Episode Transcript
Kate: Hi everyone, and welcome to the Teaching with CLASS podcast, the podcast that gives you quick, actionable tips to easily implement in your classroom. I'm your host, Kate Cline.
In today's episode, we're going to talk about the role of emotional intelligence in being responsive to children's needs for emotional support. We will specifically touch on the topic of adverse childhood experiences, their impact on Black children, and our role as educators in providing emotionally supportive environments for them.
We're joined today by LeTosha White. LeTosha has worn many hats during her career in early childhood education. As an educator, a center director, an instructional coach, and a PD facilitator, LeTosha is also currently the vice president of the Chicago affiliate of the Black Child Development Institute. So she has a lot of important and impactful information to share with us today. Let's get started.
Kate: Hi, Tosha. Welcome to the podcast. This is going to be a really exciting conversation today. I'm excited for it.
We are going to spend some time talking, thinking together about emotional intelligence and emotional support for children. We want to specifically carve out some time to think about adverse childhood experiences, their impact on black children, and the environments that we provide in classrooms to be particularly supportive for black children. This is a really exciting conversation to have, one that's sorely needed, honestly.
LeTosha: And one of my favorite things to talk about.
Kate: Before we dive into the topic, I always like to find out from the guests, what's the pull for you to this topic? How do you connect personally with this topic?
LeTosha: Well, I lived it, so it's very dear to my heart. I also have family and friends who have also lived through ACEs (adverse childhood experiences). It's something that I'm very familiar with. I know that if we have more awareness surrounding it, of course the people are going to do what they do, which is we nurture and make things better. I'm excited to talk about it.
Kate: It's a challenging topic. It's real stuff. We're talking about real people in real situations. And these are children that are in our classrooms every day, and adults who have maybe experienced their own things that are caring for these children also. It's a big topic.
Tell us a little bit about yourself, what you've done in your journey, and what brings you here to talk to us from this expert's perspective today?
LeTosha: In my journey, I've done so much. But professionally, I have been a coach and a trainer, an educator. Right now I am currently the vice president of Black Child Development Institute Chicago, which is an organization that advocates for black children and their families, giving them the resources and being in policy in places where they can't be themselves to represent their voices and concerns. So this is right up my alley.
Kate: This is awesome. Let's frame the conversation a little bit today. We're going to talk about some technical things—emotional intelligence and adverse child experiences, things like that. Let's make sure everybody's on the same page and define some of these terms. Let’s start with emotional intelligence.
LeTosha: I think that probably Dr. Bradberry described emotional intelligence the best for me. He said that emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize and understand emotions within yourself and others, but also your ability to use that awareness to then manage your behavior and your relationships. When we're thinking about emotional intelligence, I like to use that definition.
Kate: So it's both. It's an awareness, but it's an action aspect also. It's putting in, like I'm aware of things that are happening within me, around me, I can tell, and then I use that to inform.
LeTosha: There are five skill sets within emotional intelligence. Without opening the Pandora's box on brain science, it's just self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. All of that is within emotional intelligence.
Kate: We definitely know that if we're going to provide an emotionally supportive classroom environment, those are skills that we need as educators for sure.
LeTosha: Well, emotional intelligence, remember a while ago, it used to be like a soft skill, remember? It was like a soft skill. And now it's really considered a predictor of career success and adaptability. It's something that employers are looking for when you go in to get a job.
Kate: Yeah, it's not just a nice-to-have, it's a need-to-have for sure. Let’s also get our definition of adverse child experiences. How do we want to remember that today?
LeTosha: Okay, ACEs, adverse childhood experiences. I learned about ACEs through Dr. Nadine Burke Harris. She's California's Surgeon General. She said that adverse childhood experiences is the single greatest threat to our nation, which of course, I perked up. Like, what is this about?
Her work is essentially centered in research done by the CDC that proved that there are 10 major stressors of early adversity. They range from abuse and neglect or living with a family member with substance abuse, poverty, racism and discrimination. Those stressors impact both the mental and the physical health of adults later in their life. So, big thing.
Kate: These things that may have happened in our lives when we were children affecting us, and then the children we work with, things that are currently happening or have happened to them in their lives up to that point, is likely to affect them in the future also.
