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Teachers help set the tone and culture of their classes. When teachers create an environment where students feel welcomed and included, students are more motivated and likely to engage (Shernoff, 2013). There are a number of techniques and strategies teachers can use to build a strong classroom community for any age or level of learner. One strategy is building stronger student to student relationships. In this week's Teacher's Corner, we offer three suggestions to promote student-student relationships. You can use these in your own classrooms as you work toward greater student engagement.
LEVEL
Any
MATERIALS
List of possible questions for Question of the Day (Appendix A)
PREPARATION
While lesson planning, ask yourself, "How will I support, develop, and enhance our classroom community today?"
STRATEGIES Meet & Greet (Icebreakers)
Objective: Students will begin to develop relationships with fellow classmates and the teacher.

Meet & Greet activities are usually done on the first day of class as a way for the teacher and students to learn more about each other. Some teachers spend the whole class getting to know students on the first day with intricate icebreakers. These icebreakers and Meet & Greet activities get students talking and support both teacher-student relationships and student-student relationships. Supporting and developing strong teacher-student and student-student relationships are vital to creating and maintaining a strong classroom community. The more students and teachers know about each other, the more accountable they feel to the classroom community. Here's an icebreaker that engages learners and prompts discussion.

1. Put students into groups of 3-4. On the first day of class, simply group them according to where they sit. For example, walk to three students sitting next to one another and tell them they are now a group.

2. Ask each student to write down a number between 1 and 10.

3. Tell students to share the number they wrote with their group.

4. Explain that first, students should introduce themselves by name. Then, students will use their numbers as a guide for how many things they will share about themselves with the group. For example, a student who wrote 7 will have to tell the group 7 things about himself.

5. Give groups time to talk beyond what they share. This might mean using almost 10 minutes to complete this activity. Remember, you want students to spend time talking with one another.
a. As the teacher, circulate and listen as a way to silently meet students. Make notes about students' names and what they share in order to get to know them.

6. At the end of the activity, tell the groups to exchange contact information. They can share phone numbers, email, social media names, or additional contact information.
a. Explain that they should reach out to their classmates if they have a question about homework, want to study together, etc. This way, students support one another's success in the classroom.

7. After students have exchanged information, ask them to write down their name and the things they shared with their group. Students then submit this to you, so you have information about each student.
a. Collect the information sheets.
b. If you choose, ask each student to introduce someone in his/her group to the rest of the class. As students introduce classmates, make notes on the student information sheets so that you can use the information to learn more about your students.

Question of the Day (QOD)
Objective: Students will get to know most/all of their classmates so that they feel more comfortable working on class activities and lessons.

At the beginning of the school year, plan to use 2-3 minutes at the beginning of every class for a QOD activity. QOD activities are designed for students to get to know one another. These activities are simple and take very little time, but they support student engagement throughout the whole school term.

1. Before class, write a question on the board that will serve as the QOD. The QOD can be funny, personal, or fun, but it should be something that generates discussion. It is best to choose something that is unrelated to class as it gives students a chance to develop personal relationships. For example, you could write a Would you rather question on the board such as: Would you rather be able to speak all human languages or speak all animal languages? See Appendix A for more suggestions.

2. Once students arrive, ask them to find a person they have not met and discuss the QOD.
a. As the teacher, you might need to facilitate partners. Encourage students to stand and walk to the other side of the room to find someone new.
b. Students introduce themselves to each other and then answer the QOD.

3. After a few minutes, ask students to return to their seats.

4. Check in with students and ask if anyone wants to share a response.
a. Try to encourage but not force answers. The purpose is for students to meet each other.

Depending on how often you meet with students, you could do this short activity every day for one to four weeks. For example, if your class meets daily and is small, you may want to consider doing this activity each day for one week. Bigger classes that meet once a week might want to do this activity for one month.

Objective: Students will collaborate to review and explain the content of a lesson.

The Review Mingle occurs at the end of a lesson or at the end of class and gives students an opportunity to review what they've learned with classmates. This activity is fairly open and often starts with a question that asks students to contemplate what they learned.

1. Tell students that it is time to mingle. Ask everyone to stand.

2. Ask students to walk around the room discussing the lesson just learned.Offer one open-ended question that prompts discussion such as:
a.What was difficult about today's lesson? What did you learn today? What is one question you still have?

b.Encourage students to talk to one or multiple classmates.

c.Remind students to introduce themselves if they don't know their classmate.

d.Explain that they must walk around the room to find someone. This encourages relationship building between students. It also gets them away from solely communicating with the classmates that sit close to them.

3. After a few minutes, feel free to bring the group back together to share. An alternative is to allow students to review this way until class ends.

The activities presented this week are two ways to build relationships among students. Strong student-student relationships help foster a more inclusive classroom and engage all students.
REFERENCES
Shernoff, David J. (2013). Optimal Learning Environments to Promote Student Engagement. Retrieved from http://www.eblib.com
APPENDIX A Possible questions for Question of the Day

What do you want to be when you grow up?

What is your favorite thing to eat for breakfast?

If you could have any superpower, what superpower would you choose?

Would you rather live in a world without lies or live in a world where you have all the power?

Would you rather taste color or smell sound?

Which animal best describes you?

If you could choose to be any animal, what would you choose?

Would you rather have your grandmother sing at your high school graduation or have your grandfather rap at your wedding?

Tell me about one of the most important people in your life.

Would you rather watch your favorite sport or play your favorite sport?

Where would you most like to travel?

If you had to eat one food for the rest of your life, which would you choose?

If you could meet anyone, whom would you want to meet?

What is your favorite part of everyday? What do you do during that time?

What is a song that makes you happy?

What is your favorite holiday?

Tell me about your best friend.

Would you rather spend the day inside while it rains or outside in the sunshine?

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Teacher's Corner: Promoting Learner Engagement

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Teachers help set the tone and culture of their classes. When teachers create an environment where students feel welcomed and included, students are more motivated and likely to engage (Shernoff, 2013). There are a number of techniques and strategies teachers can use to build a strong classroom community for any age or level of learner.

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AE Live 17.3 - Building and Sustaining a Culture of Belonging

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Students' brains are hard at work every moment of the day, learning skills and connecting new information with old. Those same brains are also constantly processing information when it comes to their relationship with you, their teacher.

Positive student relationships are fundamental to success. When students feel supported, they're more likely to engage in learning and have better academic outcomes. Plus, when students have positive interactions with teachers, they have fewer behavioral problems. These relationships are more important - and more challenging - than ever in uncertain times, like during the coronavirus pandemic.

Neuroscience can help us understand what's happening in students' brains when they feel safe and understood. Here are four reasons why positive teacher-student relationships are important - and how you can build those relationships.

1. Positive relationships build motivation.

This creates a cycle. You provide positive feedback. The student's brain releases dopamine. The student feels good and is motivated to feel that way again. With this increased motivation, students spend more time and attention working on a skill. They build those skills. You give more praise - sparking the release of more dopamine. And the cycle starts all over again.

On the flip side, when students don't receive positive feedback, they're less likely to enter the positive cycle of motivation and learning.

How to do it: To build a positive relationship, you need to have more positive interactions than negative ones. More specifically, researchers recommend having five positive interactions for every one negative interaction. Positive interactions could include greeting students by name as they arrive, giving praise for working hard, or asking about a student's pet.

Students who learn and think differently often have more negative interactions than positive ones. For example, students with ADHD may receive constant reminders from teachers to be on time and stay on task.

This doesn't mean that you should never provide students with corrective feedback and reminders. But make sure the positive interactions outweigh the negative ones. The more you get to know your students, the more you'll recognize when they need praise or encouragement, and when they're open to constructive feedback. You can keep a tally of how many reminders you give a student to complete an assignment. Try to find five times as many positive things to comment on and tally up as well.

2. Positive relationships create safe spaces for learning.

Think about how this applies to your own life. If you have a supportive principal who has established psychological safety in your school, you might be more likely to challenge yourself and try new ideas in your classroom. But if school leaders consistently give critical feedback, you might not feel psychologically safe enough to try something new. It's the same for students.

