of arts learning. The arts disciplines (dance, media arts, music, theatre, and visual arts) provide creative opportunities for students to foster positive social-emotional relationships, connect with their teachers and peers, and actively engage in the artistic processes of creating, performing/presenting/producing, responding, and connecting. These cognitive and physical actions of arts learning promote students’ artistic literacy and skill development. Educators’ careful attention to the creative processes, content area standards, learning environments, and students’ needs when planning summer arts instruction sets the foundation for students to thrive.
The statewide network of The California Arts Project (TCAP) supports educators in designing such instruction, summer or year-round. By tapping into these standards-based resources, student interests, and their own imagination, educators are equipped to design a memory-making summer of powerful and transformative arts learning to usher in the new school year.
California has developed guidance resources to support students’ artistic literacy development and advance social-emotional learning. The new 2020 California Arts Education Framework’s core themes of equity, access, and inclusion articulate a contemporary vision for arts learning that conveys the vital role arts education has in students’ artistic literacy, cognitive, social, cultural, and emotional development. The 2019 California Arts Education Standards encompass authentic arts processes and approaches in each arts discipline to promote students’ artistic literacy development and social and emotional growth. These discipline-specific, process-oriented, grade-appropriate, and inquiry-based standards build students’ capacities in developing social and emotional connections, such as setting and achieving positive goals, feeling and showing empathy for others, building relationships, understanding and managing of emotions, and developing ethical responsibility. Educators can find additional social and emotional learning resources on the California Department of Education webpage.
Researchers at Northwestern University, University of Toronto, and J-PAL at MIT conducted a meta-analysis of 96 high-quality studies on tutoring programs. These resources summarize key takeaways and outline evidence-based principles that district leaders should consider in order to bring high-quality tutoring to their communities.
A study conducted by Johns Hopkins University researchers estimates that as much as two-thirds of the achievement gap in the elementary grades can be directly traced to learning loss in the summer, or what we call the “summer slide.” With the significant loss of in-person learning over the past 14 months, learning gaps have widened even further as evidenced by the findings shared by PACE and NWEA. Summer 2021 is an opportunity for school districts to expand access to summer learning, when the need has never been greater or more important!
As districts plan for the learning that will take place over the summer, they may be faced with pressures and demands to “think outside of the box” or to reimagine schools in the form of new models for learning. In some ways, this creates unrealistic expectations and can distract from what we know has been effective in promoting student success. Quick fixes, such as programs designed to educate children in a simpler way or off-the-shelf curriculum that pledge large gains for students, are unrealistic. Rather, a balanced approach that includes a blend of academics, social interaction, and enrichment is key to engaging students, increasing their sense of belonging, and unlocking their curiosity and passion for learning.
Summer learning provides a renewed opportunity to invite various stakeholders to the table, including teachers, parents, and community partners, to collaborate as key designers of student learning. Student data should serve as a key factor to identify targeted supports to address inequities. To ensure that the learning over the summer is not a one-off, districts will need to align summer learning to what students will be assessed in in the fall when they are back within the confines of a classroom. Consider leveraging the resources and expertise of key partners like the YMCA, county-wide recreation programs, churches, advocacy groups, social services, and other community-based organizations to expand access to both academic and mental health supports available to students.
Traditional summer school, often enrichment-based, will fall short if academic interventions are not embedded in summer learning opportunities to accelerate learning. Focused on collective efficacy and true collaboration, district teams must design extended learning opportunities that implement high-quality curriculum with fidelity and are aligned to metrics for formative assessments. Highly trained staff with experience and knowledge of the grade-level content must be at the forefront of these summer learning opportunities to accelerate learning and prevent further “summer slide,” as students prepare to return to in-person instruction in the fall. High-dosage tutoring, mental health resources, nutrition programs, high-quality early education, project-based learning, STEM, and research-based credit recovery programs will be key to the success of students this summer. To ensure that these summer learning programs serve students who can most benefit, student outreach will need to be personalized to target and recruit specific groups of students.
Districts will need to take on this new and real challenge, embracing the summer as an opportunity to reengage students, assess their needs, and begin closing the learning gaps that will likely be evident in the new school year. Recognizing that there are no quick fixes, this begins with what we’ve always known works for students – learning and relationships are entwined; advancing student learning begins with grade-level content and support; high expectations and relevant course content increase student engagement; and needs of adults must be addressed to provide safe and supportive learning environments for students.
To support districts in this ever-challenging opportunity, this month’s newsletter will feature tools, strategies, and resources to design summer learning programs that provide the necessary settings to accelerate learning, while advancing equity for our most vulnerable student groups.
Over the decades, there’s been much commentary about the downsides of our school calendar, which was designed to accommodate a farming economy. While this calendar has clearly persisted far beyond its practical application, old habits die hard, especially when so much of American life has revolved around school breaks. Amusement parks, vacation destinations, and other industries have been built around the summer vacation, and many families as well as educators have become very attached to this ritual.
However, for just as many families, and particularly those struggling financially who don’t have the luxury of long vacations or time off from work, summer paints a very different picture. Rather than attending camp and going on vacation, the children of these families are left with little to do and often suffer from what we’ve coined “summer slide”. Research has shown that summer slide is cumulative, so children who miss out on structured learning opportunities summer after summer are at far greater risk of falling behind, of not graduating, and missing key experiences and relationships that lead to college and career paths.
