Chitty Chats with Stacy

How Does Your Past Impact Your Teaching
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[00:00:00] Hey friends. Happy Thursday. I am so excited to have you here with me today. We're doing something a little bit different. Uh, you are going to not hear me interview a guest this week. What you're going to hear instead is some training that I've done. Uh, this training has been on my YouTube channel for a little bit now.

Uh, and it's been a training that I've done a few times over the last year, year and a half, uh, called How does My Past Impact my teaching? And it comes from a place where. I've been working with educators for a long time and there are just some hiccups along the road, uh, where I thought, Gosh, I need to do this class [00:01:00] for educators to help them kind of move through a few things that come up as humans.

And so this is a deep dive into, you know, how your past really impacts your classroom and your teaching. And I often say we cross the threshold of every room. Um, with all of our experiences and so we're going to just start doing this sometimes on this podcast. We're going to drop some training and education and hopefully you'll enjoy it.

I will always come back with additional guests and I'll have a guest for you next week and the following week, but every once in a while I just think, gosh, this is theme. These are some themes that are coming up in my work and this is just a really great way to be in a great. platform to give you some free resources and some free tools.

So here's a gift. I hope you enjoy. Feel free to drop me an email. If you have any [00:02:00] questions, thoughts, comments, activation that you want to work through stacyatgobu. org enjoy.

Hello, friends. We're here. We're live. We're gonna give people a few more minutes to log on. All right. Glad you all are here. So, my name is Stacy York Nation. I'm a licensed clinical social worker. I have been speaking, training, educating educators and parents now for over 15 years. been a licensed clinical social worker for about 20, uh, have a background in education and school based mental health and have been doing this work, uh, meeting with people and decided when the Trauma Informed Educator Networks Conference came up to submit a, uh, proposal that was really about how does your past as educators change your impact your teaching.

So it's a combination of the work I've been [00:03:00] doing for a long time, both in my private practice, but also with the educators that I support. And a lot of times I am faced with the questions of, Hey, this kid's driving me crazy. This kid's really bugging me. I'm triggered. I don't know how to support my coworkers.

I get faced with all these interesting questions. And so for me, This really became a presentation that I thought was extremely critical for educators, and what we're going to do today is take a deep dive into just how your blueprints really set you up in the classroom. And so, for those of you I got to meet and spend time with in Nashville, this might look a little bit different because it's virtual and it's online, and that's way different than in person.

Uh, we're recording today. So if you have friends or colleagues that signed up or registered, I will be shooting you all out a link later this afternoon and with the PowerPoint presentation [00:04:00] and a form you can fill out that will give you a verification of participation. So, if you need to use that for continuing ed or anything.

Professional Development Hours or anything like that, you'll be able to submit that. So keep in mind, tech is always an interesting thing. So if you have any pickles or bumps in the road, just drop me an email. Uh, I will put my email in the chat box and I will respond and I will assist and we'll work it out together.

So welcome. Welcome. Glad you're here. Uh, chat box is open. So feel free to drop a chat along the way. Always love participation with our people. Who am I? I already stated. I'm Stacy. I'm a licensed clinical social worker. A little bit about my background other than what I've said. I'm a mom. I'm a divorced mom.

Uh, I'm an ACES score of seven. I always think that's an important piece of this. So I were the, I was this kid that went through a lot of trauma, went through a lot of experiences in my life, [00:05:00] uh, and have landed. In this job, which is actually exactly what I was meant to do on this planet, which is pretty cool.

Uh, and so a lot of what we talk about today is somewhat personal because I was that kid and I needed the support when I was a kid. So it's very, I'm very invested. in who gets to learn these skills as well. I also have two teenagers. So I have been doing this work, uh, in my personal life, their entire life.

I discovered Dr. Bruce Perry's work, uh, in 2006. My daughter was born in 2007 and my son was born in 2008. And I have been certified in his neuro sequential model, done a lot of training with Dr. Brian Post, a huge fan of Dr. Bessel van der Kolk's. And I'm part time in the Wyoming Army National Guard. So I serve as a behavioral health officer in uniform, and I have this lens of trauma from childhood through adulthood.

So much of what I've talked about [00:06:00] today I've also discussed with my soldiers and their families, as well as the children and families that I work with, in addition to the educators and administrators I support. For the last year, Really, for the last two years since COVID, I've been doing an online virtual support group for administrators and superintendents, as well as educators.

We split them out, educators and teachers in one support group, admin and superintendents in the other support group. If you're interested in more information about that, just drop me a line. I'd be happy to discuss that with you. So, who are you? Why are you here? If you're interested in answering that question, feel free to drop an answer in the chat box so we can see.

What I want you to think about when, when I say, who are you? I want you to think about your own past self today. I want you to think about what are the experiences you've had, uh, in your own life that have landed you where you are. I also want you to think [00:07:00] about what, who's your present self. Are you happy with the person you are?

Are you excited about the, you know, who you're presenting and who you're presenting as in the classroom or in the school setting? Uh, and where do you want to go in the future? What are some things you need to tweak or work on? And. Maybe there's some, a couple of kiddos or particular students that sort of trigger you and push your buttons.

