Student Success through Micro-Adversity

A Teacher's Guide to Fostering Grit and Resilience by Celebrating Failure and Encouraging Perseverance

M. Jane, Ty Bricker

• Publisher: Ulysses Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781646041992
• eBook ISBN: 9781646042258
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Gestión del aula

Cultivate resilience by incorporating small challenges (also known as micro-adversities) in your classroom with effective, trauma-informed strategies that are proven to improve behavior, increase engagement, and empower students to achieve.

One in four children have witnessed or experienced a traumatic event by the age of 16 that can affect behavior and learning. Fortunately, educators of all grade levels can inspire resilience and grit that helps students adapt to change and overcome hardship with simple everyday activities. This book offers a breakthrough method for building community and empowering your students with a new strategy: micro-adversity.

Micro-adversities in the classroom can be actionable activities, like trying to solve a puzzle that is intentionally missing a few pieces, or building emotional intelligence with conversation starters. By experiencing small failures, students learn to overcome them and thrive. Written by two teachers, one a former US Army Ranger, this method combines the extensively trained military perspective with the important foundations of trauma-informed education.

Chapter 1

STRESS AND LEARNING DEVELOPMENT

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)

In the early 2000s, Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, a pediatrician in the San Francisco Bay Area, began uncovering a growing trend in child and adolescent health concerns. Children and adolescents with increased stressors at home (abuse, neglect, poverty, familial incarceration, etc.) were exponentially more likely to present additional health and social issues. Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs, exist disproportionately for children of color and children of generational poverty, but also impact children from every walk of life and social status. While she was not the first physician, practitioner, clinician, or professional social service worker to notice the trend, Dr. Burke Harris became and remains one of the most vocal about it.

ACEs comprise a number of events occurring in a developing person’s life that create different levels of chronic stress. Being poor and disadvantaged can compound the effects of ACEs. You can easily imagine the lack of resources, lack of support, ongoing chronic household stress, higher rate of incarceration, and higher likelihood of untreated mental illness and addiction issues stacking up in situations of poverty and marginalization. While the list expands and absorbs different categories as society changes and develops, typically speaking, ACEs are contained in the following categories: abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction.

Adverse Childhood Experiences

percentage of study participants that experienced a specific ACE

Typically, around 45% of children experience one or more ACEs, primarily economic hardship and divorce or separation of parents. About 10% of children experience three or more ACEs, placing them in a “high-risk” group. To understand what this “high risk” looks like, it’s important to see the correlating data between three or more ACEs and overall well-being. If you want to really average statistics out, and ignore the fact that many areas are more significantly impacted by ACEs due to socioeconomic factors, around 33% of a given classroom at any time has experienced significant, brain-altering stress.

Adverse Childhood Experiences tend to occur in pairs or batches—a parent may divorce an abusive partner with a drinking problem, for example—this is three ACEs rolled into one package, simply through circumstance (addiction, parental separation, abuse). The severity and chronic nature of ACEs affects the long-term influence on an individual’s life. Stress is very individualized, as well. What traumatizes one student could very likely be just a speedbump to another.

In spite of all this, it still remains to be said that brains are incredible, resilient tools. We are continuously in cycles of change with our brains and physical development. For all of us, brain development begins before birth, mapped out through a roll of genetic dice, and shaped through a variety of environmental, biological, and socioemotional processes and influences. While there is considerable data linking ACEs with disease, poor lifestyle choices, and academic struggles, it’s important to broaden the idea of childhood stressors into a more all-encompassing, holistic view of brain development: chronic stress.

There are shortcomings to the ACEs studies—they capture many elements of developmental stressors but don’t necessarily address broader societal stress or less clearly defined personal experiences that create a chronic stress response. For example, the ACEs assessment doesn’t include verbal abuse toward a maternal figure, or address living with a disability or encountering racism. It doesn’t include the significant stress of bullying, frequently moving homes or towns, homelessness, or food insecurity. While ACE assessment can serve the purpose of uncovering the significant impacts of some stressors, it isn’t enough. For the purpose of teaching and overcoming hard things, it’s important to treat the impacts of stress as light switches that will shut down cognition in exchange for survival.

Survival Orientation

Throughout this book, chronic stress will be described as any period in which the brain control center (amygdala, hypothalamus) undergoes the change to survival orientation due to toxic levels of stress (either chronic and/or traumatic). This is variable, of course; stress is, again, highly individualized. The purpose of this work is not to define what is or is not stressful, but rather, to explore the impacts of developmental stressors in the teaching and learning environment. By highlighting these impacts, we can begin to draw connections between cognitive, emotional, and physical impasse (demotivation, “freezing,” avoidance of challenge) and the steps necessary to move through those hard things into successful development. Successful development is, after all, effective learning practice.

