Work Through Racial Stress

make sure this doesn’t happen again.” By placing value on the impact or outcome, you are communicating that even “good” people can make mistakes. This allows teachers to reinforce the importance of working together as a community to reduce the number of mistakes we make.

» Try role-playing—Students in grades K–2 respond well to puppet plays and other role-playing activities, where the focus and attention shift briefly away from them. This allows them to act as problem solvers, to “help” the puppets work through their problems, and to practice scripts they can then use with each other when necessary. Choose two puppets that are similar. Have the student act out a scenario where they make fun of another puppet for being different or not like them. Ask your students to name what’s happening (read the conflict), making sure to name bias and prejudice if the students don’t, and ask them what the puppets should do to resolve the conflict. Young students will often talk directly to the puppets in earnest, even if afterward they say that they knew “those were just puppets.”

Reach Out to Families

Let families know right away when something happens, and be transparent about how you dealt with it in the classroom. If the incident involves a clear victim, as the one on the playground did, reach out separately to those families to gather their feedback about what they hope will happen in resolving the incident.

Looking back, I wish we had held a mandatory meeting after the playground incident. Bringing everyone together to address what happened would have been a powerful opportunity to read, recast, and resolve. As I discovered later in my own research, parents of color at my school had reason to be concerned that White parents weren’t necessarily going to have conversations about what happened on the playground at home.

Work Through Racial Stress

Building competency for working through racial stress is different from teaching math or reading. When students or adults make mistakes or say something insensitive, the impact can potentially be harmful; that’s much less likely in conversations about academics. So, how can teachers proceed with care and sensitivity toward

classroom and family communities? And what are some helpful ways to manage and work through racial stress when it arises?

As we look at three strategies in the following sections, remember that maintaining a goal-centered approach is helpful. Teachers’ top priority should be to achieve greater competency, shared understanding, and more unified communities. With these goals in mind, what are some specific ways teachers can build competency for themselves and support students and families in doing the same?

The Growth Mindset and Cultural Competence

First, teachers can adopt a growth mindset to supporting students in becoming culturally competent. Carol Dweck (2017), psychology professor at Stanford and leading researcher on motivation and mindsets, is well known for her work on growth mindset. Put simply, a growth mindset is the “belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts” (Dweck, 2017, p. 7). By contrast, students with fixed mindsets think their intelligence and abilities are inherent traits, “carved in stone” (Dweck, 2017, p. 7). In the classroom, fixed mindset comments sound like, “I just know that because I’m good at math,” or “I’ll never be able to draw because I’m a bad artist.”

To support students in moving from fixed mindset to growth mindset, teachers should demonstrate that while students’ outcomes and achievement matter, they’re more concerned with students’ making the effort to learn and engage in the process of continual growth. According to growth mindset theory, rather than giving general praise by saying things like, “Good job!” or “That was really smart!” teachers should praise students’ efforts and engage in conversations about the thinking behind the work (Dweck, 2017). This could sound like, “I can tell you spent a lot of time on that,” or “I’m curious to know about your approach to this problem.”

Many schools and classrooms have adopted the growth mindset approach to teaching academics. When it comes to areas of cultural competence, though, teachers tend to slip back into a belief that basic qualities are fixed traits (Lee, 2015). Because we have a collective experience of being uncomfortable about racism, it’s easy to forget that the discomfort and challenges are invitations to growth and development.

Embracing the growth mindset in our work around identity, inclusion, and cultural competence has the potential to improve our experience because, just like in academic areas, we will begin to pay attention to development and effort over performance and results. This has powerful ramifications for the classroom and

for including families in the learning. As one parent told me, “It helps to know my mistakes don’t mean I’m a bad person.” Consider the following examples of how to shift your language to reflect growth mindset rather than fixed mindset. • “I’m uncomfortable—I must be learning” versus “I’m not good at this” • “Mistakes are inevitable—I’ll try a different way next time” versus “I didn’t get it right the first time” • “This requires regular practice” versus “I’ve already had this conversation”

Shifting from fixed mindset to growth mindset takes time and practice, but the benefits are well worth the effort.

The Pit and Learning Challenges

In addition to encouraging students to adopt a growth mindset, teachers can help them work through racial stress by fostering what James Nottingham calls learning challenges. James Nottingham (2017), cofounder and director of Challenging Learning, strives to encourage “learners to investigate contradictions and uncertainties so that they might more deeply understand what it is they are thinking about” (p. 1).

