The foster care system seeks to protect children from neglect and abuse from their families. However, the system itself is flawed for a number of reasons that continues to prevent children from saving them from abusive circumstances. Many children, like Makeba, as one of the cases, mentioned by Goodman, have suffered moving from home to home with foster parents that didn’t make them feel safe and abused their weak emotional state. It’s crucial that as teachers do the best we can not to undermine students’ potential just because they are part of the foster care system. Beside understanding their different types of housing arrangements students may have, we need to help students express themselves in different ways, if needed, to overcome and work with their own personal traumas. At the same time, I think that breaking families apart is also heartbreaking when parents really want to work things out. Because of this, they cannot support their children and families are broken apart. This type of neglect experienced by children isn’t done on purpose. There needs to be systems in place to protect the family unit when the parents really want the best for their children and cannot provide enough socioeconomic and emotional support.

“Moreover, a supportive, collaborative environment leads to collective efficacy among teachers, which has been shown to lower the level of stress that teachers experience in response to students’ challenging behaviors…We argue that in a system where the caring feel cared for, exhibiting strength and positive attitudes in the face of stressful conditions becomes the norm.” (Weston et al., 2018, p.117)

It is no doubt that being a teacher means being there for our students. Our job is to help students succeed academically, but we also have a responsibility to ensure that they are thriving socially. Of course, although we may be considered an “expert” in math or ELA, we are definitely not an expert on what each individual student needs separate from an academic context. Our students all struggle with different things, and it is our job to pay attention to our students to notice if there is any “off” behavior. Continue reading Feeling Supported in Order to Give Support →

“According to Kraft and Grace (2016), the structural transformations in the economy are increasingly compelling education systems to ‘prepare students with a broader and more complex set of fundamental skills than the traditional domains of reading writing and arithmetic.'”(Weston 2018).

The “fundamental skills”, outside of the three Rs (reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic), that the Weston article believes schools should help students to develop, are categorized as either intrapersonal and interpersonal. Intrapersonal skills have to do with “behavior and emotional management”, and interpersonal skills have to do with “communicating and collaborating with other individuals”.To that effect, schools are increasingly taking on the responsibilities of modern psychotherapists, many of whom treat patients with a style of therapy known as cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). CBT focuses on teaching the patient to manage their psychological issues with proven behavioral strategies. These strategies generally involve developing the patient’s intrapersonal and interpersonal skills up to the point that these skills can compensate for the mental health issues that the patient is suffering. We can conclude that modern school teachers and modern psychotherapists have a similar responsibility to explicitly teach students/patients the inter/intrapersonal skills necessary for them to thrive. Continue reading The “Feelings” Class →

…And the system must be ready to invite teachers into the leadership for systemic change, to empower them to chart the course for adopting MHL practices, and, most importantly, to make teacher well-being a priority in the process. Initially, however, teachers need to see themselves as having a critical role in mental health efforts (Weston and Ott, 2018, pg.114).

             As reading this article, I strongly agree that practicing the Mental Health Literacy in the school setting is significant to serve our students’ individual needs. Depending on the characteristics of a student, students willing to share his/her circumstance to their teachers if they are outgoing and open mind. Definitely, it does matter that have a good relationship with their teachers in order to bring out their internal issues. However, if teachers don’t have a trust relationship with their students, especially students who are conservative or does not willing to share their problems outside of school, teachers never understand why his/her student perform poorly in their classes. Goodman (2018) listed the possible traumas of students might suffer from the relationships with their siblings, extended family members, broke family bond, loss of family members, and drug addiction of parents (pg. 109). In order to access personal issues of the student, how would teachers to support or what strategies that teachers should approach? According to my personal perspectives, first of all, if I were the teacher of these students, I would change classroom atmosphere allows students to use the languages that they prefer. In other words, I expecting students treat me as their best buddy, not like a formal type of teacher (I mean the ideology of students always treat teachers in respect manner). I think this is a big step to walk closer to students because they would feel comfortable to communicate with teachers, as well as to share the common themes that students and teachers both had such as video games, sports, social networking platforms, foods, fashions, anything related to non-academic contents. If we, as educators could able to do that, I believe most students would share their daily lives with us because we are the buddies of them. Since we choose to treat our students as their best friend, we would eager and care about each student’s life outside of school voluntary if they do have certain problems. We would go visit student’s community that they spent the most of the time, even visit his/her house if there’s something wrong with the living condition, parental relationship, or anything that Goodman (2018) mentioned. Additionally, except caring students’ academic progress on the contents that we teach, I also believe we should have a free-period that spent times together with our students to make our relationship to be closest and tightest, as their siblings. Therefore, we would be more aware and serious about the traumas that students who experienced. Once they grow up as a young adult, they would able to understand the positive of the beauty of human nature, as well as to understand how to care the other.

Reference:

Goodman (2018). It’s Not About Grit—Trauma, Inequality, and the Power of Transformative Teaching, (pg.108-128)