ACEs – Jessie Dorin Coaching

Teaching Practices that Create Classroom Connection

Posted on January 10, 2018July 3, 2018 by jessiedorin

I was getting ready to teach my workshop on hidden student trauma to staff at a local high school when my husband made the passing comment, “Better build connection early, because by the time students are failing mid-year, you’re gonna need it.”

What is the term they use now? Mic drop? My thought at the time was, Oh, shit.

When I first started teaching professional developments on how to create connection in the classroom, I had another workshop on the back burner: “Differentiation Begins With Your Ladder: How to Create Rungs on the Curriculum Ladder to Allow All Students Access.” A long title. And though incredibly important, it wasn’t as important as addressing hidden student trauma. Unless, of course, it is.

What my good-looking husband so brilliantly pointed out is that students are only going to continue to feel the benefits of the connection and support you’ve worked so hard to create in your classroom if they ALSO feel that how they are learning honors where they are starting on the curriculum ladder. And, once on that ladder, helps them learn that falling off doesn’t mean failing. Which is not the same thing as everyone gets As, and it’s also not telling a student, “I’m so glad that you were able to reach out to me to talk about your mom’s depression. Also, you’ve failed English again.”

So how does a curriculum ladder work and how do you help students attach safety ropes to it once on? I think of it like this:

Your academic standards are the top rung on the ladder. I was fortunate to teach with an colleague trained in International Baccalaureate, the standards for which dovetail perfectly with Common Core and, more importantly, common sense. Collaborating with her revealed that those standards were the top rungs.

In my experience, most students have a knowledge base at least two rungs below that standard. For example, 9th grade students know what citing your source means, but they don’t know how to accurately cite sources in essays (Don’t even get me started on what’s wrong with EasyBib). They know that you should quote your sources, but not when or how. They also are still fuzzy on topic sentences.

Then there are the few students who are like, essay? What’s that? Those students scrawl a few sentences on a piece of paper and may or may not turn that paper in. And they will be completely shocked when they don’t pass the class.

Putting bottom rungs on your curriculum ladder doesn’t mean dumbing-down curriculum. You are dealing with the equivalent of short people versus tall people trying to get onto a ladder whose rungs typically start 5 feet up. Nothing is wrong with the ability of short people to climb. Of course short people can climb to the top rung or curriculum benchmark when starting further down than everyone else–as long as there are ladder rungs that extend to their reach and there are more rungs put in along the way. The same is true for English Language Learners, students with learning disabilities, and…pretty much the rest of us. Everyone has the ability to learn anything. Some of us just need a few more rungs. If my teacher doesn’t see that I need more rungs, I don’t feel like the teacher is invested in my success.

Creating bottom rungs means breaking a task or assignment into skills or learning targets that are bite-sized. Too many directions on a page or too many skills integrated all at once = meltdown for those of us who are grasping for the first rungs on the ladder. (And guess what? Breaking down the task is also a steam-release valve for high-achieving students. Win and win).

Vocabulary reminders are a huge part of students’ understanding of content. Especially in science class, a student who may otherwise know content can get bogged down in the text’s vocabulary.

Use exemplars, not examples for what you want the final product to look like. Students who struggle have missed partial information in the past. They’ll miss the direction that what they are looking at is an example, not an exemplar, and, instead, imprint on the model that has flaws, studying it and turning in their best version of it.
Exemplars also allow the high achievers who need lots of attention to work off of an exemplar rather than asking every 3 minutes, “Is this right?”…”How about now?”…”Is this how I should do it?” You’re welcome, teachers of grade grubbers.

Use examples of weak, developing, and strong work that demonstrate where students often go wrong. Refer students back to the examples when they make those mistakes.

Build time into your curriculum plan for those who are managing a few more rungs.

If every assignment is truly important to learning, not accepting late work won’t cut it as a teaching philosophy. Dock a certain percentage amount, but not enough to cause the student to receive a failing grade. Did I want them to learn it? Yes. Did they learn it? Yes. Then mission accomplished.
For any assignment or project that is truly essential to learning, do not give the student a final grade until their best version has a chance to come in. I want to be graded on my best try, not my first try (For information about how to do this and not lose your damn mind, fill out the contact form below).