LeTosha: Mentally and physically though, like higher blood pressure, diabetes, those types of things. It's huge in a way. I was so interested in that work and just dove into it. Again, this is why I'm here today to talk about it.
Kate: Where should we start? We also said educator sensitivity, just being aware of and responsive to children in the classroom and making sure their needs are getting met. I'm thinking about this from that educator perspective of where do I start? How should I be aware? What am I looking for? There are a ton of questions going through my mind right now. Where can you give us a good place, a good jumping off-point if we want to be thinking about this?
LeTosha: Start with self-awareness. Teachers often were teaching emotional intelligence to children, and sometimes not as emotionally intelligent as we believe we are.
Self-awareness is the most important skill set in emotional intelligence because that's really about knowing your triggers. If you've ever been in a classroom like I have, where a teacher had an intense stare down with a toddler because she was really triggered about it and they escalate those minor toddler things or kid things to something that it's not, it makes me think what is it that's truly triggering, and are you aware of this. Or is this a pattern that you're unaware of?
Self-awareness is really the biggest piece of teacher sensitivity to me, and also empathy, of course, understanding what other children or their families might be going through.
Kate: So how can I build myself self-awareness? It's such a touchy or tricky thing where I'm in that moment or approaching a moment, things happen out of the blue. Children are really unpredictable little beings. What am I on the lookout for and what do I do next?
LeTosha: Well, I think that the pause is a great place to start. If a certain behavior is aggravating or causing you to feel some kind of way, because that's what happens often, you feel some kind of way, then you have to know that that's a trigger and have to look deeper. We have to be more introspective. Why am I feeling this way?
Is there a cause behind this? What are my options right now? Can I pause and just stop and not address it? Can I get to it later? Can I circle back to it? The pause is such a great place to start because it allows us to be introspective and to figure out what's really going on here.
Kate: Right, because if you're feeling some way, that pause helps you get to a moment to think. Instead of just blaming and reacting to this child, that they're doing something that's making me feel some kind of way, and then I just lash out, and then it just escalates for both of us.
LeTosha: And also what really happened here. Let me figure it out. Let me truly be here in this place and figure out what happened, instead of having that jerk reaction to what else could be going on here. The calls and going deeper are really key to emotional intelligence with teachers.
Awareness is also a big piece of understanding the children that are within your classroom and really knowing them very well. I remember back in the day—I'm old; I'm telling my age now—when teachers would actually pick up the phone and talk to parents. Now, we have all these apps and texts and all of those things. But they knew what was going on in the community and with the families, if the family was going through something or things such as that.
Now we are very electronic, heavy on text messages and apps and things such as that. But the pause allows you to think about all those mitigating factors that might need to be considered.
Kate What else might be going on for this child? What else might be going on for me right now? Yeah, all of those things.
Then the other thing you mentioned was empathy, Honestly, you get to be an adult, you’re supposed to have empathy. You’re supposed to have made that leap of understanding that other people have feelings and experiences in life and things like that.
But we tend to not always empathize with children. We don't always look at what's going on for the child in this moment and things like that. What did they think from there? What are they getting in this experience in this moment? Let's just talk about empathy for a few minutes. What else would you want to say about that?
LeTosha: Well, I think at the very core of empathy is understanding people's emotional makeup, what they're going through, what they've experienced, understanding even if you're not in that situation or haven't experienced it, understanding that this is a very real thing. Kids are little people, so they have emotions and they have responses.
Reactions, I think allowing us to put ourselves in the place of children can be very helpful. Oftentimes, I am told that I have a childlike curiosity because I always want to know how everyone feels and what's behind that, and I think we could use a little bit more of that. Be curious, like what's going on with you? What's happening here?
Kate: Yeah, like this idea that children have expectations. They have needs. They're coming into a classroom thinking today's going to be a certain kind of way. They've got something they want to play with that somebody else is taking, whatever. Or they're fearful at nap time. They're lonely for a person at home that cares for them. They have these things they're experiencing.
LeTosha: Absolutely. They have those experiences. I think as we're talking about teachers' sensitivity, which is one of my favorites for the CLASS measures, I love how teachers' sensitivity kind of goes in order. First, you have to be aware. If you're not aware, which we just talked about awareness, there's no way you can respond.