With all we know from both research and experience, why do we consider learning as something that happens just between September and June or between 8am and 3pm? Children are learning all the time—in school and out of school. Our expanded learning and youth development sectors have worked very hard to fill those learning, enrichment, and relationship gaps that children living in poverty experience after school, during winter and spring breaks, and over the long summer. But these out of school programs and opportunities aren’t available to every child in every community, creating one of the biggest and most consequential inequities in our education system.
With unprecedented state and federal investments for expanded learning coming to schools and communities, and multiple years in which to spend, let’s stop looking at the school day and afterschool, school year and summer, as such distinct and disconnected blocks of time. Let’s use this summer as a launching pad for a different approach. For example, utilize new summer program approaches and partnerships to inform school year activities; include afterschool partners in early planning for next summer; and provide opportunities for blended professional development for teachers, school staff, and expanded learning partners so all are grounded with the information and skills they need to support children, all day and all year.
There are many examples to look to, tools to access, and proven practices that should be leveraged as school districts tackle the important work of growing expanded learning opportunities for students. Be sure visit our Summer Technical Assistance Hub to be connected to expert support with planning, program design and operation, partnerships, assessment and more. Want to share this with your network? Click here for a flyer!
AUTHOR
Jennifer Peck, President and CEO, Partnership for Children and Youth (PCY)
The May edition of the CCEE Connection offers applicable resources, tools, and strategies to support LEAs plan for and develop summer learning programs. Featuring an article written by CCEE Executive Director Tom Armelino and partner contributions from Partnership for Children & Youth and Ten Strands, this month’s newsletter is a must-read!
As we continue to reimagine what education will look like in 2021 and beyond, we have the singular opportunity to leverage our lessons learned and increased technical capacity to ensure that every student feels like they belong in class, and the classroom and learning experience has been designed specifically around their needs. The feeling of exclusion, that one does not belong, stimulates a neurological response akin to physical pain. Many of our students are likely hurting, and as they return to school, they need to know that their school is designed with their needs in mind and is a place where everyone is welcome, respected, and valued. We can’t have one-size-fits-all Tier One instruction and expect to use interventions to support every learner left out of that initial model. To do that, we need to be flexible and reimagine the role of scaffolds, options, and student autonomy.
“Without a high quality instructional framework, such as Universal Design for Learning (UDL), schools will continue to risk having a significant number of students fail to meet the full array of educational opportunities and outcomes that hard working educators desire to achieve. As a former Superintendent of a district that implemented UDL, I can attest that UDL provided our district a common language, common framework and common way to collaborate and communicate about how we design and implement universally accessible instruction for all students.”
– MATT NAVO, CCEE GOVERNING BOARD CHAIR –
As we continue to reimagine what education will look like in 2021 and beyond, we have the singular opportunity to leverage our lessons learned and increased technical capacity to ensure that every student feels like they belong in class, and the classroom and learning experience has been designed specifically around their needs. The feeling of exclusion, that one does not belong, stimulates a neurological response akin to physical pain. Many of our students are likely hurting, and as they return to school, they need to know that their school is designed with their needs in mind and is a place where everyone is welcome, respected, and valued. We can’t have one-size-fits-all Tier One instruction and expect to use interventions to support every learner left out of that initial model. To do that, we need to be flexible and reimagine the role of scaffolds, options, and student autonomy.
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a flexible framework that leverages decades of research and evidence to address learner variability, the individuality of every student. Prior to joining the CCEE, my primary mission was supporting through the implementation of UDL that all students could thrive in their general education classrooms. Over the years, I’ve found it very helpful to lay out some foundational pieces to prevent any misconceptions about what UDL is and is not.
UDL is a lens, not a checklist. Practitioners of UDL set clear, challenging goals for all students and then, based on their knowledge of the goal, their design constraints, and their students, anticipate barriers to learning and then develop options and supports to mitigate or eliminate those barriers. The UDL Guidelines are a tool that informs our work, not a strict checklist or plug-and-play mechanism.
UDL is a marathon, not a sprint. UDL shifts the center of instruction from the teacher to the student, empowering students to take ownership of their learning. This transformation takes time, for both teachers and students. No one should expect UDL to be implemented overnight. Do not expect that of yourself or anyone else.
UDL is not “just good teaching.” There is no universally accepted definition of good teaching. UDL, however, has a defined framework, backed by significant research and evidence from the field. Teachers have hard-earned knowledge, skills, and experience; these can be sharpened and delivered with intention to address inequities through UDL.
Developed by Tom Tobin, this is a quick way to retrofit an existing lesson, assessment, or resource, building your facility with UDL through repeated, quick application. Writing lessons from scratch takes considerable time and effort, but we all have time to make one change.
Select a lesson/assessment/resource you’ve used before and intend to use again.
Identify the biggest pinch point (i.e. the place that triggered the most requests for help, the question that most students missed, the place where the most students got off track). Based on your experience and knowledge of your students, what’s the likely barrier there?
Once you have a hypothesis, how might you plus one – add one new support, option, revision to address the barrier?
Make that change, then test it out – see if the next group of students experiences better success.
The April edition of CCEE’s newsletter includes two articles from contributing authors who are part of innovative programs focused on inclusion and equity, each with UDL at the core of their work. We also introduce the California UDL Coalition, a partnership with CAST, the California Department of Education, and several other California LEAs and programs, that seeks to promote, align, and support UDL efforts across our state. One of its initiatives is the CA UDL Network, which holds open quarterly online meetings to provide resources, share best practices, and solicit ideas, questions, and needs from the field.