Building psychological safety is harder with some students than others. Think of the last time you saw a student seeming to overreact. This behavior may result from trauma or chronic stress in the student's life (such as having a learning or thinking difference or growing up as part of a marginalized group). This can cause them to feel threatened in situations that other students find harmless. The brain learns that the environment is not safe and remains on alert to potential danger.

For these students, when something is perceived as a threat, a region of the brain called the amygdala sets off an alarm. The amygdala is known for its role in detecting threats in the environment. Its job is to keep us safe and alive. Think of an animal that must decide whether to run or freeze when it sees a predator.

The amygdala triggers the release of cortisol (also called the stress hormone) and epinephrine (also called adrenaline). This sends extra energy throughout the body. The muscles tense up and the heartbeat quickens, preparing for fight or flight. When the threat detection system in the brain is highly activated, learning cannot happen. This is the opposite of psychological safety.

In students, this might look like:

Avoiding assignments

Putting their head down

Yelling or making negative comments

Walking out of the classroom or leaving a live video lesson

Acting out physically or aggressively

While building psychological safety may be even more difficult with these students, it is especially important for them. That's because oxytocin also helps keep the amygdala's threat detection system quiet. Over time, when students are surrounded by people they trust, their threat detection system is less likely to activate, and they're better able to learn.

For students who are at risk for a fight-or-flight reaction, your approach will need to differ slightly. Use strategies like when-then sentences so they can know exactly what positive outcome to expect when they complete a task, while giving students the power of choice. Expect that they may overreact sometimes, and provide the space and time needed to calm down. By remaining calm, you're not only reminding yourself to react to their behavior as a form of communication and respond appropriately. You're also building psychological safety and trust.

3. Positive relationships build new pathways for learning.

As you teach the new information, new neural pathways connect the old information with the new. If students don't understand the context or aren't able to link the new information to anything they currently know, they'll have a hard time understanding the lesson.

Ask students to share what they know about a topic. Every student has a different set of background knowledge. For example, if you know a student is a talented artist, you can leverage their knowledge of different kinds of paintbrushes to explain friction. Or you can make an analogy about the relationship between the characters in a student's favorite book and the domestic strife in the Civil War.

4. Positive relationships improve student behavior.

Neuroscience research has started to uncover why this imitation happens - and how it can be used to encourage positive behaviors. Studies have shown that when people observe an action being performed, it activates some of the same neural pathways that would be active if they actually performed the action. This is called the mirror-neuron system.

Essentially, our brains are practicing the action that we're seeing, even though our bodies don't move. Studies show that when people see an action first, they are able to perform the action more quickly than if they had not seen the action.

How to do it: Start by thinking through what behaviors and social skills you're modeling for your students. For example, you likely already model social skills like turn-taking, cooperation, and empathy on a daily basis. You can take it a step further and explain the behaviors you're modeling. The next time you're feeling frustrated, tell your students how you're feeling. Talk about how you deal with frustration, such as taking a few deep breaths.

For younger students, use pre-correcting and prompting as a classroom management strategy. It allows you to explicitly tell, show, and remind students how to approach tasks or situations.

Young children are even more likely than adults to imitate the behaviors they see. That's because they're still learning social skills and appropriate behavior. Plus, the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain that allows us to choose where to direct our attention and to regulate our behaviors and emotions) isn't fully developed until we're in our 20s. Childhood is a prime time to model behavior and social skills for students.

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Building positive relationships with students: What brain science says

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Brain science tells us why positive student relationships can lead to their success.

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AE Live 2.2: Routines to Support Effective Classroom Management & Planning

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APA Mental Health Primers

This information is designed to help teachers respond to students who may need support. It is not intended to be used as a diagnostic tool or to replace the use of formal assessments employed by mental health professionals. Additionally, it is important to consider the context of the situation, individual differences, and cultural and linguistic factors.

Teachers play an important role in establishing and maintaining healthy environments for students to learn and grow. For students who have been exposed to traumatic experiences, the first step is to ensure that classrooms feel safe for the child. Only after a student feels safe, can teachers work toward building supportive relationships and academic gains.

Unfortunately, trauma exposure is common. When students require additional support, teachers play a critical role in guiding students suffering from trauma to professionals in the building who can be of assistance.

What is Trauma?

A traumatic event is a frightening, dangerous, or violent event that poses bodily or psychological harm or is a threat to a student's life or a loved one. Students may or may not experience a situation as traumatic. The manifestation of trauma may differ based on cultural perspectives. For example, in some cultures people express their experiences of trauma more publicly and with their community whereas in others the expression is more individualistic and private.

Some traumatic events could be, but are not limited to:

Gun violence

Sexual abuse

Domestic abuse

Addiction

Suicide/death

Familial illness

Car accidents

Natural disasters/catastrophic events

Traumatic experiences often initiate strong emotions and physical reactions that can persist long after the event. Notably, a student does not need to have experienced a traumatic event directly.

A child may witness a traumatic event or see it through the media.

A child may be told about a trauma, often with gruesome details.

Traumatic events during one's childhood can impact a student's development throughout the rest of their life.

How Might Trauma Be Expressed by Students in School?

Left unaddressed, the negative impacts of stress and trauma can disrupt a student's behavior, and emotional wellbeing, academic success and health. Witnesses and bystanders of traumatic events might be disruptive or inattentive in school, or demonstrate unacceptable or defiant behavior. They might also demonstrate more fear-based behaviors (e.g., not wanting a door closed; being disturbed by a normal occurrence, like a bell ringing).

Students who have been exposed to trauma might also show a disruption in cognitive skills (e.g., memory, attention). This might result in decreased academic performance and school engagement. In the virtual learning environment (VLE), students who have experienced or witnessed trauma might withdraw from video or text/chat engagement or appear to have difficulty focusing.

In both learning environments, students exposed to trauma may also exhibit truancy, repeated tardiness, decreased attention to personal hygiene and grooming, and behaviors they have not demonstrated before, such as unreasonable fears or repetitive speech and behavior patterns.

Refer Students to Further Help if Needed

Review your school policy for seeking student supports.

Contact your school counselor, psychologist, social worker, and other personnel.

Empirical Research

Berson, I. R., & Baggerly, J. (2009). Building resilience to trauma: Creating a safe and supportive early childhood classroom. Childhood Education, 85(6), 375-379.

Blitz, L. V., Anderson, E. M., & Saastamoinen, M. (2016). Assessing perceptions of culture and trauma in an elementary school: Informing a model for culturally responsive trauma-informed schools. The Urban Review, 48(4), 520-542.

Dods, J. (2013). Enhancing understanding of the nature of supportive school-based relationships for youth who have experienced trauma. Canadian Journal of Education/Revue canadienne de l'éducation, 36(1), 71-95.

Hudson, C. C., Adams, S., & Lauderdale, J. (2016). Cultural expressions of intergenerational trauma and mental health nursing implications for US health care delivery following refugee resettlement: An integrative review of the literature. Journal of Transcultural Nursing, 27(3), 286-301. https://doi.org/10.1177/1043659615587591

Figge, C. J., Martinez-Torteya, C., Taing, S., Chhim, S., & Hinton, D. E. (2020). Key expressions of trauma-related distress in Cambodian children: a step toward culturally sensitive trauma assessment and intervention. Transcultural psychiatry, 1363461520906008. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363461520906008

Terrasi, S., & De Galarce, P. C. (2017). Trauma and learning in America's classrooms. Phi Delta Kappan, 98(6), 35-41.

The Mental Health Primers are developed by the Coalition for Psychology in Schools and Education. This resource was updated in October 2021 with support from cooperative agreement NU87PS004366 funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views or endorsement of the CDC or the Department of Health and Human Services.

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Teachers play a critical role in guiding students suffering from trauma which if left unaddressed can disrupt a student's behavior, and emotional wellbeing, academic success and health. Part of the APA Mental Health Primers for teachers responding to students who may need support.

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Using a Daily Routine for Language Practice

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Language teachers already know that students learning a new language need visual support, but it is especially beneficial to young learners. Visual support helps young learners associate images with new vocabulary, grasp concepts, and understand classroom routines. Visual support is especially important for young students who are still learning to read.

How can teachers create a visually rich classroom that will support students' language learning? This week in the Teacher's Corner, we present some ideas for materials to post in the classroom as well as ideas about how to encourage student interaction with each one.