And so I really want you to think about your own journey. Uh, today is a very reflective, uh, hour that we're going to spend together. And it really is a space for you to take the time to think about why you do what you do and who you are in this setting. Uh, oftentimes I find that we just choose a job or career, we get in it, and we just do day to day.

We're in it, we're going through the daily routine. motions, and we don't take a [00:08:00] lot of time to reflect and look at how we got where we are. So today what we're going to do is we're going to reflect on why you chose teaching or education. We're going to discuss who in your past has influenced you. We're going to talk about how Your physiology is wired.

You're going to hear me say today, we can't fight physiology and our physiology is critical in understanding our stress response systems. We're also going to develop what you can do when you are triggered and we're going to learn when to breathe. So we're going to cram all of that in the next hour. So I'm so excited that you're hanging out with me today.

So let's get started with really why. So what I want you to do is either pop open something on your computer, take some notes, think about it. I want you to spend some time just thinking about your why. Why do you keep teaching? We don't have a mandatory draft for teachers, [00:09:00] although we might pretty soon, right?

So why did you even get into teaching? Why are you landing in the classroom? Why do you choose to stay in? That's a huge question I'm asking people these days. It's a hard job. It's really, really difficult to be in education. It's difficult to have people who are not educators mandate what you have to do in the classroom.

People who don't have an understanding of child development tell you how to do your job. Everybody has an opinion about education. And my question is, why do you stay? Why do you keep showing up and why did you even choose it in the beginning? So part of my story, I have a bachelor's in education. Uh, I have a teaching degree.

I just never decided to teach. I really enjoyed the clinical side of working with kids and the understanding of the why and what that means. What behavior and all the things that are going on and people ask me all the time, Stacy, how long have you been a therapist? And I say, since I was in middle school, I was the kid people were talking [00:10:00] to about their problems.

I'm the one who's taking my friends to doctor's appointments. Uh, one of my best friends was sexually abused. I was the one who talked to school counselor and we engaged in all the mandatory reporting. All of those experiences happened to me when I was in middle school and high school, and so in many ways, I was destined to do what I'm doing now.

Why are you showing up? The other reason I choose to stay here is because of that sweet spot that happens, right? And I know you know what I'm talking about. That sweet spot when you're working with someone, you're engaged with a kiddo, and all of a sudden the aha happens and you just show up. Get it. You see them get it and you get to witness that and you get to know that you were a part of why these kids are being successful.

So why do you keep teaching? Is it because you're passionate? Is it because you need a job? Is it because it pays well? Is it because you're close to retirement? Is it because you [00:11:00] love the kids and so you navigate some of the politics? Do you enjoy your co workers? Why do you keep showing up? I want you to write that down.

If you feel comfortable typing that, feel free to let us know. We want to know, we want to know what it is and why you feel what you feel.

Now I want you to think about who, who has influenced you. Think of your very favorite teacher of all time. We all have one. Typically we all have a teacher who influenced us that we just, we felt. them seeing us. They saw who we were. Who is your favorite teacher? Think of your worst teacher. Who's the worst teacher you ever had?

I can immediately think of both of mine. Which one are you? That's a tough question. It [00:12:00] requires a little bit of reflection, right? Which teacher are you? Are you the favorite teacher? Are you the worst teacher? Are you somewhere in between? I ask that question because we get to choose, actually. which one we want and which one we are.

Most favorite teachers are really about relationship. We don't always remember what they taught us, but we remember how we felt when we were with them. Same with worse teachers. We remember being shamed. We remember that they didn't care. We remember that they checked out, or they were mean, or hurtful. And we want to know, which one do you want to be?

Who, who is it that you want to be? And who influenced you? Was it a school counselor, or a particular teacher? At what age were you influenced? One of my favorite questions to ask, I don't think I did this in a live session, is to ask, Are you [00:13:00] teaching in the same grade as your favorite teacher was teaching?

Are you connected to that in some way? My favorite teacher was a chemistry teacher I had in high school, super high standards. If you got something wrong, he brought out that red pen, he marked it. It could have easily been, Feeling like a shameful way, but the way he did it was he marked it. He gave it back to you and he said, work as a team to find out the right answer and solve your problems.

You each got different things wrong, work together, and he created this culture of relationship that was really rich and really helped us to achieve some pretty difficult things. I thought that was pretty cool. I also want you to be reflecting on your hardest students. Do your hardest students see you as a favorite teacher or a worst teacher and Why?

Why do they see that? Is there because there's this [00:14:00] disconnect or lack of relationship? Is there this piece that doesn't feel as engaging with those hard students? So I want you to think a little bit about that. I'm going to give you a couple minutes.

All right, let's move on and let's talk about how. Is this a big question? How are you wired? So here's what we know. The five years of life. Right. So all of the foundation of our house is being built really early on. So it's important that we know what our beginning of life story is now. Everything I talked to you about today is also going to apply to your students.

