Most of the 3rd-graders in Anita Parameswaran’s class at Daniel Webster Elementary in San Francisco have had experiences so awful that their brains won’t let them easily forget.
“Whether it be that they’ve been sexually molested, or they’ve seen domestic violence, or shootings, or they know somebody who’s passed away,” Parameswaran said, “I would say every single year about 75 percent, give or take, come in with a lot of trauma.”
Now a national campaign is recognizing, backed by research on brain development, the power of teachers like Parameswaran to lower the levels of stress hormones in a child’s body and strengthen the neural connections needed for learning and self-control. The campaign, called Changing Minds and launched last month, is a partnership of the U.S. Department of Justice, the nonprofit group Futures Without Violence and the Ad Council, a nonprofit agency that creates public service advertisements.
The campaign is not meant to suggest that teachers and school staff must carry the entire burden of healing traumatized children, said Joyce Dorado, director of UC San Francisco’s Healthy Environments and Response to Trauma in Schools, or HEARTS, program and a consultant for the Changing Minds campaign. Instead, Changing Minds aims to provide information to make it easier for teachers to have “calm, compassionate and empowering” interactions with students who have experienced trauma, and to encourage schools to become supportive places for everyone, including staff.
“The message to teachers is that we care about how stressful this is for you,” Dorado said. Teacher supports have “a very clear focus on addressing stress, burnout and trauma in educators,” she said. “It’s an invitation to teachers to take better care of themselves and each other.”
With repeated exposure to violence, children’s developing brains grow strong neural connections to regions associated with impulsiveness and anxiety, and weaker connections to regions that control behavior and planning, according to research cited by Changing Minds. Elevated levels of stress hormones disrupt the brain’s ability to process memories, which can lead to thoughts that are intrusive or deeply suppressed, according to a 2012 research review published in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
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