Many stores that sell educational materials sell pre-made posters that illustrate key vocabulary, concepts, and even classroom routines. However, if you do not have access to a store like this, posters can easily be created for this purpose. If you create your own posters, it is helpful to make a quick sketch on a regular sheet of paper first so that you can plan how to arrange the content. Once the plan is ready, the information can be neatly written on large poster paper. The poster should present images and/or content for students to learn in an organized way. Words and images should be clear and large enough for students to see from far away. Vocabulary such as color words, shapes, sizes, numbers, the alphabet, animal names, types of weather, and seasons are commonly displayed in classrooms for young learners. As content is covered throughout the school year, teachers can add posters to illustrate concepts such as daily routines, the water cycle, and animal or plant life cycles.

In order for a poster to be useful, it should contain the key vocabulary or information in words and illustrations. For each vocabulary word, there should be an accompanying illustration or example. For every piece of information, such as steps in a cycle or process, there should be a visual that illustrates the concept.

While posters create a colorful and visually stimulating environment for young learners, simply hanging them on the wall does little to support language development. Instead, teachers should try to incorporate the posters into lessons. For example, if you are teaching a unit on fruits and vegetables, you can incorporate a discussion about colors into the lesson. Ask students to locate the color of each fruit or vegetable on the poster with colors as you discuss each one. Similarly, if you create classroom posters about routines that students should follow, you can use them to review expectations. (There will be more ideas about how to utilize posters in Week 2 of this month's Teacher's Corner.)

The Sing out Loud collections are available for free on the American English website and are excellent resources for young learners. Both collections, Sing Out Loud Children's Songs and Sing Out Loud Traditional Songs, include a poster for each song to add visual support as students sing. These ready-to-use collections can help you create a visually rich classroom that will build the vocabulary of young learners.

When teaching new information to young learners, it is helpful to create a visual representation of ideas or examples as you discuss content. To do so, it helps to have chart or poster paper on an easel or hung on your chalkboard so that you can easily create illustrated lists or diagrams.

Continuing with the fruits and vegetables theme, you can begin by asking students to name fruits and vegetables that they already know in English. As they raise their hands, you can quickly write down the name of each fruit or vegetable they say and then draw a picture. Even phonics concepts, such as letter sounds, are a great opportunity to create illustrated lists. If you are reading a book with your students, create a graphic organizer on the chart paper to review the events or concepts from the text.

The charts you create can be displayed in the classroom to help learners recall concepts and information throughout the year.

The vocabularies of young learners grow very rapidly and word walls are a great reference tool and visual reminder to use throughout the school year. A word wall is an area of your classroom where vocabulary words are displayed in an organized format. The most common ways teachers choose to organize them is alphabetically or by theme/unit.

To create a word wall, you must first choose your organization method. Whether it is alphabetical or thematic, you should create labels that are legible (easy to read) from a distance. For alphabetical organization, create one label for each letter of the alphabet. For thematic organization, create labels based on your units of study, such as "weather" or "animals."

For each set of vocabulary words you introduce, create an illustrated card for each word. Write the word neatly with a marker and, if possible, large enough that students can read the words from their seats. Include a picture or create an illustration on the card. The picture can be to the left, right, above, or below the word, but it is helpful to keep the position consistent so that the word wall is neat and students understand the format.

Depending on the age of your class, you can ask your students to create the vocabulary cards that you will display on the word wall. They can find pictures for the cards in magazines, newspapers, or on the internet, or create their own illustrations. For students at the higher end of the young learners age range, you can also include brief definitions on the vocabulary cards that will be displayed on the wall.

As with posters, to promote language development, word walls should be incorporated into lessons and classroom activities. You can refer to the word wall when teaching, have students come up and read words from the wall, or use the wall to play matching games. To play a matching game, you can verbally state a definition and have students come up to the word wall and point to the word that matches what you say. You can give additional clues about the word, such as the part of speech, how many letters it has, an example sentence with the word missing, or something that rhymes with the word. The goal of the activity is to help students interact with the word wall often so that they can recall the words and meanings in order to use them independently.

Young learners enjoy when teachers bring concepts and stories to life with real objects or props. Not only does this provide real life examples of content, it also helps learners feel more connected to the information they are learning.

Incorporating these types of visual support can be quite easy, and you can even involve your students in the process. For example, if you are reading a book or story with new vocabulary related to a particular topic, you can bring in the items from home or have your students bring them. For example, if you are reading a book about morning routines, bring in a toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, a towel, and a hairbrush. Interacting with these objects will bring the story to life for young learners, and they will make connections to the content. If you are studying the names of different clothing items, use your students' clothes as visuals or ask them to bring in items to associate with the words.

Whenever possible, have students interact with the objects rather than just look at them on display. For instance, in the daily routines example, pass the objects around the class and have students pantomime the actions associated with each one (pretend to brush their hair, wash with soap, etc.). In the clothing example, you can choose a student volunteer to "get dressed" and then have the class name all of the clothing items the student chose to wear.

By including visual representations of the content young students are learning, you will enrich their learning experience and create a visually stimulating classroom environment. If your young learners are old enough, you can also get them involved in the process of creating materials. If you teach the same content each school year, it is helpful to laminate the materials you purchase or create so that you can use them again year after year. If you do not have access to a laminating machine, try to use sturdy poster paper or card stock to help make your materials last. Take care of the materials by asking students to use pointers, rather than their hands, to interact with the posters. Many things can be used as a pointer, such as a ruler, a marker with the cap on, or even the eraser side of a pencil. This will help to keep the materials clean and enable you to use them over and over again.

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Teacher's Corner: Teaching Young Learners

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Language teachers already know that students learning a new language need visual support, but it is especially beneficial to young learners. Visual support helps young learners associate images with new vocabulary, grasp concepts, and understand classroom routines. Visual support is especially important for young students who are still learning to read.

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Involving Students in Classroom Routines and Processes

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Group and pair work provide students frequent opportunities to practice using English with a variety of people in a lower-stakes setting. These collaborative learning situations are an essential part of a communicative EFL classroom.

EFL teachers often pre-establish groups and pairs for either long-term or short-term purposes. Teachers usually consider several factors when assigning students to groups depending on whether they want groups to be homogenous (made up of people with similar characteristics) or heterogeneous (made up of people with different characteristics). Personality type (introverted or extroverted), language proficiency, maturity level, likes and dislikes, life experiences, cultural considerations, and learning styles are just a few of the characteristics teachers might consider when creating groups or pairs. For helpful tips on how to create assigned groups and establish group roles, see "Minimizing the Chaos through Cooperative Classroom Management" by Gena Rhodes ( English Teaching Forum, 2013) and "Reconceptualizing Interactional Groups: Grouping Schemes for Maximizing Language Learning" by Judith Rance-Roney ( English Teaching Forum, 2010).

In this week's Teacher's Corner, we look at ways to make the sometimes tedious task of getting students into groups and pairs fun and language-focused. The techniques shared below offer unique ways to create impromptu (spontaneously made), randomly allocated groups for communicative activities. These approaches may take time to prepare, but their advantages include allowing students to work with different classmates (those who are not their usual neighbors or members of long-term assigned groups), enabling students to enjoy a fun "brain break" that involves language or content learning, and presenting opportunities for students to get up and move around.

Be sure to consider your students' language level, age, and learning preferences when determining if the techniques below are a good match for your classroom.

1. Creating groups with "counting off" variations

Most teachers have used the "counting off" method to create impromptu groups (if you want 5 groups, students each say a number aloud in turn: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 2....). You can easily modify this technique to include a language or content focus:

Sequenced vocabulary: To reinforce vocabulary at beginning levels, instead of having numbered groups, assign sequenced vocabulary items as group names. Write the sequenced words on the board for extra visual support, if needed. For example, if you want 5 groups, your sequence could be "weekdays," and students would count off Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Monday.... (or your locally defined interpretation of "weekdays"). To create 6 groups, you could use "Spring and Summer months" with students counting off March, April, May, June, July, August, March... (or the applicable months in the Southern Hemisphere). To create groups of any size, you can use "multiples of 10" or "multiples of 100" to practice number vocabulary: for 7 groups, students would count off ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, ten, twenty.... You can also use recently studied vocabulary words in alphabetical order for your sequence. For example, for "fruits and vegetables," students could count off with apple, banana, cucumber, eggplant, lettuce, orange, apple, banana... If desired, post pictures or draw the items on the board and point at each as students count off.