So this is sort of a double training. How does your past impact your teaching, but how does the current development of their students impact their experience in education? Okay. So we want to be looking at how. Is your physiology wired? We [00:15:00] can't fight physiology. So we want to look at our blueprints. Okay, so blueprints are really the house, right?

Like, how did this house get built? We have a foundation, then we have the walls and the structure, then we have the interior decoration. So, academics are really the interior decoration and they don't stick, they don't happen in a way that is really useful and helpful if we don't have a strong foundation and we don't have the structure of the house in place.

And so, what was happening in your development? I'm going to take you through a real quick, super, super duper quick, Deep dive into brain development. So this is Dr. Perry's work. Dr. Perry runs the Child Trauma Academy. He wrote the book, What Happened to You? The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog. I love his theory around the brain because it's super simple.

So this is his brain. The brain was developed from the bottom up, from the inside out. That very bottom part of the brain, that pink box, that is [00:16:00] called your brainstem. And your brainstem develops in utero to nine months old, and so it fully develops by nine months old, and it houses your somatosensory system and your fight flight freeze response.

This is a really critical component to understand in education. Okay, so your sensory system and your fight flight freeze response are connected. They're in the same place in the brain. So what we say about stress response systems is stress response systems are like rubber bands. The more stressed we are, the more stretched we get.

And if we keep on stretching, then eventually we snap. What happens in our students is that when they snap, that's when we see that negative behavior. Behavior is a language and it's teaching us how, how stressed a child is. It's teaching us how stressed our teens are. So the more they stretch, the more stressed they are, the more they stretch, the further they get closer to [00:17:00] snapping.

When we provide ways for them to release that stress, then what we're doing is we're helping them manage some of their sensory system and their fight, flight, freeze response. The best example I use for how this looks is if you have someone in your life who is a veteran or combat veteran, they've been to war, what happens is they get a flashback when they smell something, when they hear something, right?

We talk about firecrackers at 4th of July, that's coming up this week. So we know that when a combat veteran hears those firecrackers, they immediately respond from their brainstem. from their brainstem. They hear the firecracker, they immediately go into that fight, flight, freeze response. They cannot be talked out of that.

This is going to impact you directly. You cannot be talked out of that. And so we know, and they, they as veterans know, like, It's 4th of July. I'm going to talk myself through this. There's nothing to be scared of. I'm not at war. And they [00:18:00] still have a flashback. They still have their stress response system stretched.

So it's really important to know that the sensory system and the fight, flight, freeze response live in the same part of the brain. Next part of the brain to develop is that regulatory piece, and that's responsible for emotional regulation. It develops to midbrain, it develops four to six years old. Next part is your limbic system, and it's responsible for social skills and understanding relationships.

How many of you struggle with students who can't get along at recess, who struggle to change, you know, in the hallways, who don't know how to interact with their peers in an appropriate way? Next That's this part of the brain. And the last part of the brain to develop is your cortex. That's that blue box.

The cortex is fully developed at 25 years old. And I always say it's your worst enemy because you have one and they don't, they don't have a cortex. And so we ask kids all the time, why did you do that? And what do [00:19:00] kids say? Somebody type it in the box. What do kids say? Why did you do that? I don't know. I don't know why I did that.

And then we say, well, you've been doing it for days and weeks and multiple times. Of course, you know, I don't know. Cortex is responsible for critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making. When we ask kids the question why, we expect them to be able to engage in critical thinking, decision making, and problem solving.

When a kid is acting out, a kid is stressed, they cannot grasp their cortex, A, because they're stressed and they're operating from the bottom part of the brain, B, because it's not fully developed. So we have to stop asking why and we have to really understand how that brain development piece works. So why am I talking to you about that in relation to you?

Why is because it's important for you to know how your [00:20:00] brain was wired in your own emotional development. When we look at bottom of the brain up, there's two emotion ways to emotionally regulate humans that help them gain control of their emotions from the bottom up. And from the top down. So bottom up thinking, bottom up regulation is about engaging your sensory system.

We're going to talk more about that. There are certain things that you do in your own life. that 100 percent regulate you from the bottom of the brain up. When you're engaging with students and you're trying to understand their brain and you're asking, why did you do that? What's happening? You're trying to talk them out of behavior.

You are cortexing them, which is exactly what Amanda just said. You're cortexing them. So I say that all the time to my people, right? We cortex humans all the time. There's only one right way to [00:21:00] regulate. students, and that's from the bottom of their brain up. The most effective way to regulate humans, regardless of their development and where they're at in their age, is from the bottom of their brain up.

So when I'm talking to people about really hard stuff, I'm thinking about engaging their sensory system to regulate instead of their cortex. If I can meet them at the sensory level and mark up. Instead of cortexing them and working down, I'm going to get further quicker and I'm going to be able to access the upper part of their brain.

Okay. So how does that affect you? I want you to go back to what was happening in your development. How were you wired? I grew up in a home filled with alcoholism. So I learned early on, you use alcohol to express your feelings. You alcohol when you're happy, alcohol when you're sad, alcohol for anything in between.