One strategy Nottingham (2017) uses is called the pit. Students are in the pit when they have a set of unresolved, contradictory ideas about something they are trying to understand—when learning feels hard. To help students build resilience and stay engaged, teachers encourage students to be in the pit, where they are having multiple ideas at once and thinking deeply about them. The goal is not to get the right answer but to pursue deeper understanding and engagement. To get students into the pit, Nottingham (2017) recommends creating learning challenges—activities and discussions that create a state of cognitive conflict, in order to make the learning more challenging and thought-provoking.

Students have a keen sense of justice and are often adamant that everything should be fair. This leads to plenty of opportunities for learning challenge conversations with them. Consider the following examples. • Is it fair that every president of the United States, except for one, has been a White man?

• Is it fair that most students in the United States learn about

Columbus but don’t learn about the many Indigenous tribes that lived on North American land long before Columbus arrived?

• Is it fair that some students have access to their own personal computers or to online learning while others do not?

The list could go on and on. Young students have conversations about fairness with each other constantly and are often eager to participate in teacher-facilitated discussions. Nottingham (2017) writes: The Learning Challenge relies on high quality dialogue. At its best, dialogue is one of the best vehicles for learning how to think, how to be reasonable, how to make moral decisions and how to understand another person’s point of view. It is supremely flexible, instructional, collaborative, and rigorous. Done well, dialogue is one of the best ways for participants to learn good habits of thinking. (p. 9)

Importantly, as with any dialogue, learning challenges only work when students have a basic, shared understanding of the concepts they are discussing. While all learning challenges are necessarily complex, those that arise around race and racism can elicit stressful reactions that block dialogue and end discussions. To support students in staying engaged, teachers can provide clear guidelines and parameters to these discussions, such as community agreements, definitions of commonly used terms, and strategies to manage stress.

Racial Recasting

Managing racial stress isn’t just for students; teachers need to actively practice the skills to be ready to respond to situations that arise in the classroom and to model the behaviors for their students. Misinformed statements and difficult questions from young children can bring about racial stress for teachers or can make you feel as if you’ve lost your words.

Howard Stevenson’s (2014) racial recasting strategy of calculate, locate, communicate, breathe, and exhale is an excellent tool to lean on in such moments. What might it look like to apply it to your competency building as a teacher? • Calculate the level of stress you are feeling. • Locate it in your body. • Communicate about this stress to yourself. Recognize any self-talk you are doing during the experience, and work toward shifting from negative (“I can’t do this”) to positive (“I can work through this”) self-talk.

• Breathe deeply for the span of three full breaths, putting your full attention on each inhale. This can help you calm your senses and ground yourself in the present moment. • Exhale through another round of three full breaths, focusing on the exhale. Practice letting go of the places in your body where you are holding stress.

It may also help to have scripts at the ready. For example, “What you just said is important, and we need to talk about it more. I care about this topic, and I want to answer you with the best information I can find. Let me do some research and get back to you.” When I say this to my five- and six-year-old students, they often nod gravely, appreciative of the fact that an adult is taking their ideas and questions seriously.

With guidance and support from their teachers, students as young as five and six can apply these strategies as well. • Calculate: Invite students to use their fingers to show their level of discomfort or stress on a scale of 1–10.

• Locate: Ask students to rest a hand on the place in their body where they are feeling this stress. • Communicate: Instruct students to talk about this stress with you. Together, work to shift from negative (“I can’t do this”) to positive (“I can work through this”) self-talk. • Breathe and Exhale: Ask students to close their eyes, take three deep breaths, and focus completely on their breath; first the inhale and then the exhale. Tell students that the act of focusing on their breath helps to calm their bodies and reset their attention and focus.

Looking back at that moment with my daughter on the couch reading Harlem’s Little Blackbird, I realize I had some strategies at the ready: I took a deep breath, I gave myself time, I engaged in positive self-talk (“You can do this even though it’s hard”). The look on my daughter’s face, like she was truly confused and connecting dots all at the same time, helped me stay focused on the goal of the conversation. It was my job to let her know that I am her ally and her support, and as her White mother, I will always fight against injustice and racism.