If every assignment is truly important to learning, students should never be sent out of the room for something like not having a pencil or paper. I am not their future employer. My student may even end up working at a job that gives their employees limitless supplies to get their work accomplished! If my school can’t afford to supply pencils and paper to students who forget or don’t have the supplies, WTF is wrong with the allocation of my school’s funds? $8959cc10057bac98f0ea18a23395e273--a-pencil-math-teacher$
If every skill or content knowledge is truly important to a students’ education, then tests should be offered multiple times—in class (gasp!)
- Offer the test 3 times–and only accept 100% correct for passing the first 2 times. (Grade grubbing students love this).
- Struggling students often don’t make it back for after-school or lunchtime make-up tests without a lot of teacher prompting. Skip the nagging, offer the test in class and get more bang for your class time.
- For more tips on how to do this and not lose your damn mind, fill out the contact info at the end of this blog.

At regular, 3 week intervals, hand students slips of paper with their missing assignments listed.
- Many students are still not technology inclined. They need a reminder in their hand to acknowledge what is missing and to do something about it. Tech savvy kids will throw away the reminder slip, but now they know to check their online grade and be properly shocked and outraged.
- Offer class time during that week to help students who have not completed assignments. The rest of the class gets to do an enrichment activity, possibly for extra credit. Everyone likes this because everyone wins.
- The following Monday, call home for any student who has not turned in acceptable work (Email won’t suffice).

If you are interested in examples, exemplars, or have questions about specific classroom practices mentioned above, fill out the contact form below to get on my mailing list. In the comment box, ask about ideas for your classroom, ideas to help your child who is struggling in school, or to make sure that not only your students feel supported, but YOU feel supported as well. Because if Mama ain’t happy, well, we know how that goes…..

Maya Angelou and Why Character Development Alone Won’t Change School Connectedness

Posted on May 16, 2017May 6, 2020 by jessiedorin

Social Emotional learning is great. Character Development is wonderful. So is mindfulness. None of those, on their own, will create true connections in the classroom. I point to Maya Angelou and my turbulent past with toddlers to illustrate why.

School connectedness is a new buzzword in the districts near my home. High performing schools are great at getting (most) students to make the grade, but those same students are not feeling connected to their classrooms or their school in general. Those schools use Healthy Schools, a survey in California, as their method of measuring students’ own reporting of how connected or disconnected they feel in school.

Many schools in my local district have placed student feelings of connectedness as one of four priorities for their next accreditation cycle. They’ve enlisted a wonderful organization that uses character development curriculum as the sole method for creating this connectedness. Schools host inclusion rallies, show character-building movies, and create spirit days that celebrate the “other.”

In the case of my local school district, schools put a video clip on their character development web page featuring a Maya Angelou clip from YouTube as their rallying cry. The clip is entitled “Just Do Right.” In it, Dr. Angelou speaks about the time when she left her mother’s house, at 17 and with a baby, and her mother told her, “Now you have been raised.” She knew right from wrong. “Just do right,” were the words her mother bestowed upon her.

Kids, it’s easy: Just do right.

Um, yeah. Here’s why it fails:

A few years ago, after a particularly grueling day teaching and worse commute home, I stopped at my local grocery store. After stomping around the store to get something for dinner, I made my way to the checkout counter. A toddler with her mother was in the line ahead of me. The little girl stared at me, and I gave her my meanest glare back. The kind I would never have dared to shoot at any adult. The kind that tells you to go F yourself. That’s the kind of glare I gave this three year old. Somewhere, a unicorn died.

Yes, I do work with kids. Yes, I do have my own toddler now and am even more horrified at my actions, but then, as, I suspect, even now, the “Just do right” mantra wasn’t going to change me into someone who recognized how far I had slipped from reality on that day.

When you’re having a bad day, thinking about how someone else is feeling isn’t going to transmute you to connection. Neither is mindfully focusing on how you feel on the insides of your feet. I imagine it is the same for a student whose parents are divorcing, who is neglected at home, or whose brother just went to jail, or…any of the crappy life events that happen because it’s, well…life.

No, “Just Do Right” isn’t the Maya Angelou clip that illustrates how to get to connection. On the other hand, another Maya Angelou interview, entitled, “Love Liberates,” is.