That is not an effective way to manage stress. [00:22:00] So what I did as a kid is I read voraciously. I read books to escape some of what was happening in my life. And what I've learned as an adult is that when I am really stressed out and I have a lot on my plate, my rubber band is stretched. If I pick up a book, not a workbook that involves my but a fictional book that I can enjoy that really helps me Check out from a sensory standpoint, when I pick up a book and I read it, I get less stressed.

I'm a better human when I am reading fiction. And the reason that's true for me is because I utilized that when I was a kid. So all these things we've been talking about, teach yourself care, right? You guys are probably want ready to go with all of that. When we think about Teach yourself care. We have to [00:23:00] look at what did you do as a kid to take care of yourself?

Was it useful and healthy or not? Did you spend time outside? Did you swim? Were you involved in sports? Did you hang out with friends? Did you watch TV and movies? What did you do as a child to cope with your own stress? And how can we build that in to your adult? life. What are some strategies and different things that you utilized as a kiddo that can be built in throughout the day in your adult life?

The other thing we want to think about is when we look at bottom up regulation, we look at basic needs. So I've been doing this support group with administrators and one of the administrators is like, how can I support my teachers in the best way? And And he's an elementary teacher and I said, you need to ask them if they've taken a bathroom break today.

And he was like, what? And I said, there are millions [00:24:00] of teachers who don't go to the bathroom during the day. That tells me a couple things. One, they're too busy to go to the bathroom. Two, they're too afraid to leave their classroom to use the bathroom. Three, they're not drinking enough water. and needing to go to the bathroom, which tells me their basic needs aren't being met.

So we want to look at bottom up strategies. How do we engage your sensory system, meet your basic needs throughout the day so that your stress response isn't as stretched? Okay, I want you to be thinking about what was happening in your brain development. As we go through that, we want to think about What triggers us?

Okay, I'm going to pause for a second. Any questions about bottom up regulation, the brain development piece, how you're wired?

Just type it in the chat box. If you have any [00:25:00] questions, thoughts, comments. Very interested in hearing them.

All right, I'm going to keep moving forward. So part of today is talking about those kids that we really, that really trigger us. One of the things I say often is I have a no kill policy. You can't kill them. They can't kill you. No one can kill themselves because when you work with kids for longer than a minute, there comes a time where you just want to string them up by their toenails or like poke them in the eye, right?

Because they hook us. Kids have this beautiful way of just hooking us. And so we want to look at kids who trigger us. Kids who trigger us actually are an opportunity for us to grow because they are tapping into something that we need to address. Okay. So there's a few things I want you to think about.

One, when you're triggered by a [00:26:00] student, who does that student remind you of from your own past? Automatically, every time I ask this question to an educator, they say no one immediately because they're in their cortex. But when you start to sit with that, a lot of times you'll get to the beginning of your life stages and you will identify that this kid reminds you of someone from your past.

Okay, I'm going to give you a couple examples of what that looks like. Who does the student remind you of from your past? When did you have this feeling before? Okay, so if you've ever been to a funeral, a wake, a celebration of life, a lot of times what happens is when we're sitting experiences in the setting, we will be thinking about all the times or all the people that we've lost in our past.

And what's happening is we've opened up the file cabinet of grief. [00:27:00] We've opened up every time we've ever felt that feeling. So there's three parts to a memory. There's a thought, a feeling and a body experience. And when we look at the thoughts that we have, We look at the feelings we have. Those separately don't help us process through something very difficult.

We have to look at where does it live in our body. Okay, I'm gonna take you through an exercise. This is really important. In the meantime, I want you to remember that every time you've ever felt that feeling, if you haven't worked through the thought, feeling, and body experience, then what happens is feeling that feeling of every time you felt that feeling.

So when you have a kid that triggers you and you might immediately feel fear, lack of control, embarrassment, shame, there's all these things that go into what happens when we get triggered, you're feeling that feeling every time you felt that feeling in your back, which sometimes [00:28:00] happens when we have a stronger response to a student than what is warranted for their behavior.

And that is an indication that we have some unprocessed, unacknowledged feelings. Okay. The other question I want you to be asking is, what age did you experience your own hard things in your childhood? I think every person who works with kids or lives with kids should go through the experience of writing down your timeline.

When did really difficult things happen to you? I had a lot of really hard things happen to me when I was eight and when I was 15. So eight year olds tend to be a little bit harder for me to work with and 15 year olds tend to be harder for me. I can manage those a lot better now because I'm bringing it up to consciousness.

I know that those were hard things in my past. Okay. So it's important for you to know when did hard things occur in your life [00:29:00] and acknowledge and work through those hard things so that when you're working with that age of student, you are not going to be as triggered. Okay. So let's talk about where does your body feel your feelings?

Where do things live inside your body? So most of us understand thoughts about an experience, feelings about an experience, but it's really the body experience that's important. Okay. So I want you to just take a deep breath, put both of your feet on the ground, close your eyes if you want to. I want you to just take a deep breath and sink into your body.

Okay.

Just notice what is happening inside your body. Does your body feel tight? Do you have any cramps in your body or any pain anywhere? Take a deep breath.