Letters and vocabulary: Instead of having numbered groups, assign each group a letter. The letters don't always have to be sequential (e.g., A, B, C...). For instance, you could use B, C, M, S, and T to create 5 groups. Write the letters on the board and point to each one as students count off so they can stay on track. As students count off, they must say any English word that starts with the letter in the sequence on the board. For example, students could count off boy, car, map, street, time, baseball, cow..... Each student must use a different word, and the rest of the class should be on the lookout for repeated responses. Students who get stuck after a few seconds can ask a neighbor for help. This sorting technique is great for lower intermediate levels and above because these students have access to a wider range of vocabulary items. Also, teachers can make this vocabulary-focused approach more difficult by choosing both letters and a category, such as "proper names," "types of food," etc. For instance, if your letters are B, C, O, and P, and the category is "food," count off responses might include banana, coconut, onion, potato, bagel, cake, orange....

Themes: Instead of numbered groups, use themed group names, such as Animals, Sports, Jobs, and Things You Read. Write the themes on the board. As students count off, they must give an example that fits the category. For example, for the categories above, responses might be camel, football, policeman, magazine, monkey, basketball, doctor, newspaper.... The rest of the class can judge whether or not responses suit each category. You can choose themes related to content in your curriculum or, after you've used this technique a few times to create a routine, let students suggest the themes.

For all variations, your group names are limited only by your imagination and the students' language level. In all options, after the "count off" phase, you can then direct and instruct groups according to the sorting factor: Can everyone in the "Monday" group stand up, please? I need five volunteers from the "C" team to pass out these worksheets, please. I'd like all of my "Sports" group members to start working together at Station 1 now.

2. Creating pairs and groups with "Find your Match"
During pair and group work, teachers often ask students to turn and work with their neighbors. In classes with assigned seats or where students usually sit in the same places, this means working with the same partner or group mates on a regular basis. While working in a familiar pair or group can build trust and comfort, students also need opportunities to work with other classmates who may have different perspectives, language skills, and personalities.

The "find your match" technique for setting pairs or groups can be used with students of any level and can be adapted to review and recycle a variety of language and content topics in the curriculum. The premise for all of the variations described below is that students will all receive a card or small piece of paper with information in English on it, and they must move around the room and talk with others as they try to find the partner or group mates whose cards contain related information.
Language-focused "find your match" cards
Prepare the cards in advance based on the learning objectives, mix the cards up, and distribute them to students. Here are a just a few of many possible language- and content-focused ways to use this technique; examples with different difficulty levels are included for some items:

o Synonyms: big finds huge (pair); happy finds cheerful (pair); permanent finds everlasting, unchanging and immutable (group of 4)

o Antonyms: sad/happy; difficult/easy; danger/safety

o Comparatives and superlatives: expensive/more expensive; pretty/prettier; comfortable/more comfortable/most comfortable (group of 3)

o Irregular verb forms: go/went; swim/swam; sing/sang

o Associated vocabulary items: cat/kitten; baseball/bat; (theme: "things in a kitchen") pot/stove/refrigerator/sink (group of 4); (theme: "things that fly") duck/airplane/helicopter/pigeon/rocket (group of 5)
Content-focused "find your match" cards
o Picture - word (for lower levels): vocabulary item/picture of the item; digital time/a drawing of an analog clock with the time displayed on hour and minute hands (students must say the time aloud in English when they find their match); a number in numeric form/the number spelled out ( 71/seventy-one)

o Reading / literature: book title + character(s) - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn/Aunt Polly/Becky Thatcher (group of 4); The Gift of the Magi/Della (pair)

o Science: parts of a system or process - photosynthesis/sun/leaf/chlorophyll (group of 4); lifecycle of a butterfly/egg/caterpillar/pupa/butterfly (group of 5)

o Science: animal + habitat - bird/tree; shark/ocean; fox/moose/bear/ owl/forest (group of 5)

o Social studies: current event + country where it occurred or current event and person involved - 2014 Winter Olympics/Russia; international volunteers respond to recent floods/Bangladesh; promoting a nationwide campaign that encourages kids to exercise/U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama

o History: event + significance or date or person and significance - 1945/World War II ends; E mancipation Proclamation/freed slaves in the United States during the Civil War; Mahatma Gandhi/promoted non-violent approaches to social change

Tip - Managing the Volume: This type of mingling activity can generate noise. While it is great that students are actively speaking, you don't want the noise level to become disruptive. Here is a way to create a routine that uses visual signals to encourage students to speak at a classroom-appropriate level:

Traffic signal: The teacher holds up stoplight-colored signs or pieces of paper to indicate the noise level. Green = Good; Yellow = Becoming too noisy, lower the volume; Red = Stop - it is too noisy! Use your quiet voices or whisper. The teacher can hold up the sign at the front of the class or walk around with the sign raised while students are working. Train your students to pass along the signal to their partners or group mates when they see it and to remind others to adjust the noise level when yellow or red signs are shown.

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Group and pair work provide students frequent opportunities to practice using English with a variety of people in a lower-stakes setting. These collaborative learning situations are an essential part of a communicative EFL classroom. EFL teachers often pre-establish groups and pairs for either long-term or short-term purposes.

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AE Live 9.4  - Amplifying Voice and Choice in the EFL Classroom

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How to teach the language of feelings - UsingEnglish.com

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Teaching tips and classroom activities for the language emotions, from very young learners to advanced learners.

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Strategy in Practice

Our aim should be to move away from the traditional practices of teaching with one modality (typically linguistic) for all students in a lesson. Instead, if we recognize that our students learn in different ways, then we also need to recognize that our students need us, when possible, to teach lessons with strategies that allow students to process information through multiple modalities. When possible and based on the knowledge of your students' learning style needs, provide opportunities for students to:

Talk about their Learning: Use Think-Pair-Share, Save the Last Word for Me, Take a Stand or another structured discussion strategy in order to help students process what they are learning. If students understand, they can explain it in their own words. By talking and using their own language to make sense of learning, students are incorporating new information into prior knowledge.

Use or Create Visual Representations: Ask students to create a mural of a chapter they've read. Ask students to use a 9-Box visual strategy to summarize the 9 most important events in a text. Ask students to compare and contrast an excerpt from a text with a cultural artifact or to create a visual that represents a character. Similar to the power of using language, creating and using visual representations assist students in synthesizing new information in a meaningful way.

Utilizing New Media: Ask students to find, view and use CNN news clips that accompany, expand upon or replace traditional print articles. Ask students to read the blog entries of an author in order to analyze the potential authorial intent behind a text. Guide students through the use of a blog, wiki, podcast or Power Point in order to represent learning of the student, literature circle group, or class. New media is multi-modal and our students need us to guide their understanding and use of new literacies.

Write in Many Modes: Rotate the responsibility among students or student groups of updating the class blog. Ask students to keep their reader response journal online and provide them time individually or in groups to record their thoughts about their novels, inquiry project, etc. Create time and space in the class for students to use writing as a reflective, clarifying, or therapeutic experience when reading, responding to or preparing to discuss texts. Sometimes the quality of the writing necessitates inclusion in a portfolio. Other times, as teachers, we can be more concerned with the quantity of meaningful opportunities to write. Quick Writes, letters to peers, personal learning statements, truth statements, etc. are easy ways to engage this modality.

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Strategy in Practice Our aim should be to move away from the traditional practices of teaching with one modality (typically linguistic) for all students in a lesson. Instead, if we recognize that our students learn in different ways, then we also need to recognize that our students need us, when possible, to teach lessons with strategies that allow students to process information through multiple modalities.

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Designed by Gloria Willcox, the feeling wheel is a proven visual aid that helps people recognize, talk about, and change their feelings.

