Building a New Normal: Fostering Resilience in Elementary Students

During the early days of the 2021 school year, I knew this year was different. Many of my students displayed signs of trauma like not speaking up, being reluctant to make eye contact, not wanting to work in groups, and appearing shy and secluded from peers. The first week of school “get to know each other” activities felt strained. The lack of in-person activities during the height of the pandemic had adverse effects on my students. Typically, in fifth grade, my students share many learning activities with peers verbally, building up to our Learning Defenses. These Learning Defenses are an end-of-year culminating experience where our students defend their learning to various administrators in our district, showing they are on the path to “College and Career” readiness. Considering the “withdrawn” behaviors that I observed, I was very concerned my students would have difficulty completing this year-long assignment. To address this issue and offer support, I decided to focus directly on improving social and emotional learning during the daily life of my classroom. Using published and local resources to educate myself, my goal was to enable my students to feel emotionally and physically safe, encouraging confidence and resilience through building a new normal.During the pandemic, many national, state, and local agencies published articles about filling in the gaps and offering support for educators, caretakers, and students. I started with The Prichard Committee’s Innovations in Education: Re-Imagining Education for a Big, Bold Future – Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, which was very helpful in my research. My main takeaways stemmed from the President and CEO, Brigitte Blom saying, “Innovations are being made to help all kids in each school and district, but we must lift up those examples of innovations to create a truly equitable system when we emerge from this difficult time in our nation’s history.” Our students have never faced an educational hurdle such as the pandemic. Kids need to see how life goes on after traumatic events. I plan to show them how to build a new normal that enables their resilience.My research also led me to The US Department of Education, a “Return to School Roadmap.” The road map contains three landmarks:

• Landmarks 1: Prioritize the health and safety of students, schools, personnel, and families.
• Landmark 2: Build school communities, and support students’ social, emotional, and mental health.
• Landmark 3: Accelerate academic achievement.

For Landmark 1, I started with interest inventories, asking students to identify areas of school where they felt physically and emotionally safe. Because of Covid guidelines like social distancing and masking, my students reported feeling physically safe. However, students stated that they felt lonely and did not know where to go when they felt anxious or overwhelmed. Using the information from the interest inventories, I purposefully grouped my students based on their similarities. During the small group peer-to-peer discussions, students answered questions about how to be resilient in specific situations. These discussions about daily struggles and successes built trust among my students. I noticed the students offering to talk more in their small groups. Slowly, I saw this in our whole group instruction, too. My students were making social and emotional gains already.Continuing to Landmark 2, I collaborated with our school district’s Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program and our local high school. The DARE program begins with the School Resource Officer (SRO) teaching students the steps of the DARE Decision Making Model, discussing ways of handling adversity and trauma to make responsible decisions. The model has four steps: define the problem, assess the choices, respond appropriately, and evaluate decisions. Weekly, students would discuss ways to use the DARE Decision-Making Model in real-life situations. Another bonus is that this program helped students feel comfortable with law enforcement agencies in our county. The program ended with a field trip to our local law enforcement offices. Besides giving my students support and strategies they could use in their own lives, the DARE program built a system of support and trust between my students and the community.Continuing to strengthen a sense of community, building our new normal, I invited the students in the Leadership class from our local high school to come and offer mentoring to my students. Many of the high school volunteer students were alumni of my fifth-grade classroom, and it was nice having them come back.The high school students led whole group discussions and small group mentoring. The Leadership class and my current students worked collaboratively on many activities for the betterment of our school. For example, they made kindness cards for a local nursing home to celebrate Kindness Day.The collaboration continued with the high school students and my 5th graders working together to make a public relations video for Central Elementary School. The end product was amazing. I feel very proud of how the video visualized my school’s equitable environment. This video was used on our school’s various social media accounts as community outreach.It’s notable that through our collaborations, the high school students volunteered for other projects at my school. They created a memorial hallway to remember a special instructional assistant who lost her life to COVID. Also, they created a food pantry for the community, and then my students brought food to put into the box. The positive impact the high school students had on my students was life changing. My students began to think of other ways they could make a difference in their community by developing empathy. More importantly, students began to display improved social and emotional behaviors in my class. They offered to share more openly and worked in various groups with more engagement. At one point, volunteers were needed to work with a third-grade classroom, and many of my fifth-grade students volunteered. Seeing my students strengthen their social and emotional skills to not only help themselves but to help others made me realize I was meeting my goals of building resilience and addressing the trauma of the last two years.It was now time to look at Landmark 3. To continue building Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) behaviors in my fifth-grade students, I assigned a project-based learning (PBL) assignment. Embedding many academic standards, I posed the driving question, “How can we inform our community about severe weather safety precautions?” Western Kentucky faced a life-threatening tornado on December 10, 2021. Two of my students lost their homes, and many were without power and water for weeks.I’ll be honest, this experience was so fresh for us that I wasn’t sure my students could emotionally handle the topic. However, seeing their improvement over the previous months, I went for it. My students embraced this assignment wholeheartedly. They had lived through the danger of the December 10th tornado. They wanted to help others be safe the next time a storm like this occurred. Collaborating with our local emergency management directors and TV weather news team, they worked to make public service announcements about weather safety. The PBL was a great success: my students learned academically, and they felt good about the positive work they had done for their friends and families, healing some of their own trauma from the tornado.Nearing the end of the year, it was time for our Learning Defenses, empowering students to display growth from the school year. I knew my students had improved their overall social and emotional health. Nonetheless, I was nervous for them. They had grown confident with me in the classroom, but I was unsure how they would respond in front of others. My students delivered their Learning Defenses beautifully. I was proud of how they developed and improved their social behaviors throughout the school year. They were confident as they described all they had learned this year, the challenges they had faced, and the strategies they had learned to help them in the future. My heart burst with pride seeing how they had grown with resilience as we built our new normal.