[00:30:00] Now, I want you to think about A time when you felt sad,

just recall a memory that was sad for you.

Where do you feel that sadness in your body?

Does it have a shape? Does it have a color?

Does it have a size, a weight or a smell?

Just look at that. Get a really good visual of where that sadness lives in your body.

Now I want you to take a deep breath.

Think about a time you felt happy or joyful. [00:31:00] Just recall that happy or joyful memory.

Where does that live in your body? Did it shift? Did it stay? Does that place where you feel that happiness or that joy, does it have a thought or does it have a shape, a color, a size, a weight, or a smell?

Just acknowledge that, notice that, take a deep breath,

open your eyes, come back together when you feel ready.

If you felt sadness inside your body in a specific place, Just give me a thumbs up. [00:32:00] Just put a thumbs up in the chat box. Let's just see what happened. Do we have people that experienced sadness in a certain place in their body? Maybe you felt a shape, a color, a size, a weight, or a smell, or maybe it shifted when you felt happiness.

Did you feel that in your body somewhere? I take you through this for a couple of reasons. One, this is how feelings work. Feelings actually live in our body. The best people on the planet to teach us about feelings are toddlers, because toddlers feel everything right in the moment. They don't push it down.

They don't dissociate and check out from it. They feel it. And that's why they're so stinking hard to parent, right? That's why they're throwing the tantrum in the grocery store. That's why they're saying no all the time. They have these really big feelings and they make humans [00:33:00] feel very uncomfortable because they feel what they feel in the moment.

And it's extremely. body feel. They feel with their whole entire being. What happens over time is we learn that our feelings make people feel uncomfortable. And we have to make our feelings smaller so that it doesn't make the world around us feel uncomfortable. And then some of us grew up in families where feelings were expressed very differently.

So I often say, when we learn to walk, everybody around us is taking one foot in front of the other. Right? We're all learning to walk one foot in front of the other. So all the input that we get is everybody who's walking puts one foot in front of the other. When we learn to express feelings and emotions and all the things that go with that, everybody's all over the gamut.

Some of us grew up in homes where one person, when they felt happy, might have gotten really quiet. Or when someone feels happy, they get really big and loud. Some of us grew up in homes where when somebody gets [00:34:00] angry, they just get silent or they leave and the other person in their home might get really mad and yell and have all sorts of facial expressions.

So when we start to learn how to express feelings, there's so much different input that we're not always expressing our feelings. And what we do is we store them inside and they live inside of us. And so if you had a shape, a color, a size, a smell, or weight when you're feeling sad, that is probably an indication that there are some things for you to just spend some time acknowledging, spend some time thinking about, working through.

Yeah. So much more when divorce is involved. Agreed. Very complicated. And that's part of what my family has gone through is really expressing feelings. How do we navigate? How do we manage teaching kids how to express feelings? So when I work with kids, I will often say, looks like you're having a feeling.

Where do you feel that in your body? [00:35:00] I don't say, how are you feeling? Or what are you feeling? Because those are cortex questions. We don't want to cortex them. I want to know where that feeling lives in their body. And is there a shape of color, size, weight, or smell? You as an adult are probably like, Stacy, that would never work.

That's because you're in your cortex. But when we work with kids and we meet them from the bottom up and we say, where are you feeling that in their body? Kids have all sorts of answers. They'll say. I feel that in my eyelash. I feel that in my elbow. I feel that in my left big toe. The most important example I have is this young man I worked with.

He's eight years old. He's sexually abused by his best friend. He's having all sorts of acting out behavior, both in home and at school. He's aggressive. He's explosive. He's all the things that feel scary. And when they bring him into me, I say, Hey buddy, let's just talk through this. Like, did something really bad happen to you?

You and your best friend had this incident that occurred. It occurred repeatedly. It's happened over and over. Let's just, let's just work through [00:36:00] this. I said, when you think about what happened between you and your best friend, where do you feel that in your body? And he said, I feel a red triangle in my stomach.

Think about that. A red triangle in your stomach. If you're walking around with a red triangle in your stomach, is that comfortable or is that annoying? Does it hurt? I said, okay, that makes sense. And he said, what, and he said, really, really heavy. I said, what happens when you think about the loss of your best friend?

Cause they couldn't be friends anymore. And they've been best friends since childhood, since birth, actually. And he said, when I think about the loss of my best friend. I still feel that red triangle in my stomach, but it's rounded corners and it's really blurry. That gives me so much more to work with. If I asked adults, how do you think a kid feels when they've been sexually abused by their best friend and then they lose their best friend?

The gamut of answers is so big. [00:37:00] They might feel shame, embarrassment, sadness, loss, confusion. There's so many feeling words that are in the cortex that we can access. But when I say to a kid, how do you, where do you feel that in your body? And they say, I have a red triangle in my stomach. I can manage that.

I can say, what do you want to do with that? Do you want to keep it? Do you want to get rid of it? How do we help you with that red triangle in your stomach? How do we help you with the blurry rounded corner triangle in your stomach. So at home, when a kid is acting out, when this kid was acting out and he's having these big behaviors, the parents can say, are you trying to get that red triangle out of your belly?