Background story

Inspired by Joseph Zinker's ideas of conceiving the therapist as an artist (Zinker, 1978), and Robert Plutchik's comparison of emotions to colors (Plutchik's 1980), Wilcox set out to design the feelings wheel using the four basic emotions: scared, sad, mad and glad. To keep things balance between comfortable and uncomfortable emotions, she expanded "glad" into three emotions: joyful, powerful, and peaceful.

Armed with this balanced cohort, she matched them to the primary and secondary colors to render the inner wheel of fundamental emotions, from which the outer circles would radiate. Eluding to the blending nature of emotions, she painted these external sectors in decreasing shades of their corresponding inner feeling.

In her experience as a psychotherapist, she found that people seemed to find themselves at a loss for words when describing how they feel, usually handicapped in their ability to verbalize their emotions by learned behaviors of what is and not acceptable, when it comes to sharing feelings.

The Feeling Wheel is the precursor data model for the emotion wheel we use in our self-assessment app.

Anatomy of the feeling wheel

The feeling wheel is composed of an inner circle with six segments corresponding to six primary feelings: mad, sad, scared, joyful, powerful, and peaceful. It has two outer concentric circles describing secondary feelings that relate to the primary ones, painted in lighter shades than their counterparts.

Recommended Uses

Here are some suggested use according to Willcox:

Leverage the blank spaces provided in the outer circle to add your own feeling words.

Use it in a small group setting to facilitate creative play.

Color the wheel using colors representing how you feel like a playful way to reveal your needs to the group.

Change unwanted feelings into desirable ones by becoming aware of the bridges between them.

Final Thoughts

The exploration of emotions is a vehicle to become aware of your power. Use the feeling wheel to hone this power and build an emotional vocabulary that improves your communication quality.
Your power to be intimate with others depends on your capacity to share your emotions with them.
References

Gloria Willcox (1982) The Feeling Wheel, Transactional Analysis Journal, 12:4, 274-276, DOI: 10.1177/036215378201200411

Zinker, J. Creative process in gestalt therapy. Vintage Books, Random House, 1978.

Plutchick, R. Emotions: A psychorevolutionary synthesis. Harper and Row. 1980.

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Inspired by Joseph Zinker's ideas of conceiving the therapist as an artist (Zinker, 1978), and Robert Plutchik's comparison of emotions to colors (Plutchik's 1980), Wilcox set out to design the feelings wheel using the four basic emotions: scared, sad, mad and glad.

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Teaching Young Learners Self-Calming Skills

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Teaching Young Learners Self-Calming Skills

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Social & Emotional Learning (SEL)

To help early elementary students manage big emotions, try breathing exercises and sharing how you deal with overpowering feelings.

Big, sometimes overwhelming, feelings can be hard to contain, especially for our youngest students. In the past three years, many have experienced hardships-loss, grief, isolation, food and housing insecurity-and the fallout in school continues.

Of course, working with big feelings and dysregulation in early elementary school is nothing new. Our pre-K through grade two students have always come to us brimming with excitement, while also bringing their jitters, apprehension, anxiety, and frustrations into the classroom. Unaddressed, big feelings and nervous energy can go viral, with the power to disrupt a classroom in a few minutes or less.

So what to do? How do we help our youngest students feel safe, nurtured, and connected in school? What skills and practices can we introduce for them to learn to ground themselves so that academics can thrive?

MultiSensory grounding techniques

First, we need to make sure we maintain our center and stay grounded. As the teacher, you are the thermostat (not the thermometer) in your classroom. You set the tone. So when things escalate around you, feel your feet on the ground, take a deep breath, rub that stone you carry in your pocket for times like this, or take a whiff of that bottle of calming essential oil. You might also use calming self-talk, like "I've got this" and "Easy does it." According to research, silently messaging ourselves can reframe the story in our head and push back on the brain's stress response.

Consider sharing your practices with students in the moment; as you feel your blood pressure rising, you might name your own big feelings. Model and talk students through some five-finger (aka starfish) breaths as you compose yourself. Invite students to breathe along with you as you take everyone's feelings down a few levels. And if multisensory breathing isn't your thing, consider modeling self-talk or progressive muscle relaxation. Whatever it is that works for you, share it. Letting young people know that we, as adults, experience big feelings, too-and that we have ways to work through them-is powerful stuff.

Have a mindful practice for students to draw on when the going gets tough. They don't call it a "practice" for nothing. Starting the school day with some starfish, rainbow, or snake breaths can help students learn how to calm and center themselves. Some teachers I work with add mindful movement. As students develop a practice that works for them, they can return to it more easily in moments when big feelings threaten to overwhelm them.

Have you ever passed the quiet? This magical practice was shared with me by a pre-K teacher, Mr. Holifield, years ago. He would cup his hands and announce in a quiet whisper that he had the quiet. He'd look into his hands and nod excitedly. Students would perk up and lean in to see what was happening. Mr. Holifield's contained excitement was contagious, and as he had his students pass the quiet around the circle, their rowdy and unregulated excitement calmed down. Mr. Holifield was the classroom thermostat, always.

Create a soothing environment. Playing calm, rhythmic music in your classroom is another way to intentionally quiet the senses. Fluorescent classroom lights can be activating, so consider dimming them; or, if possible, rely on natural light or introduce warmer light sources altogether. I once worked with a teacher who used calming essential oils in her classroom. I made sure to always pop in when walking by her room, inhaling deeply, before going on my way again.

Build a peace corner. Once you've introduced your students to centering and grounding techniques, peace corners can provide them with a place to practice. To start, ask students to draw their peaceful place and discuss what it is about their place that makes it peaceful. Next, look around the room and decide together where a peace corner could go. Also ask students about tools they use to calm themselves. Stuffies? Paper and crayons to draw or doodle? Books about feelings? A glitter jar perhaps? Decorate the space together using student artwork. Once it's ready, have students take turns visiting, emphasizing that we all have moments in which we need to collect ourselves, including us, the adults.

Social and emotional learning (SEL) is key. As teachers, we know that teaching students skills is important. As is practice. Consider introducing talking circles to invite students to share their stories and perspectives while they practice mindful listening and patiently wait their turn. As the talking piece goes around, students make connections with other students, feel less alone, and are able to better understand where peers are coming from. The connections, empathy, and skills that students build in circles can be tapped when they get into a dispute or altercation. Guided skillfully by the adults at first, students learn how to problem-solve and repair harm. With practice, students can begin to host their own circles, using a talking piece to moderate challenging conversations.

So there it is. It may seem like a lot, and we're already dealing with a lot these days. Just take it slow, one step at a time. Reflect and learn with your students. See what works, and keep building.

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Teaching Young Learners Self-Calming Skills

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To help early elementary students manage big emotions, try breathing exercises and sharing how you deal with overpowering feelings.

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Social & Emotional Learning (SEL)

Expressing gratitude has a lot of benefits for students, and teachers can give them the freedom to express it in different ways to promote student choice.

Notice the things in your life that you can be grateful for.

Think deeply about why you have been given this thing you value.

Reflect on how you feel about the gift you have been given.

What can you do to express appreciation?

While research supports writing as a powerful (even calming, for some) way to practice gratitude, it is not the only way. The reality is that we are all unique and dynamic, so a one-size-fits-all approach just doesn't cut it with gratitude (or anything else for that matter).

The four essential components of the gratitude experience identified by psychologist Andrea Hussong and her team are: notice, think, feel, and do. To realize all the benefits of experiencing gratitude, learners can work through these prompts:

What are your design opportunities and constraints (e.g., time, space, developmental appropriateness)?

What resources, supplies, and/or technology could assist in empowering learners?

The first three prompts are really about reflecting to experience gratitude, and the last prompt is a call to action to express gratitude. We can think of these essential components as our firm goals, and we can offer flexible means to achieve them.

The process of noticing, thinking, feeling, and doing can take as little as a few minutes, or it can be savored over longer periods of time. Before we get to specific examples of firm goals and flexible means related to gratitude, think about your context:

Ultimately, you want your students to experience and express gratitude to improve well-being and nurture relationships. By affording them the freedom to decide how to do that, you're meeting the needs of diverse and variable learners and honoring the interests of the individuals who make up your learning community.

Below are some examples of firm goals and flexible means for both experiencing and expressing gratitude.

