 Hello everyone and welcome. My name is Brittany Collins and I'm pleased to share with you this presentation regarding a grief responsive approach to teaching English language arts. I'm an author educator and curriculum designer with a background teaching writing to middle and high school students. I'm also the founder of grief responsive teaching a professional learning community dedicated to supporting students and teachers well being in times of loss. I'm also the author of learning from loss a trauma informed approach to supporting grieving students a book that explores best practices for grief support in school systems. Now available through Heinemann Publishing and I'm happy to offer viewers of this session a discount code for 40% off the list price using the code C O N F 21 at checkout on Heinemann.com. In addition to telling you a little bit more about who I am. I also like to acknowledge who I'm not. I approach grief responsive work as an educator and a formerly bereaved student. So I'm not a psychologist counselor or medical professional and I certainly encourage you to seek out the support of licensed clinicians as a supplement to this work. So what do I mean when I say grief responsive teaching. Grief responsive teaching is a pedagogical and interpersonal approach to teaching and learning that integrates science and stories of grief into actionable classroom practices that support students and teachers well being in times of loss. Because grief impacts the brain body and behavior and by extension teaching and learning grief responsive teaching seeks to support and empower the whole person socially emotionally culturally and academically. And this philosophy is born out of the understanding that loss is the most commonly cited trauma experienced by young people. 7 out of 10 teachers had a student in their classroom who was grieving prior to the pandemic and over 40,000 young people lost a parent or guardian to COVID-19 by April of 2021 with BIPOC youth experiencing higher rates of bereavement due to the systemic health inequities that the pandemic has only further underscored. And the number of impacted youth continues to ascend when we consider that grief is not always tied to a death. For example, moving houses or schools experiencing the divorce of family members or navigating foster care can all elicit grief responses in young people's brains and bodies. So in order to consider how best to support grieving students in the classroom, it's important to first take a look at what exactly grief does. Some people consider grief to be an emotion and it is of course a felt experience, but on a much deeper level grief impacts our neurology. The neurologist Dr. Lisa Shulman writes that grief insights a fight or flight response followed by a depressive response. And for some people grief can be traumatic trauma of course is determined by our nervous systems in response to an event rather than the type of event itself. And for all people grief is often more complex fluid and continuing than the five stage framework that Elizabeth Kubler Ross put forth in the late 20th century. Grief can also elicit changes in behavior as outlined in this diagram here. It's important to remember that any behavioral changes we notice in young people are not only responses to loss but adaptations to loss. And so often these behaviors are attempts to fulfill or meet an unmet need in the face of a loss experience. So shifting to the classroom context, psychologist Howard Bath coined three tenets of trauma informed care, safety, connection and emotional regulation. Working collaboratively with students to tend physical, emotional and cultural safety in the classroom through responsive practices, cultivating peer to peer and student to teacher connections and integrating positive regulatory activities into classroom life like moments of mindfulness, free writing, a sense of predictability and routine starts to put in place the scaffolds needed for supporting these tenets and students lives. And the ELA classroom holds a special opportunity for offering grieving students support. For example, psychologist James Pennebaker of scholarship reveals that expressive writing in which the author uses emotion words to describe their internal state and personal experiences has significant psychological and physical health benefits especially for people experiencing trauma. So personal narrative writing or private or guided free writing offers space for students to explore lived experiences but in a challenge by choice manner. So we should never ask or force students to write or talk about their loss experiences, lest those activities reignite students grief or trauma. But we can instead create opportunities and spaces in which students are invited to explore any aspect of their stories on their own terms. In the ELA classroom it's also inevitable that we encounter literature and poetry that explores mortality implicitly or explicitly. I've heard many stories about how exploring loss in literature necessitates a both and approach so stories whether fictional or non-fictional can both serve as a catalyst for exploration, connection, memorialization and healing. And the exploration of these themes can also prove emotionally and psychologically challenging and may disrupt a level of well-being that grieving students are working hard to maintain. So a grief-responsive approach to this dynamic involves evoking students' agency. It's proven that trauma and adversity often involve a lack of literal agency, a disempowerment of the affected individual. They can also result in an impaired sense of agency meaning students experiencing grief may carry an internalized sense of powerlessness or hopelessness. And to counteract this tendency infusing our classrooms with opportunities that cultivate and empower agency is important. This might look like project-based learning, student-driven inquiry, choose your own text reading assignments, student-created rubrics, or even choice activities during ELA blocks. But returning to the topic of mortality in literature, providing content warnings and offering alternative texts are always ways to frame literature studies in a challenge-by-choice manner that invokes that agency without forsaking the positive potential of direct consideration of loss or mortality in literature for students who may feel ready for that. Finally, any discussion about grief-responsive teaching is incomplete without mention of educator well-being and the toll that supporting others can take, especially in times of challenge. Secondary traumatic stress, sometimes referred to as compassion fatigue, is the very real neurologically rooted experience that can come from exposure to other people's trauma and in our case grief. STS mirrors the signs and symptoms of traumatic exposure, the changes in brain, body, and behavior that we explored in the earlier slides. And teachers with past experiences of grief, loss, or trauma may be at an elevated risk for experiencing STS when working with grieving students. So connecting students with peers, mentors, colleagues, school counselors, as well as with activities and outlets that support well-being means that you help to collaboratively weave a fabric and community of support for grieving students without taking on the sole responsibility of witnessing a young person's pain. For more information on educator well-being, grief-responsive teaching, as well as specific exercises, prompts, and activities for the ELA classroom, I invite you to check out griefresponsiveteaching.com for more resources or use that special WMWP discount code CONF21 at Heinemann.com for 40% off of my book Learning from Loss. Thank you very much for tuning in today and I hope to connect again in the future. I also encourage you to look through my references slides for more readings regarding grief and trauma in the classroom. Take care.