And he could say, yes. Or can we support you? Is that red triangle there? That is way different and it aligns and it helps us manage, help us, helps us co regulate, right? Help someone back to emotional regulation when we can identify the concreteness, [00:38:00] that sensory experience of feelings. It's really important for you as you go through these three questions.

Who does this student remind you of from your past? Sit with that. See what happens in your body. When you're thinking about the interaction with this student, Think about what you're feeling in your body and think about what else it's connected to from your past. When did you feel this feeling before?

And what age did you experience hard things in your childhood? Those are really important questions to be asking and feeling in your body, like what's going on. Here's the other thing I will say. It's important for you to know how your own sensory system is responsive and reactive. Okay, because typically kids who trigger us.

trigger us because their sensory system is different than our sensory system. So all of us start observing this just in [00:39:00] your life. We engage in pattern repetitive activity to manage our sensory system. What does that look like in a classroom? That looks like a kid who's tapping. Looks like a kid who's moving.

It looks like a kid who's clicking. There are so many sensory things that occur in a classroom. that it's really important for you to look at a child's sensory system and how does it interact with yours. So, I have a huge window of tolerance for people who move. When I do a lot of training and I'm in big groups, I don't really care if people are getting up and they're walking and they're moving and they're doing whatever they do with their body to regulate.

Everybody regulates. At some point during this presentation today, there's You have taken a drink of water, you've eaten something, you've thought about something else, some of you are doodling, some of you are working on something else while you're, while you're listening to this, some of you might be in a rocking chair or in a chair that spins, everybody engages in some sort of [00:40:00] sensory activity when they are learning.

My window of tolerance for people moving is really, really big, but you get a pin and you start clicking it and I'm like twitching. If there's a projector, overhead projector that's super loud, it is really hard for me to tune that out and be able to focus on what I am presenting. I have a cortex! Right?

You don't see me on the ground throwing a temper tantrum, but I am still very aware of the sensory experience I'm having. Kids without the ability to regulate from the bottom down, they're responding to those sensory pieces all the time. So I know that if I have a kiddo in my audience or my classroom that's clicker, I need to work with that kiddo to find a sensory experience, a pattern repetitive activity that can help, that they, that will help regulate them, that I can also [00:41:00] tolerate because we're engaged in a shared experience of learning.

So this is why it's important for you to think about your own learning. Blueprint. Okay. I work with a lot of people who've been through a lot of really hard things. I specialize in trauma, so it's not uncommon for me to, in one day, discuss divorce, suicide, sexual abuse. That could be just a day in the life of Stacey.

Because those are so difficult and it's important for me to stay regulated, water is a huge regulation factor for me. So I have a fountain. I had an office that was by a stream. I could hear water all the time and that is an example of me regulating from the bottom up so that I can stay present and connected to the people I work with.

So I want you to start thinking about your own classroom. What is it? in your classroom that helps regulate you. What dysregulates you? I walk into a lot of classrooms where their wall [00:42:00] face is covered floor to ceiling with something. And I'm like, Oh, that is so overstimulating. And if you're a kid who cannot process and filter everything that's on the wall, you think that kid's hearing a word you have to say?

No way. So start doing some sensory inventory. What feels safe to you? What feels calming to you? Is it safe and calming to the kid that triggers you the most? Or is there something that they may need differently? Meg, I appreciate you sharing that. You have to have windows. Yeah, we want to see outside.

These are the things that help us understand how we're wired. If you're a person who needs to move your body, guess what? There are people in your classroom that need to move their body. It's important we build in that movement. There are millions of humans who every day wake up and go work out before they function and interact with other people.

There are children in our classroom who are going to benefit from working out before they start [00:43:00] school. I have a kid I work with, he ran five miles every morning. If he showed up at school and he hadn't run his five miles, guess what? What? He got to go run his five miles before he went to class because he had a better day.

If people just forced him to start academics before he ran those five miles, he was missing out in the entire day. Okay. Amanda, love that quiet and stillness triggers me. My daughter's the same way. We've written in sensory calming regulation activities into her 504. Part of it is she gets to access earphones to listen to music because the quiet and stillness does not work for her.

There are humans on this planet who listen to music while they write, write their papers. There are humans on this planet who are like, how in the world could you listen to music while you write your papers? So it's important to recognize that our sensory systems are all over, and that's why teaching is so difficult.

Because you have all these creatures with developing sensory systems. They're all different, and we don't quite know what they each need. Okay? Here's the [00:44:00] thing I'll tell you. Regulating from the bottom up. When you use mint, spicy and sour things. You're, when a kid is super dysregulated, you offer them something minty, spicy, or sour, it will chill them out usually right away.

And the reason is because your brain cannot process a huge emotion. anger, grief, really big feelings and a really strong taste at the same time. One of them has to win and it's usually the taste. You will have some kids who are two Altoid kids, right? They need two Altoids and then they'll chill out a little.