Small yet awesome everyday things

Family, friends, pets

Health

Coincidences

Nature, places

Experiences

Life lessons

Firm Goal: Notice the Good

Flexible means: We want to empower learners to notice the good in their lives and in their learning community. We also want to consider ways to offer support for those who want or need it. You could brainstorm topics as a class or offer options like the ones listed below. Either way, learners should understand they have the power to choose.

Firm Goal: Capture What You Think and How You Feel

Artistic expression: drawing, painting, sculpture, or collage

Digital media: videos or slideshows

Mind or concept maps (e.g., create a circular diagram as a gratitude wheel)

Performance: storytelling, speech, poetry

Written reflections: journaling, letter writing

Other: students can suggest another option

Flexible means: At this point, we want to make sure we are capturing the experience, and even when we are short on time, we can give the option to draw, write on paper, use a word processor, record a voice memo, or take a photo.

Here are some options you can provide:

We want to offer a buffet of options, but we don't want to serve up choice fatigue with a side of frustration. Be sure to consider the needs and interests of the individuals you're working with. What means are they already familiar with? What are some options you could model to help them build up their toolkit so they have the skills to take advantage of the choices?

Firm Goal: Do Something to Express Your Gratitude

Flexible means: A learner might choose to continue with "capture what you think and how you feel" from above by gifting their drawing, video, etc. Or they may have something completely different in mind (e.g., social media posts, emails, texts, etc). Either way, we can encourage learners to go the extra mile when they express their gratitude.

In the book The Gratitude Project, Jeremy Adam Smith reveals that the richest thank-yous acknowledge the intentions and the costs while also describing the value of the benefits received. Here are some examples:

Intentions: "Thank you for sending me a copy of your notes when I missed a class."

Costs: "I'm grateful that you offered to help me with my project, even though it meant sacrificing some of your free time."

Value: "I appreciate you explaining that math concept clearly-I finally get it!"

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Expressing gratitude has a lot of benefits for students, and teachers can give them the freedom to express it in different ways to promote student choice.

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20 Tips for Creating a Safe Learning Environment

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20 Tips for Creating a Safe Learning Environment

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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Everyday SEL Exit Tickets | Learning to Give

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After a meaningful session or day together, a reflective writing prompt can help young people internalize, sort, or articulate their thoughts and feelings. A great tool for SEL and personal reflection, exit tickets provide a prompt to bring thoughts to a close before moving out the door. Designed to…

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This activity that I "authored" in 2019 was useful for building teamwork and empathy with students ages 10-60 in southeast Asia, South America, and the Middle East. A "dream house" can be switched to any topic: a classroom, a restaurant, a utopia (city), a "perfect day (timeline style)," and more.

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I start all my online classes with a 'get to know you' discussion forum. But I decided during the pandemic to ask students to post a picture, a video, a song, etc that represented who they wanted us to see them as in this class. I enjoyed listening to music that resonated w/my students for example.

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I start all my online classes with a 'get to know you' discussion forum. But I decided during the pandemic to ask students to post a picture, a video, a song, etc that represented who they wanted us to see them as in this class. I enjoyed listening to music that resonated w/my students for example.

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I learned in a rather difficult way about creating the safe environment. I like surprising my students with fun activities and mixing it up. But during a jeopardy game, some students became visibly agitated, and some became aggressive. I stopped the game and learned that the competition and aggressive behavior of some students was triggering. I gave students the option to leave class w/out repercussions if they were upset. I also began to share my ideas for future classes in person and online 

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I learned in a rather difficult way about creating the safe environment. I like surprising my students with fun activities and mixing it up. But during a jeopardy game, some students became visibly agitated, and some became aggressive. I stopped the game and learned that the competition and aggressive behavior of some students was triggering. I gave students the option to leave class w/out repercussions if they were upset. I also began to share my ideas for future classes in person and online 

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In my current work, I create assessments that offer choice in student response. 

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In my current work, I create assessments that offer choice in student response. 

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My research centers on multimodal representation and expression! Take a look at my webinar on the topic: 

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My research centers on multimodal representation and expression! Take a look at my webinar on the topic: 

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Listen to my interview with Alex Shevrin Venet (transcript):
Sponsored by NoRedInk and The Modern Classrooms Project

This page contains Amazon Affiliate and Bookshop.org links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. What's the difference between Amazon and Bookshop.org?

As a teacher, you probably find yourself in situations pretty often where you're made aware of a student having needs or challenges that exceed what your school typically offers them. It might be a need for extra time or attention, a shortage of school supplies, food, or clothing, a need for transportation, a need for help with organization, structure, or time management. The list of student needs in so many schools is never-ending, and your desire to help meet them is probably pretty strong, too.

But attempting to meet these needs on your own - to become a kind of "savior" to your students - can not only lead to burnout for you, it's also not ultimately that helpful to the student long-term.

Joining me to talk about this on the podcast is Alex Shevrin Venet, author of the book Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education ( Amazon | Bookshop.org). This is Alex's third time on the podcast. The first time was in April of this year, when we did an overview of trauma-informed teaching. There were two topics from her book that I thought were so important I wanted to do a deeper dive on them, so we did separate episodes for each of these. In September we talked about a concept called unconditional positive regard, a stance toward working with students that's grounded in giving them love and acceptance without making them earn it first.

Now we're going to talk about the danger of getting into a savior mentality when helping our students, how to tell if you're slipping into that kind of thinking, and how to shift toward healthier and more helpful ways of thinking about and approaching student needs.

You can listen to our conversation in the player above, read the full transcript, or read some of the key points of our conversation below.

What is the savior mentality, and why is it a problem?

"The savior mentality is this mindset that teachers can get into that basically has us looking at students who've experienced trauma or who are struggling, and sort of taking on this feeling that our role is to rescue them," Venet explains. "So rather than seeing that we might support them, it's really more of this dynamic where You're the one that needs to be rescued; I can do the rescuing. You're the one that needs saving; I can save you."

Why do teachers tend to think this way? And why is it so problematic?

"One big reason is that our whole society tells us that we should," Venet says. "You see stories about 'the hero teacher adopts their student who had nowhere else to go,' 'the hero teacher bakes homemade muffins every day for a year for their hungry student' ... these stories are elevated but they're actually not feel-good stories. They're kind of 'feel gross' stories because they really highlight the inequities that teachers should not really be responsible for. Why was the teacher the only person positioned to do that? If the teacher's the one buying food out of their own money or cooking things on the weekend, why does that kid not have food already? What are the systemic failures that are preventing the school from having food?"

Venet also sees the savior mentality as a way for teachers to avoid the unpleasant reality that they really can't "save" kids all by themselves.

"When you let go of savior mentality you start to see that you're just going to be one small piece of a student's story," she says. "The thing that happens in the movie where one hero teacher totally turns a kid's life around - it doesn't really happen like that in real life. But that's hard because when you witness a kid who's struggling, it's normal to really want to help them. And to really acknowledge and sit with the discomfort that you probably are not going to fix what is harming them, it's just really sad and hard. And so when we don't have the time or the space to kind of feel our feelings, I think it feeds into this savior mentality because it's just easier to go Yeah, I can fix it, I can save them. I can be the rescuer."

What It Looks Like: Examples of "Savior" Thinking

Even if you think you don't fit the profile of someone with a savior mentality, there's a chance you may have had at a few thoughts that bear the hallmarks of savior thinking.

"My students with trauma are broken. I feel so bad for those kids."

"The cultural narrative about trauma usually pushes us to one of two directions," Venet says, "the first direction being that people with trauma are broken. You see people experiencing trauma on TV and you see them totally subsumed by flashbacks and anger and lashing out and just in a dark place. The other narrative that you see a lot is the What doesn't kill us makes us stronger narrative, where you go through trauma and it makes you a superhero. It transforms you. But it's really much more messy than that often. People might see some elements of growth or strength come out of surviving trauma, but they also can have a lot of struggle in a lot of hard times."

Instead of pitying students, Venet encourages teachers to focus on getting to know them as whole people. "If we look at students and try to actually see them, then we're not going to just feel bad for them because we're going to know them, that they are whole and complete people, that they have skills and strengths and they're silly and funny and they also struggle. It's that actual building of relationships that's the antidote to this one, rather than feeling a sense of pity, which is going to put us in a place of maybe talking down to students, lowering our expectations, not challenging them enough."