In this clip, Dr. Angelou relates a memory of her mother telling her, again when Angelou was a young woman who was leaving her mother’s home, “You can always come home.” And Angelou says, “I went home every time life slammed me down and made me call it uncle.” She recalls, on those occasions, how her mother was always delighted to see her, never gloating over the event that made Angelou need to move back. And then her mother told her, “You’re the greatest woman I’ve ever met.” This from a mother who had abandoned Angelou and her brother to her grandmother when Angelou was a small girl.

Dr. Angelou then talks about her mother on her deathbed, and how Angelou told her, “You were a piss-poor mother of small children, but you were a great mother of young adults.” Angelou says her mother’s love had liberated her, and she wanted to liberate her mother by telling her how much she loved her and it was okay for her to go. It was a seeing of faults and a gratitude for the love of an imperfect mother.

Mindfulness asks students: How does your breath feel? Social-Emotional learning asks students to imagine how someone else feels. Compassion, Empathy, and Vulnerability asks students, “How do you feel?” Then the teacher listens, and goes to a place within themselves that says, “Yes. I have felt that way at some point, too. Let me sit with you while you feel that way now.” It asks teachers to courageously be vulnerable and talk about their imperfections and sadness too.

“Love Liberates” provides schools with context and vulnerability that “Do Right” misses. When a student is having a horrible day, “Love liberates” says that parents make mistakes. Terrible mistakes. Even Maya Angelou’s parent. It doesn’t mean that the student will not become successful. It doesn’t mean that that parent is shameful or will be a person who makes terrible mistakes as a parent forever. Maybe they will. But maybe not. Angelou didn’t forget or forgive her mother for her mistakes in the past, but she didn’t define either herself or her mother by those mistakes either. She clung to the love her mother offered later. People change. Thank God.

When teachers offer their own stories in a safely vulnerable way, especially stories that say, “This happened to me when I was young. It was awful. I wish I had told someone.” And students see that you are okay now, they see that they, too, may just make it through this awful spell. And they can feel like if they talk to you about their tough time, they will be seen.

Oh, and the toddler in the picture is mine. Karma is definitely Team Unicorn.

In Plain Sight: What We Miss When Talking About Student Trauma

Posted on April 23, 2017November 25, 2019 by jessiedorin

If a tree falls in the woods…no, wait. If a student experiences a traumatic event but no adult authority figure acknowledges it, does that event have devastating long-term affects? Always, the research says.

And that has been my experience too.

Way back in 1997, the now-renown ACEs study (Adverse Childhood Experiences), documented that traumas in childhood predictably alters the quality of a person’s life FOR the duration of their lifetime (increased risks for major diseases, cancer, divorce, substance abuse, and other self-harming behaviors). 70% of all US citizens have at least a score of 1 ACE. Divorce, for example, counts as 1. After 6 ACEs, your life expectancy decreases by 20 years.

Rut -roh.

Unless…

ONE caring adult finds out about the trauma, acknowledges it, and provides a stable, caring sounding board for the student. It is the first proven mitigating factor in the long-term devastating effects of trauma.

It starts with knowing what constitutes trauma or Adverse Childhood Experiences. A parent who is emotionally abusive, physically abusive, or sexually abusive easily comes to mind. But what about the parent who threw the pan at my best friend’s head, hitting the wall instead? “She missed,” my friend said. “That’s not physical abuse.” Which is why we have to be taught what is abuse in childhood. Yes, a pan at the head, whether it hits you or not, is physical abuse. Divorce is trauma to a child. So is homelessness, homophobia to a student who is gay, or a father berating a mother.

It turns out, when the list of traumas that affect students’ developing brains and bodies is spelled out in its entirety, very few of us have been exempt.

Which brings me to the one place that is teeming with kids from trauma backgrounds and could use an adult stepping in….schools.

For 12 years, I worked in a last-chance high school full of students who wore trauma around their necks in the form of placards of friends and family killed. Some students even tattooed RIPs onto their bodies as reminders of loved ones gone. These were clues in plain sight. No detective work required. Still, for too many of those years, I lumped traumas together (family member out of the picture, a friend killed, a major illness in the family) and avoided asking about personal specifics.

But unhappiness is always personal.

I didn’t ask about the student hurts in plain sight because I didn’t want to make students sad or embarrassed. I thought it was better if I didn’t remind students of people gone, sadness in their pasts. Only, RIP tattoos are there because someone wanted to etch a heartache into their DNA to make visible a person who is absent.

