Building Resilience After Classroom Trauma in Classrooms
American Psychological Association defined resilience as the process of adapting well when confronting adversity, trauma, threat, or sources of stress. Studying how resilience could be built after classroom trauma is significant because it helps children to recover from traumas, which, on some occasions, can lower the likelihood of developing severe psychological disorders in adulthood.
Creating a comfortable classroom atmosphere
Optimism and self-efficacy can be cultivated in groups. Using this theory in curing students of traumatic experiences, teachers can create a comfortable class atmosphere in which students’ individualized needs can be heard and considered. By increasing the bond between classroom members and teachers, teachers can help students to regain a sense of security. In the encouragement of group discussion, teachers can educate students about a perception of the world and lead them to a more reliable perception of self, which contributes to the building of self-efficacy and resilience.
Developing a growth mindset
People with a growth mindset are tempted to think that personality traits can be altered through an individual’s endeavor. When they fail, they recognize failure as an opportunity for future development. On the contrary, people with a fixed mindset think that characteristics can hardly be changed, meaning that individuals are determined to have a limited amount of ability, which they can do little to improve. So, they tend to believe that it is their own incompetence that results in failure, and they can almost do nothing to change.
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In this case, students will think that it was purely their own fault that made them feel bad and suffer. Therefore, if teachers want to help students building of resilience and recovery from trauma, it is necessary for them to teach students to analyze daily troubles from a positive perspective so that students can practice their uses of a growth mindset.
Facilitating expression of emotions
To recover from trauma, students need to directly confront the trauma itself. More importantly, they need to understand their true feeling and recognize their emotions, whether they are distressed, depressed, anxious, or angry. According to Berson, teachers can introduce the vocabulary of feelings. Consequently, students can verbalize their emotions to achieve personal catharsis.
Teachers should also teach students to manage their anger and distress, or else students’ pain might be triggered again while expressing their emotions. In this comfortable surrounding, teachers should also provide consistent messages that recognize students’ worthiness and safety, allowing students to form positive schemas. Altogether, it is promising that students can learn to recognize and control their emotions after all of these exercises.
Connecting to larger community
Looking at the larger picture, schools should also maintain rapid communication with students’ parents. Working with students’ parents and local communities, and schools and offering volunteer activities for students who suffered from traumas. By engaging in these voluntary charities and helping others in need in the community, students can acknowledge their competence to help others as well as help themselves out of traumatic experiences.
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