"My students are not capable of helping themselves. I need to save them."

This kind of thinking takes agency away from students and makes it all about the teacher instead. "People have their own strengths and capabilities," Venet explains. "Another person doesn't need me to survive and heal through trauma. What they do need is maybe a community of people, and if they do need something from me, maybe that's what I can contribute to. If I'm going into that relationship thinking, I'm going to be the one to help her. I have to be this essential resource for her, I'm undermining that student's wisdom of Who's going to be the right person for me? What do I need from those around me? When am I ready to get help? "

"Teachers can provide the love students don't get at home."

"My problem with these phrases is that they make a whole lot of assumptions," Venet says, "they often are stated when people are talking about students with behavioral challenges, students who are poor, students of color, students with disabilities, or who otherwise are the targets of bias, basically. There's sort of this coded language around, oh, the students who aren't getting love at home can come to school and get love. What makes you feel like they're not getting love at home?"

There's a difference, she says, between not loving a child and not having all the necessary resources to parent them successfully.

"There are a lot of parents who love their child so much that they work multiple jobs and therefore aren't home to help them with their homework. There are parents who love their child so much that they come up with custody agreements to make sure that the child is in a stable place to live. And so maybe they don't see them as much, or maybe there's stuff around who to contact, or these things that you might see as a teacher of 'oh, the parent doesn't come to school,' or 'the parent doesn't answer their emails' or 'there seems to be conflict with these co-parents' or 'the kid doesn't have clean shirts that they wear.' These are just little things, and to extrapolate and say that family doesn't love that child is making huge leaps and bounds."

"I alone can fix them. I can be 'the one.'"

"People often repeat this idea that it just takes one caring adult to help a child survive and thrive," Venet says. "And it is true that one caring adult can make a huge difference. But I think that how people sometimes misinterpret that is that any one caring adult can turn a child's life around, or that it only should be just one person as opposed to a community. There's sort of this individualism. Whereas what the research and experience tells us about healing is that it takes a lifetime. It takes a community. People benefit from a whole web of supportive people around them."

She also warns against trying to provide the kind of care that we haven't been trained to do. Even if no one else is available, she says "I still should not take it upon myself to become a counselor or a psychologist and delve into the psyche of this student. It's not my job, it's not my role, and I might actually be doing harm if I try, because I don't know what you're supposed to do as a therapist to work through that stuff."

By positioning yourself as the only one who can save a child, you also make yourself dangerously irreplaceable. "Sometimes I ask teachers, if you got abducted by aliens tomorrow, would your school be any more trauma informed than when you were there? And if you are baking the muffins every morning, and doing a lunch group and kind of providing informal counseling for a group of students, and you are doing case coordination that really should be done by a school social worker, and then at the end of the school year you decide to move to a different school, all of those things that you are doing are just not going to happen for the next batch of students."

"My value is in how much my students respond to me."

When students don't respond positively to our attempts to help them - or even push back - it can interfere with our ability to really meet their needs, because our ego takes a hit. But Venet advises us to maintain a healthy perspective on this; ultimately, it's not about us.

"So often a person who's going through trauma might have a response to someone that truly has nothing to do with that person," she says. "If I'm placing my whole self-worth on Does this student trust me and confide in me and see me as their helper?, I'm already setting myself up for failure because there's all kinds of things that are out of my control around how they're reacting to me. If my value is about whether the student feels supported by me and healed by me and thinks I'm the best teacher ever and can come to me and confide in me, that's placing a lot on a kid who's just trying to live their life. I can't look to a student to get all of my emotional needs met.

"My mentor would often say to us that whether or not your student has a good day shouldn't determine whether you had a good day. If I had a solid plan going into the day, if I was present and responsive, if I used my tools and strategies, if I did all that I'm trained to do and used the best of my skills and capabilities, then I had a good day as a teacher, regardless of whether my students were having a hard time."

What to Do Instead

So if we see all these pressing needs, and we're not supposed to try to meet them ourselves, what is a healthier approach? Venet encourages teachers to put their energy into helping students find the resources they need, and when those resources are not available, addressing the systemic issues that create those scarcities.

"I encourage teachers to just be really loud about these gaps," she says. "Your administrator might already be aware that there is a demand that's not being met. But let them know. Every time that you want to make a referral and you feel like you can't because there's no availability, let them know. Write to your school board and let them know. Write to your state legislators and let them know. If teachers can collectively say, we need more mental health support, or we need food pantries that are more accessible, or whatever the need is, you're setting that boundary and saying 'It doesn't make sense for me to meet this.' If you have the time, if you have the energy, just take the little extra step and let people know we need this. We have to let folks know what those needs really are, the gaps that we're seeing on the ground."

Coming From a Good Place

Venet's closing message for teachers who have fallen into a savior mentality is to be gentle with themselves.

"You didn't create this dynamic," she says. "This dynamic was created for you by the gross combination of cultural narratives, underfunding of schools, scattershot policies that don't equitably meet the needs of students and teachers, and here you are in the middle of that trying to do the best you can. If you have slipped into a savior mentality because you care, don't leave this conversation thinking that you're doing something wrong. All you've been doing is trying to meet the needs of your students. What I would invite you to do is to do some critical reflection and think about, am I honoring their agency? Am I honoring their self-determination? And am I trying to make systems change so that this dynamic does not continue to repeat forever and ever?

"Caring for your students is not a bad thing. We just want to be critical about it to really support students in their self-determination."

Come back for more.
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How to Help Students Without Being a Savior

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Trying to meet big student needs on your own is ultimately not that helpful to the student. Here's how to shift your approach.

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Listen to my interview with Alex Shevrin Venet (transcript):
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As a teacher, you probably find yourself in situations pretty often where you're made aware of a student having needs or challenges that exceed what your school typically offers them. It might be a need for extra time or attention, a shortage of school supplies, food, or clothing, a need for transportation, a need for help with organization, structure, or time management. The list of student needs in so many schools is never-ending, and your desire to help meet them is probably pretty strong, too.

But attempting to meet these needs on your own - to become a kind of "savior" to your students - can not only lead to burnout for you, it's also not ultimately that helpful to the student long-term.

Joining me to talk about this on the podcast is Alex Shevrin Venet, author of the book Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education ( Amazon | Bookshop.org). This is Alex's third time on the podcast. The first time was in April of this year, when we did an overview of trauma-informed teaching. There were two topics from her book that I thought were so important I wanted to do a deeper dive on them, so we did separate episodes for each of these. In September we talked about a concept called unconditional positive regard, a stance toward working with students that's grounded in giving them love and acceptance without making them earn it first.

Now we're going to talk about the danger of getting into a savior mentality when helping our students, how to tell if you're slipping into that kind of thinking, and how to shift toward healthier and more helpful ways of thinking about and approaching student needs.

You can listen to our conversation in the player above, read the full transcript, or read some of the key points of our conversation below.

What is the savior mentality, and why is it a problem?

"The savior mentality is this mindset that teachers can get into that basically has us looking at students who've experienced trauma or who are struggling, and sort of taking on this feeling that our role is to rescue them," Venet explains. "So rather than seeing that we might support them, it's really more of this dynamic where You're the one that needs to be rescued; I can do the rescuing. You're the one that needs saving; I can save you."

Why do teachers tend to think this way? And why is it so problematic?

"One big reason is that our whole society tells us that we should," Venet says. "You see stories about 'the hero teacher adopts their student who had nowhere else to go,' 'the hero teacher bakes homemade muffins every day for a year for their hungry student' ... these stories are elevated but they're actually not feel-good stories. They're kind of 'feel gross' stories because they really highlight the inequities that teachers should not really be responsible for. Why was the teacher the only person positioned to do that? If the teacher's the one buying food out of their own money or cooking things on the weekend, why does that kid not have food already? What are the systemic failures that are preventing the school from having food?"

Venet also sees the savior mentality as a way for teachers to avoid the unpleasant reality that they really can't "save" kids all by themselves.