Trauma is personal and no two traumas are alike. Addressing trauma is the least a teacher can do, and I should have known that. What I needed to say was, “Tell me about the person whose picture is around your neck. What were they like?” or “Your mom died. That’s so sad. Tell me about her.”

The reason I should have known that is because I was that kid. I lived in fear of my bipolar dad. In high school, my dad was arrested at my brother’s ballgame for harassing my stepdad. Handcuffs and flashing lights in front of what felt like half my school.

In response to chaos at home, I started leaving school early several times a week. My grades dropped. On the softball field, I went from team MVP to a player who couldn’t catch any ball hit to right field. Trauma in plain sight. But no one wanted to embarrass me by saying something.

I saw my school counselor when she called me in for my once-a-year check-in. I could tell she didn’t know me at all–we’d only met once before. I got decent grades and wasn’t a behavior issue. She didn’t ask about my home life. She did ask what I wanted to be. I said a fireman or astronaut because they were sarcastic cliches. She wrote them down and didn’t ask questions.

After 6 ACEs, your life expectancy decreases. Rut-roh.

Unless…The one factor that can mitigate the devastating effects of childhood trauma includes one caring adult. On a Friday during my sophomore year of high school, I was in Dr. Wendell’s science class, crying behind my hair. He saw me and handed me a tissue. On Monday, he said, “I was thinking about you. I was worried.” And I rejoined humanity.

That was everything, and that is least a teacher or a counselor can can do. Because school staff are the people students see most often. School staff are the people students look to as the authority figures when their parents are not there.

That’s why school staff are the detectives AND first responders in hidden student trauma. When clues are there, we have to ask about them. Someone could have asked me, “Jessie, I saw your dad getting arrested at the ball game. That’s awful. How are you?” It’s not nosey. It’s caring. I was thinking about it anyway. When you talk about it, you take shame’s stinger out. It is

I didn’t recognize my trauma overwhelm until a female student, a girl who’d had wild mood swings in class, stayed with me one afternoon finishing an assignment. I’d asked her to describe an important moment in her past. She wrote about when her mom died from cancer, how her dad didn’t know what to do, and how her teachers didn’t talk to her about it. It was then that she started acting out. The next year, her brother was shot and killed. She changed schools and started getting in trouble, and still, no one asked her what was wrong. No one at her new school knew her past. No one was playing detective. No one allowed her to share that her mom had died, giving her a chance to have a caring adult acknowledge that it was so, so sad. And her brother had died. And that was a whole different kind of sad. We talked about it as she wrote out her story, and her behavior in school improved dramatically.

Signs of Trauma: Trauma is there in plain sight in students who act out, students who drastically alter their appearance, students who come to class on mind-altering substances, those who cut, those who cut class, and those who suddenly change demeanor.

Hidden trauma can only be revealed through the right kind of prompts and through the vulnerability school staff are willing to exhibit. Once I figured out that what I did as a teacher created opportunities for students to reveal hidden student trauma, my world changed, as did the lives of my students.

I never push students to tell me information. I think of classroom prompts as dropping a line without a hook: I’m just seeing if the fish has been waiting there, wanting to bite, and has never been given a chance. I use non-invasive, content appropriate prompts for students to share about themselves. I structure the shares so that students can reveal a safe amount to their classmates and more to me if they want to. My workshop on Hidden Student Trauma has worksheets and guidelines for safe prompts and teacher-led student sharing.

I used to think I’d have to BE a counselor in order to have an empathetic response. Then I took a 9 month life coaching course and learned that everyone can respond to hurt with a compassionate, “That sounds hard. Tell me more.” Some students elaborate, others just relate that is IS hard, it WAS hard, and it continues to BE hard. That, as it turns out, is enough.

I always refer students to the school’s counselor, citing my concerns. I also tell the student that I have referred them for counseling, generally with the fear-calming, “Have you met the counselor? Let me walk you down to their office. Counselors are great people to talk to.”

We model care, compassion, and ask the uncomfortable questions that bring the hurt into the light where it can start to heal. Teachers, counselors, and school staff rock like that.

To have me speak at your school about combating visible and hidden student trauma, email me at: JessieDorinCoaching@gmail.com

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