It helps release some of that stress. So it's really important we look at our own sensory system. Our body literally keeps the score. If you haven't read the book, The Body Keeps the Score by Kolk, hugely important for the work that we're doing because it talks about how our body stores memory. [00:45:00] If we don't process through it, then guess what?

We are storing it in our body. Okay. We talked about the filing cabinet of memory. I want you to look up implicit versus explicit memory. Okay. That's a really key component. I Call all of our little selves, right? Like we have little selves. Every experience that I've had since conception is stored in my body.

It's really important that I acknowledge and recognize and honor the experiences I had as a kiddo, especially as I'm working through children because, or working with children, because if I don't acknowledge that, And what happens is what I call the train wreck of the unconscious, and you've seen this play out.

If you have spent any time in school, you've seen an adult and a kid interacting in a way where you're kind of wondering who the adult is. Maybe it's been you. When that happens, that means our unconscious has been triggered and our little [00:46:00] self is on board. It is not our present regulated adult self. We don't want the train wreck of the unconscious to happen very often.

So we want to be aware of what is in our past. Okay. And we talked about three parts to a memory, thought, a feeling, and a body experience. So what can we do? Once we understand our own wiring, we can develop a plan to cope with those triggers. Right? When I know that I have really hard days coming up, whatever that looks like, I can get up and I can exercise in the morning.

I can chew on a mint or suck on something really spicy while I'm going through something difficult. I can incorporate and make sure that I'm reading 15 or 20 minutes throughout the day. I can start building in a plan that is for me, right? From the bottom of my brain. I'm a huge fan of nature. I can make sure I spend some time outside and I can connect.

We have to know how to regulate our own [00:47:00] sensory system, okay? We regulate most efficiently when we meet our basic needs. Are we eating? Are we drinking? Are we managing our bodies? Are we moving our bodies? Are we going to the bathroom? Are we engaging in something that feels good? safe and regulating.

Here's the question. When we breathe, oftentimes people are like, Stacey, that's such an obvious question. And I'm sort of like, it might feel obvious, but most people, when they're mostly stretched, they forget to breathe. When you have been called in to assist as an emotional crisis responder in your school, right?

Two people in crisis, you show up, you're going to co regulate, you're going to help talk them down. What we see is that they're holding their breath. So we wanna make sure we teach people how to practice pausing, how to breathe right. We wanna,

we wanna know what our heart rate is. Breathing [00:48:00] is part of that. The number one thing all kids want is control. When we teach kids how to control themselves, they actually are not gonna hijack control from us. So when we are externally, when we're internally feeling out of control, we're going to control anything we can externally.

So the more we teach kids how to control their insides, the less they need to control their outsides. Teaching them how to breathe is a huge piece of that. Teaching them about their body and moving is a piece of that. Teaching them about their heart rate is a piece of that. I love using oximeters and teaching kids that when they breathe, they can control their body.

It's teaching them how to calm their body. Okay. Co regulation is huge. I often ask the question, how many of you have been in a car accident? How many of you had the paramedics show up? When the paramedics showed up, did they say, what the hell were you thinking? You're in a [00:49:00] car accident. You ruined my day.

I have so much paperwork to do. No, they don't say that. They show up. They're calm. They're responding to the scene. They're co regulating you. They're helping you recognize what you've been through and the trauma that you've experienced. That is what we do as educators, as classroom teachers, as administrators.

We show up. And we are emotional crisis responders. Most of us are emotional crisis responders with really, you know, emotional training. And so this is why this kind of class is really important. Because their crisis is actually not your crisis. If you meet them in their crisis, you're becoming part of it.

But if you co regulate, share your calm, help the people that you're co regulating manage their stress, and help the people that you're co regulating manage their stress. You become the co regulator and you de escalate that situation. [00:50:00] I am going to ask you, what questions do you have? So, type in a question.

If you haven't, we have a few more minutes left together. If you have any questions from our time today, I want to know. What are your questions? Let me give you a few minutes, you can type away.

What is your biggest takeaway from today? So let's review. Who's your favorite teacher? Oh, yes, Lori, great, great question. I will type these questions in right now. Please repeat what feelings have. All right. As, okay, so the first question is where do you feel that in your body? What's the color? What's the shape?

What's the size? What's the weight? What's the smell? [00:51:00] And then we ask, What do you want to do with that? Keep it or get rid of it? This is a really important question. We do not want to assume that kids just want to get rid of it or humans want to get rid of it. A lot of times our feelings are connected to loss.

I work with a lot of kids who are adopted. They have a lot of feelings about their birth parents. If I said, get rid of your feelings about your birth parents, kids can't understand that they're not getting rid of the memory of their birth parents. They're getting rid of the feeling. They can't separate that.

So we, if they want to keep it. We ask, how does it live in your body in a safe way? If we say, um, if you want to get rid of it, how do we get rid of it? And we take them through a visual. I do this with all the adults I work with too. They may throw it in the water and it washes down. They may tie it to a balloon and it goes into the air.