Stress response is a fundamental aspect of being human, and it serves us efficiently for much of our lives. We encounter a situation in which our well-being is threatened; we are flooded with the appropriate chemicals to generate a response; we enact the response to avoid danger; and we flood with different chemicals post-event. Typically, there is a recovery period in which our comfort and safety is then reassured: the danger is gone, the world is bright, we are ready to move forward. The issue with chronic stress, however, is that the reassurance is absent or insufficient. The flood of chemicals associated with recovery is less than adequate, and our brains over time become acclimated to the increased levels of the stress hormone cortisol within our physiology.

Stress and Student Failure

Increased and sustained levels of cortisol are damaging; in children and adolescents, this is increasingly harmful. Brains with chronic stress produce individuals that struggle in their encounters, management, and recovery from new stressors. The chronically stressed brain doesn’t know how to recover from negative events, so overcoming obstacles as small as planning a week of homework becomes unthinkable. If obstacles create a shutdown, we are more likely to predict failure when faced with a challenge; this pattern is replicated for adolescents and young adults who have been forced to live in a survival orientation in which they could not control or predict their environment. For people trained in shutting down during stress, avoiding challenges is essential, because traditionally, the stress of something hard has caused pain and loss—failure.

Failure isn’t the wolf in the shadows. It’s the pain, the loss, the grief, and a deep-seated anxiety that no matter what we try or how hard we try it, we will not be enough. It prevents each of us from stepping our toes out into the unknown, into a space of challenge where we might fail.

Students tend to give up, not because they don’t want success but because they fear not being good enough. The idea of not being capable of something usually comes from the idea that failure is inevitable, final, and unmanageable. This is a very common human trait, especially in our post-modern, first-world mindset in which immediate success is the only success. Students have overwhelming numbers of variables to think about. What will their friends think of their failure? How embarrassing will it be if they tell everybody that they’re going to do something, and then publicly fail to do it? What about social media? If they fail at something, or look bad, not only will it negatively affect them, but possibly their family. The image young people believe others see will be tarnished and shamed. These are social boundaries people put on themselves—culturally, we value social perception over accomplishment. This is unbearable to the human psyche: to publicly fail to uphold a socially accepted image is modern tribal exclusion. These altogether high stakes give students an “out.” They can easily convince themselves that the task at hand is too great, not only because it’s too hard, but because there’s too much on the line if they fail. By imagining the risk to be too great to manage in the event of failure, they have activated their stress response and deemed it too dangerous, and to be firmly avoided or only half-heartedly attempted.

As teachers and educational leaders, it’s vital for us to model and insist that excuses are the currency of preemptive failure. Reasons can exist in the name of generative failure while learning. Reasons denote responsibility, and lay the groundwork for addressing shortcomings. Excuses, however, are the simplified, image-saving statements or “things” made to the self and society that do not produce growth. Those “things” can be sneaky; excuses and reasons are so close to one another that they require self-monitoring. Not exercising because you feel vulnerable and embarrassed about your appearance at the gym feels reasonable but also creates further barriers to becoming healthy. Reasons identify barriers, excuses create them. Instead of putting in the work to do the hard thing, students may settle for the easy thing, bypassing failure that could have led to growth. If we do not insist on being willing or open to putting in hard work, then we provide opportunities for learners to come up with the “things,” and the things simply delay success. Excuses are short-lived and provide, at best, stasis. At worst, students can create an aggressive confirmation bias—“I don’t think I can do it, so when I don’t, I’m right.”

EXAMPLE OF RESILIENCE FROM TY

I believe that humans use helplessness or self-pity as a tool for survival, and frequently so. We seem to have an innate desire for approval through sadness, maintaining the mindset that “Nothing ever goes right for me”; “This happens all the time”; “I’ll never get ahead”; or “I’ve had it so tough/bad, so how could you expect this of me now?” From my experience, this mindset is hard to overcome. And once you’ve gone down the rabbit hole of self-pity, it’s hard as hell to dig yourself out. But dig yourself out, you must.

