Helping Educators Support Children Through Grief

Educators are often on the front lines of children’s grief, but few receive training on how to support students through loss and other major life changes. In this episode, host David Hermanovitch speaks with Keisha M. Wint from the Binghamton University College of Community and Public Affairs about her research on the “Helping Children with Loss” program, how it equips teachers to both examine their own experiences with grief and better support young children. They explore the many forms grief can take, as well as the importance of “helping the helpers."

Transcript

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Cold Open

Keisha Wint 0:00

Educators are often the first adult a grieving child sees each day, but what we found is that many never receive training in this area.

David Hermanovitch 0:09

What do you mean?

Keisha Wint 0:10

It goes beyond just the loss of a loved one. Moving, an illness in the family, many things can impact the child's day-to-day life. Schools can be one of the few places of stability and continuity for children, and equipping educators can help them adjust.

Intro

David Hermanovitch 0:47

I'm David Hermanovitch, and this is The Aha! Moment presented by Binghamton University. Thanks for joining us today. I'm joined today by Keisha M. Wint, and she's an assistant professor of the University's College of Community and Public Affairs. And I have her on because we're gonna be talking about something that's very pertinent with back to school season starting, and that's educators, obviously. They see our kids just almost almost as much, sometimes more so uh than parents do. And something that people might not realize is they uh have the opportunity to help children not just learn but to process any form of grief that happens in their life. But we're looking at their uh abilities to do it, their training to do it, and uh what they feel are the barriers um in doing so. And Keisha studied this extensively through uh a research paper, and she's gonna be she's joining us today to talk about it. So thanks for thanks for coming on the show.

Keisha Wint 1:36

Thanks for having me. I appreciate being here, David.

David Hermanovitch 1:38

So tell us a little bit about the study itself, not just how many educators uh you worked with through this program to um help train them on helping students process grief and things of that nature. But what was the impetus, like for you personally, what caused you to want to study this in particular?

Keisha Wint 2:00

Yeah, that's a great question, David. I think for me, there'd been kind of this intersection of both personal and professional experiences. So personally, of course, my own journey with grief and loss, but professionally I've been an educator for 20 plus years. I always left I start when I was 12. But um, and seeing the the reality of how educators struggle with having conversations with children, specifically very young children, around grief and loss. And uh that also timed up with COVID, with our our global pandemic and that experience. And so the combination and the intersection of all three of these um journeys kind of came together and sparked and presented an opportunity for me to explore this.

David Hermanovitch 2:49

And so there was a large group of a couple, I believe it was a couple dozen educators who went through this Grief Recovery Institute as part of this study. Tell us a little bit about what that entailed as they were, as they were going through it, and then also for you as you were, you know, working to uh come to conclusions through this research.

Keisha Wint 3:09

Well, thanks. Yeah. So the program I had been exposed to with the Grief Recovery Institute on a personal level, and through that new knowledge, so I'd been a social worker for many years, a clinical social worker for in at that point going on 20 years, and hadn't really come across a program that provided instruction and support for the adults, not necessarily thinking about direct service to children. And my work in schools uh and seeing a lots of educators struggle, and initially there's often in schools sometimes been this reality of like silence, like we don't acknowledge, we don't say anything. So when this opportunity came up, we had the educators uh come in, we recruited district wide. This was a large urban district in the northeast section of the United States, and we recruited district-wide. Uh, several educators were on board, but it was during the summer, and so we ended up with approximately 26 educators who said, yes, I'm up for this. I want to go through this four-week program during their summer to learn about how to have conversations with younger children. At this point, it was specifically children enrolled in a state-funded preschool program around grief and loss. And what was interesting about that was the timing where we were just coming off of our first year of full instructions after the COVID-19 pandemic and schools had been shut down. So there had been a lot of conversation around what do we say to young children and how do we have conversations in a way that is honoring of their developmental stage, but also what educators were comfortable with, because it's not something that's generally talked about or discussed.

David Hermanovitch 4:53

So, what sort of things did they experience as they were going through uh as they were going through the the Grief Recovery Institute?

Keisha Wint 5:00

So the program uh that's uh from the Grief Recovery Institute is called Helping Children with Loss, and this is a four-week program. It's usually done in person or online, and they go through four weeks of really interrogating their own ideas about grief and loss. And for me, when I walked through it, I'll speak for myself, there was this kind of pulling back the curtain on ideas or thoughts that I've always just assumed were to be so, or even sayings that we have, things like, you know, this person is in a better place, or, you know, just sayings or or mindsets that we have with regard to what to say and what to do. So they interrogate that first and foremost. And then they also, I think, learn a lot about what more to how to be rather than what to say. I think oftentimes as a society we're very focused on, what do I say and what do I do? But what I learned from this program, speaking personally, was that it's more about a how to be and how to come alongside, how to acknowledge, how to support and be willing to listen without criticism, analysis, or judgment. So that's something that they walk through in the program. So they go through first learning, there's reading, there's large group and small group conversations that happen, and then they also are really a support for each other as well as educators are walking through these small group trainings. They learn to lean on each other, to learn from each other's ways of expression, and also recognize that they're not alone in their experience of struggling with feeling inadequate about how to talk with children because it's not something that any of us really learn in our professional training. Even as a social worker, we have limited training in that, and I know that educators don't receive any in their pre-service training.