Uh, boys are efficient. Boys tend to blow things [00:52:00] up. Or shoot it. That doesn't mean they're antisocial. It just means they're efficient. Girls do a lot of other things. They share it with friends. They talk about it. I have one young lady. She vacuums it. Uh, all sorts of things. And so I think it's so important that we ask that question and then we just allow them to create a visual of what it is that they're storing in their body and how they want to get rid of it.

I am recording this today. So what happens next is I'm going to share this recording with you. If you're on this call or if you registered for this call, once I get the downloaded link, I will share with you. About, uh, I will share the link with you and I'll leave it up for the next month. I'll share the slide deck with you and I will also share a form with you.

So yeah, how I love that. Thank you for reminding me of the word scholars. I didn't use that today. I need to get better at that. Can you speak at how? When dysregulated, scholars leave the room, but when they return the room, [00:53:00] they can escalate again. So a lot of times when you are a classroom teacher and you have a kid that's really dysregulated and they need a break, what happens is you call someone, someone comes and gets the kiddo, right?

We take them for a break and that break can look like a lot of things. I used to be that person. I did a lot of school based mental health, so people would call me in, go in and get the kiddo. I would give them all sorts of positive reinforcing attention, right? Positive. Connected attention. I would offer them something for their basic needs.

Do they need a snack? We would engage in side by side pattern repetitive walking. We might go out and we might swing. We might get a drink of water. They are getting co regulation, okay? They feel like they're ready to go back to class. They go back to class and a couple things happen. One, we didn't co regulate the teacher.

We gotta co regulate the teacher. Two, we may not have done repair between the teacher and the student. Three, we may be putting the kiddo back into an [00:54:00] environment that immediately stresses them and they dysregulate again. And so part of breaking that cycle is figuring out which piece of that we need to look at.

What was triggering the kiddo to begin with? What is disrupting the kiddo? How do we keep them in that setting for a longer time? So sometimes we want to dose regulation proactively. We may want to go get that kiddo before they become disruptive, engage in some regulation strategies, and then put them back in class.

Oftentimes educators will say, but they're missing academics. What about all the other kids? It's not fair. You're right. It's not fair. Also, remember kids who are on grade level and developmentally where they should be can stay in class and manage their business. They don't need the same interventions that other kids need.

They don't need the regular regulation that other kids might need. My third grade, my son's third grade teacher did this beautifully. And an [00:55:00] example of this, they said, so they had two T stools in their classroom, right? T stools are the, the stools that you can rock on. And every week, those two T stools were assigned to kids in the classroom.

So, each week, a different kid got access to the T stool, so they could take turns. However, a kiddo who the T stool had been assigned to, could gift the tea stool to someone else if they needed it more. There's so much in that. One, it causes other kids to look at emotional regulation, right? You're creating a regulating environment.

You're giving kids permission to look at that. Two, it causes kids to have empathy. Wow, that kid's struggling. I bet I have a resource that could really help that kid. What ended up happening is by the end of the school year, the same kid had the tea stool for the rest of the school year. Kids just gifted it to him.

And they agreed as a class, like let's just let him have the tea stool. So I said to my son, I said, was that [00:56:00] fair? And he said, mom, it doesn't matter if it's fair. If the kid needs it more than everyone else, why wouldn't we give it to him? Because that's helping him be successful. And when he's regulated, the rest of us are successful.

I was like blown away by that answer. Third grade, not a fully developed cortex. Remember that your cortex can get in the way of other people. Right? When you start thinking, is it fair? That's you trying to cortex the situation. Regulation is not fair. So when we dose regulation proactively, what we're doing is we're helping the entire class stay regulated.

So we want to look at behavior and we want to look at sensory system and regulation. We want to look at how do we help kids stay regulated for longer periods of time successfully. So, I will leave you with all those beautiful thoughts today. I'm going to send you a recording link, and I want you to know that I'm going to start [00:57:00] doing this every month.

I'm going to be offering these sorts of adventures and workshops, and next month is July. And in July, we're going to talk about the arts. Ups and downs of emotional regulation. We're going to talk about some additional strategies we can use in the classroom, in the home, in the office that help people emotionally regulate.

What I want you to take away from today is you. How does your past impact your future? your teaching. How do you show up? Right? How do you show up in a way that is regulating? How do you deal with yourself when you're dysregulated? What do you know about your past that impacts your teaching? If we're not practicing this, If we're not doing what we ask our students to do, we're not being trauma informed.

If we're not learning appropriate ways to cope with ourselves, working on our stress response systems, we're not doing what we need to be doing. So I so [00:58:00] thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you for your time today. Really appreciate it. Feel free to type one takeaway from today in the box. Happy to do that.

Uh, information on the screen is my contact information. I often say I'm in your life now. Feel free to reach out, drop me an email anytime. Happy to support you along the way. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your time. I'm thankful for you too. I love that our paths have crossed and that we get this opportunity to spend time together.

So also know that you are welcome. Welcome to share this recording with anyone else , in your, your tribe and your family. So feel free to shoot it out when you want to. Um, and I'm so thankful for you spending an hour with me today. Enjoy the rest of your summer. Take care.

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