"When you let go of savior mentality you start to see that you're just going to be one small piece of a student's story," she says. "The thing that happens in the movie where one hero teacher totally turns a kid's life around - it doesn't really happen like that in real life. But that's hard because when you witness a kid who's struggling, it's normal to really want to help them. And to really acknowledge and sit with the discomfort that you probably are not going to fix what is harming them, it's just really sad and hard. And so when we don't have the time or the space to kind of feel our feelings, I think it feeds into this savior mentality because it's just easier to go Yeah, I can fix it, I can save them. I can be the rescuer."

What It Looks Like: Examples of "Savior" Thinking

Even if you think you don't fit the profile of someone with a savior mentality, there's a chance you may have had at a few thoughts that bear the hallmarks of savior thinking.

"My students with trauma are broken. I feel so bad for those kids."

"The cultural narrative about trauma usually pushes us to one of two directions," Venet says, "the first direction being that people with trauma are broken. You see people experiencing trauma on TV and you see them totally subsumed by flashbacks and anger and lashing out and just in a dark place. The other narrative that you see a lot is the What doesn't kill us makes us stronger narrative, where you go through trauma and it makes you a superhero. It transforms you. But it's really much more messy than that often. People might see some elements of growth or strength come out of surviving trauma, but they also can have a lot of struggle in a lot of hard times."

Instead of pitying students, Venet encourages teachers to focus on getting to know them as whole people. "If we look at students and try to actually see them, then we're not going to just feel bad for them because we're going to know them, that they are whole and complete people, that they have skills and strengths and they're silly and funny and they also struggle. It's that actual building of relationships that's the antidote to this one, rather than feeling a sense of pity, which is going to put us in a place of maybe talking down to students, lowering our expectations, not challenging them enough."

"My students are not capable of helping themselves. I need to save them."

This kind of thinking takes agency away from students and makes it all about the teacher instead. "People have their own strengths and capabilities," Venet explains. "Another person doesn't need me to survive and heal through trauma. What they do need is maybe a community of people, and if they do need something from me, maybe that's what I can contribute to. If I'm going into that relationship thinking, I'm going to be the one to help her. I have to be this essential resource for her, I'm undermining that student's wisdom of Who's going to be the right person for me? What do I need from those around me? When am I ready to get help? "

"Teachers can provide the love students don't get at home."

"My problem with these phrases is that they make a whole lot of assumptions," Venet says, "they often are stated when people are talking about students with behavioral challenges, students who are poor, students of color, students with disabilities, or who otherwise are the targets of bias, basically. There's sort of this coded language around, oh, the students who aren't getting love at home can come to school and get love. What makes you feel like they're not getting love at home?"

There's a difference, she says, between not loving a child and not having all the necessary resources to parent them successfully.

"There are a lot of parents who love their child so much that they work multiple jobs and therefore aren't home to help them with their homework. There are parents who love their child so much that they come up with custody agreements to make sure that the child is in a stable place to live. And so maybe they don't see them as much, or maybe there's stuff around who to contact, or these things that you might see as a teacher of 'oh, the parent doesn't come to school,' or 'the parent doesn't answer their emails' or 'there seems to be conflict with these co-parents' or 'the kid doesn't have clean shirts that they wear.' These are just little things, and to extrapolate and say that family doesn't love that child is making huge leaps and bounds."

"I alone can fix them. I can be 'the one.'"

"People often repeat this idea that it just takes one caring adult to help a child survive and thrive," Venet says. "And it is true that one caring adult can make a huge difference. But I think that how people sometimes misinterpret that is that any one caring adult can turn a child's life around, or that it only should be just one person as opposed to a community. There's sort of this individualism. Whereas what the research and experience tells us about healing is that it takes a lifetime. It takes a community. People benefit from a whole web of supportive people around them."

She also warns against trying to provide the kind of care that we haven't been trained to do. Even if no one else is available, she says "I still should not take it upon myself to become a counselor or a psychologist and delve into the psyche of this student. It's not my job, it's not my role, and I might actually be doing harm if I try, because I don't know what you're supposed to do as a therapist to work through that stuff."

By positioning yourself as the only one who can save a child, you also make yourself dangerously irreplaceable. "Sometimes I ask teachers, if you got abducted by aliens tomorrow, would your school be any more trauma informed than when you were there? And if you are baking the muffins every morning, and doing a lunch group and kind of providing informal counseling for a group of students, and you are doing case coordination that really should be done by a school social worker, and then at the end of the school year you decide to move to a different school, all of those things that you are doing are just not going to happen for the next batch of students."

"My value is in how much my students respond to me."

When students don't respond positively to our attempts to help them - or even push back - it can interfere with our ability to really meet their needs, because our ego takes a hit. But Venet advises us to maintain a healthy perspective on this; ultimately, it's not about us.

"So often a person who's going through trauma might have a response to someone that truly has nothing to do with that person," she says. "If I'm placing my whole self-worth on Does this student trust me and confide in me and see me as their helper?, I'm already setting myself up for failure because there's all kinds of things that are out of my control around how they're reacting to me. If my value is about whether the student feels supported by me and healed by me and thinks I'm the best teacher ever and can come to me and confide in me, that's placing a lot on a kid who's just trying to live their life. I can't look to a student to get all of my emotional needs met.

"My mentor would often say to us that whether or not your student has a good day shouldn't determine whether you had a good day. If I had a solid plan going into the day, if I was present and responsive, if I used my tools and strategies, if I did all that I'm trained to do and used the best of my skills and capabilities, then I had a good day as a teacher, regardless of whether my students were having a hard time."

What to Do Instead

So if we see all these pressing needs, and we're not supposed to try to meet them ourselves, what is a healthier approach? Venet encourages teachers to put their energy into helping students find the resources they need, and when those resources are not available, addressing the systemic issues that create those scarcities.

"I encourage teachers to just be really loud about these gaps," she says. "Your administrator might already be aware that there is a demand that's not being met. But let them know. Every time that you want to make a referral and you feel like you can't because there's no availability, let them know. Write to your school board and let them know. Write to your state legislators and let them know. If teachers can collectively say, we need more mental health support, or we need food pantries that are more accessible, or whatever the need is, you're setting that boundary and saying 'It doesn't make sense for me to meet this.' If you have the time, if you have the energy, just take the little extra step and let people know we need this. We have to let folks know what those needs really are, the gaps that we're seeing on the ground."

Coming From a Good Place

Venet's closing message for teachers who have fallen into a savior mentality is to be gentle with themselves.

"You didn't create this dynamic," she says. "This dynamic was created for you by the gross combination of cultural narratives, underfunding of schools, scattershot policies that don't equitably meet the needs of students and teachers, and here you are in the middle of that trying to do the best you can. If you have slipped into a savior mentality because you care, don't leave this conversation thinking that you're doing something wrong. All you've been doing is trying to meet the needs of your students. What I would invite you to do is to do some critical reflection and think about, am I honoring their agency? Am I honoring their self-determination? And am I trying to make systems change so that this dynamic does not continue to repeat forever and ever?

"Caring for your students is not a bad thing. We just want to be critical about it to really support students in their self-determination."

Come back for more.
Join our mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration that will make your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to our members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, the e-booklet that has helped thousands of teachers save time on grading. Over 50,000 teachers have already joined-come on in.

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How to Help Students Without Being a Savior

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Trying to meet big student needs on your own is ultimately not that helpful to the student. Here's how to shift your approach.

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This is a great strategy to support learners who are shy or afraid to speak up in class. 

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This is a great strategy to support learners who are shy or afraid to speak up in class. 

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I found these resources courtesy of Larry Ferlazzo's "Websites of the Day" email. The resources come from the San Antonio school district.

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Although SEL has its detractors, it has proven effective for learners and useful for teachers who have, since before SEL was given a name, provided the language, skills, and environment for learners to express themselves.

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100+ Social-Emotional Skills IEP Goals [The Complete List] | Positive Action

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Dive into Positive Action’s comprehensive guide featuring over 100 IEP goals for fostering social-emotional skills in children. Covering areas like self-awareness, relationship skills, and problem-solving, this resource emphasizes the importance of SEL for mental health and provides strategies for tracking progress in a behavioral IEP.

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This 2-page infographic reinforces many of the concepts introduced in this session. There is a handy list of references at the end of it.