When I was working as a law enforcement officer for the US Forest Service in Colorado, I became intimately involved with an addiction recovery group. This group would meet at a local church every Wednesday night at 6:15 p.m. You might ask yourself, how did I become intimately involved with this outfit? Well, it’s a long story, but for clarity I’ll give you a few details. I had a PTSD problem from the war. Between the Rangers and life as a protective security specialist, I deployed around fifteen times. Off and on from 2003 to 2013, through two administrations, I went out and did work for the US of A… as a result, I developed an anger/self-worth issue. It was destroying my marriage, my family, my decision-making abilities, and most importantly, me. Veterans have a problem, and that problem is us. We’re unwilling to accept or look for help. And I was no exception. Unexpectedly one day, I was approached by a man who I credit with saving my life. He invited me to an addiction recovery meeting he hosted every Wednesday evening. I was a bit resentful about it; I mean, after all, what in the hell did these people know about me? What did he know about me? They didn’t see what I saw, or do what I did. So how were these people, former addicts no less, going to help me? Well, I went anyway. I was curious, and deep down I knew that I needed help. I sat there totally silent through the whole meeting (one hour). And then I heard an older woman tell her story. It was a terrible story. Full of rape, drug and alcohol addiction, physical abuse, and total despair. She had been through hell and made it out the other side. Now she was a fully functional woman, wife, and grandmother. She had taken control over her experiences, and weaponized them to help others. She held nothing back and was absolutely, brutally honest. Listening to her story gave me the courage to say something… to share. I felt like a coward. Here was this woman, who had experienced horrific things, and she wasn’t using those things as an excuse. She didn’t show any self-pity, she wasn’t helpless, she wasn’t powerless. She was STRONG, and she owned everything. All of it. I had a choice in my life, and I decided, me, to join the military and do the things I did. Things that weren’t always honorable. But those were decisions I made, decisions I consciously made. She wasn’t in charge of the awful things that happened to her: being raped and abused, which led to addiction and prostitution. It wasn’t her choice to have those things happen, but they did. And if given the choice, I’d rather lead my life a thousand times over than lead hers once. I needed to grow up and change the man that I was into the man I needed to be. I needed to take ownership. I introduced myself and told my story. I aired out a lot of dirty laundry to complete strangers. Nobody interrupted me, and though the meeting ran late (because of me), everyone politely stayed until I was done. I cried, I sat quiet a few times gathering myself, and I was honest about everything. All of the dreadful things. When I was done, everyone loved on me, and I felt powerful. My experiences didn’t own me anymore. They were no longer my dirty/sad/embarrassing secrets. I took them out, exposed them, and aired them out to rot. It changed me, and I think it saved my life.

I wasn’t able to save my marriage, and a few years later I went through a very traumatic and public divorce. But I had developed the strength to survive it, strength I had acquired through this group, and through these amazing people. Before, I portrayed myself as strong. I gave the outward impression of a man that had it all, and had it all together. But I was filled with self-doubt, self-pity, anger, resentment, and blame. I was almost crippled by it. Though I had experienced much and made it through some of the hardest training around, I was a shell of a man. I found my strength and my meaning through ownership and honesty, and the ownership and honesty of other solid human beings.

The example above shows the deep impact that the acceptance of being “not enough” can have on an individual. Being “not enough” is directly related to self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is the belief that you have the tools, ability, and support to learn and overcome obstacles to your development. Trauma, negative relationships, and poor academic experiences all contribute enormously to how we perceive our own willingness and drive as it relates to doing hard things. Many, if not all of your students have been told and shown through social media, peer groups, and their own families that they are not enough. They are one failure from being unredeemable, one mistake from losing their identity or safety. School, which could be such a safe haven, often compounds the mindset of failure further by punishing students who cannot perform. There are staggering statistics around students with an executive function disruption such as Attention Deficit Disorder/Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADD/ADHD). Students with a history of maltreatment are more likely to carry a diagnosis of ADD/ADHD, and vice versa. There is a growing body of research trying to determine the chicken-or-the-egg relationship, but the maltreatment of children and adolescents with ADD/ADHD is significant; at the moment, children with ADD/ADHD are more than twice as likely to experience childhood maltreatment. Compared to their non-ADD counterparts, these kids are more than eight times more likely to suffer psychological abuse, more than five times more likely to experience neglect, and more than twice as likely to be victims of physical abuse. Academically, students that are maltreated are at least one full grade level behind their peers in grade school, and if they have behavioral issues, are more likely in middle and high school to be suspended or expelled, and fail to graduate. These are students that have been personally, socially, institutionally, and academically told they don’t have the tools or ability to be successful, because of who they are and what they came from.

Of all the students that frustrate us in the classroom, it’s these. These are the students that pull their hair over their eyes to avoid you, don’t complete homework, are chronically late or absent, don’t seem to care, and largely just don’t want to try. They want to be angry and resentful, and blame others, and there is legitimacy to their claim that it isn’t fair, I can’t do it, I’ll ju...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Stress and Learning Development
• Chapter 2: Educational and Social Shifts
• Chapter 3: Building Classroom Communities Through Leadership
• Chapter 4: Social Development and Empowerment
• Chapter 5: Tactical Teaching: Classroom Innovations
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Bibliography
• Copyright