The Aha! Moment

David Hermanovitch 7:02

So looking at the before they took the course and then comparing it to after they took the course, what were some of the things that you uh found to be the most surprising or something that you did not realize was the case?

Keisha Wint 7:17

Yeah, there were a couple. So one I would say, and and this wasn't perhaps as surprising, but the reality that we often solely associate grief with death, and that there are so many other experiences that we as human beings face that are losses that result that can result in grief. And these are anything from changes such as moving and you know, a divorce or a separation in a family, as well as some of the unlikely ones where, or I would say, experiences where people have a sense of shame. Um, there's mental health concerns, and someone is no longer in the home as a result, or someone has been incarcerated, and that's a significant loss for our family or multiple family members, but we don't ever really hold space to have conversations about that because so much of our conversation and our effort and support is focused on death-related loss. So holding space for that and acknowledging that, I think a lot of educators walked away with this aha moment for themselves. Like, yeah, I need to acknowledge this as a potential area of grief and loss for children as well. And I think the second piece that I get chills, I'm getting chills now every time I think about it, but just the reality that our focus, at least mine going in, was so much about let's do this to help the children, let's do this to help the children, but we didn't focus or think about what the experiences were of the educators. And so as we attended and learned from these sessions they were walking through, we learned that educators themselves were having so many lost experiences and so many experiences of grief. And, you know, we can't expect them to be able to care for and support and nurture children through their own experiences when we're forgetting about their needs as well. And so I think it was a big aha moment for me to say, hey, what are who's helping the helpers? Who is here providing support and helping to equip? And that that showed up in our follow-up. We were able to follow up with some of the educators about what they what things have been like, what experiences have been like post-participation? And some of that was that, yeah, we we realized that this is not a space that we are normally in and that we need more of this kind of support.

David Hermanovitch 9:46

Did you notice that there's possibly whether or not there was like a uh a spectrum of like what educators felt comfortable um talking about and helping students with? Like, for instance, um, is uh an educ an educator more likely to be hesitant to work with a student on processing uh the death of a loved one versus uh like a general anxiety thing? Is it does that kind of live on a spectrum or would it seem pretty even in terms of what what things uh educators had apprehension of uh addressing?

Keisha Wint 10:22

I think all of it can be challenging depending on where who you are and your own ideas and upbringing. And so that's why a program like helping children with loss creates an opportunity for us to pause and reflect on like what are my beliefs around grief and loss and where did these even come from? And how can I start to interrogate some of this with new knowledge and new ideas about how to respond? And even things like if I need to cry, I'm going off into a corner and doing that alone, or the thing the the euphemisms that we're brought up saying uh to each other and even to children, like you know, to be strong. And so interrogating some of those ideas and some of those ways that we respond, and even these ideas of we have to do so much, but maybe sometimes it's really about a posture of being and being open to listening and creating space for children to want to talk and share.

David Hermanovitch 11:24

What do you hope is the potential future application of this research, rather either either by you or by um anybody else, any entity, organization? What what do you what do you what is your big hope for the future of this research and how it's applied?

Keisha Wint 11:41

My big hope is that certainly children can be supported and that schools can be a place of care and connection and acknowledgement. Like so much of what we talk about around this is even being able to acknowledge, you don't necessarily have to have the right words, quote unquote, whatever those are, but being able to acknowledge that yes, this happened. David, you you know, you lost your dog. I'm sorry to hear your dog die, heaven forbid, but you know, just that this this significant change happened or you moved, and that must be challenging. So being able to acknowledge that, that there could be hopefully more opportunities to acknowledge and that educators can have a space themselves where they can feel supported and heard and connected. I know that there are there is a movement towards creating more policy around helping uh schools in general be able to acknowledge grief and loss in some states. Um, New Jersey is one of them that recently passed a bill where uh instruction around grief and loss is mandated for grades eight through twelve, I believe, through this bill. And so having opportunities for us to be able to acknowledge it in schools, education can be a great equalizer, right? So I might come from a family that's under-resourced in different ways, but when I come to school, I have access to great educators who can support me. And so I hope that going forward there could be more conversation around how schools can come alongside because our role, I think, as educators overall is to help prepare children and families. We death, loss, change, transition is a part of life, and it's not ideal to think about how do we not talk about it or have a sense of silence or shame, but being able to elevate these conversations and hopefully

Parting thoughts

Keisha Wint 13:39

help others find a way to navigate and to feel free to express.

Speaker 1 14:03

So if there’s one thing that I take away from the research, it's that there's plenty of different types of grief that a student might need help with. But there's also a lot of educators who they themselves might need a little bit of help to process their own grief before they can help those who are more vulnerable than them. Um Keisha, I'm gonna give you a parting thought. What's uh what's one thing that you want people to take away from this?

Keisha Wint 14:19

I hope people take away this idea that schools can be a source of healing, connection, and support around education for sure, but certainly around challenges such as grief and loss.

David Hermanovitch 14:34

Thank you. That was Keisha M. Wint, assistant professor of the Binghamton University College of Community and Public Affairs. I'm David Hermanovitch, and this has been The Aha! Moment presented by Binghamton University. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next month. The Aha! Moment is a Binghamton University podcast. Listen on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.