After that, we are addressing the problem, and then we have that student comfort. All goes in order, but it starts with the awareness. You're aware that children have needs. They have expectations. They have feelings. Their feelings get hurt. They have excitement.
And then being able to respond and address those emotions appropriately and contingently is really important in order to get to that space where you have to address the problem, and then you have that student comfort-ridden, feeling free to take risks and feeling free to participate. I love that it's made that way in the tool. That's exactly how it goes.
Kate: And what we're adding is this layer of responsive awareness, rather, is more than just I'm noticing what's going on in the classroom. But I'm also internally aware and using my emotional intelligence, of my awareness of myself and my environment and what's happening, my awareness of other people. And then that empathy is woven in in that responsiveness, so all of these things are augmenting our understanding of awareness and responsiveness.
LeTosha: That is the emotional intelligence piece. It's that, again, internal piece. In the class, we talk about what's being aware, of what's going on in the classroom and what's going on with the children, but also that introspective piece of what's going on with us inside is the other half of that. And that's emotional intelligence.
It's not only being aware of others, but also being aware of what's going on with you. That is the piece that I see often that's missing with not just teachers, but folks in general. It's easier to say, this is going on with you. This is going on right here. I can assess what's happening here.
It’s more difficult to say, this is what's going on with me, and why am I doing that? Why do I keep doing that? That's a pattern. I have to find out what's causing that. So it's easier, I get it. But yeah, that's the piece of it. You can't have one without the other and be emotionally intelligent. You have to think about yourself. You have to think about the students as well.
Kate: I want to add this other layer that we wanted to bring into the conversation today too about ACEs and black children. One of the things that impacts how we are aware and respond to children, especially black children, might be our own biases about what we believe to be happening in this moment or what we notice and what we dismiss, what we support, what we punish, all of those things are influenced by what we read into a situation.
LeTosha: And that's the thing about biases. We don't even often know that we have them, and how do you become aware of that but by doing self reflection. Unless somebody like me tells you. Let's say you have a bias. Is that a bias there? Why did you think that?
I think that's important to look at as well. Oftentimes, people who have biases, whether teachers or just in general, are not aware of it. Here we go back to awareness, how you become aware of it. Again, what we have to think about are those triggers.
When we think about triggers, those are pretty much events that cause us to have a response, a reaction to something. I think that's the place to pause. Why am I feeling this way? What is going on? Why did I say that?
Right there is the place where we can begin to look at those biases, and think about what awareness looks like in an unbiased state, to consider the difference between is this the same actual misbehavior or do I have a bias going on here? And what could be behind it? Is there a family issue at home? Is there a new friend influence? What is going on here? It all comes back to the pause and really taking the time to think about it.
Kate: Just off the top of your head, can you think of an example of maybe you've coached a teacher through or something like that, where this really was underneath their response to a situation was maybe either a lack of emotional intelligence or a particular bias that had them always responding to a particular child in a certain way, or not responding to the child because they had a bias? Does anything pop into your mind?
LeTosha: I go back to the situation that I spoke of earlier. I was in a toddler classroom once and there was a child. The teacher expressed to this child that the child should put away his toys then go get ready for lunch. The child was not ready to put away his toys.
The teacher went and stood over him and said, I told you to put those toys back in the cubbies right now. The child stood up, and I promise you Kate, I was counting, I'm observing this classroom, I'm counting. We get to 60 seconds. This is a full=on stare-down.
After that, another teacher came in and helped the child to get their toys away. I went to coach the teacher after that session. I said, why did you feel so strongly about that in that moment? The teacher said that that particular child had a problem with defiance. That teacher felt disrespected by that child. Not only that. She thought that if she allowed that child to disrespect her, then all the other children would disrespect her.
Now, after talking back and forth with her for a few more moments, what we really came to was that there was a need for control. Not only was there a need for control, but that her pattern was to gain control by threatening, which she didn't even realize.
She thought, okay, well, this is like a consequence. No, you know what we teach. There's a difference between consequences and threatening because that is a tactic used to instill fear. She said, I never really thought about it like that. That's just the way that they get it done.
What else was going on in the home was that the dad had left the home. So he'd been having a few behavioral issues and things such as that. But she wasn't considering that. She was only considering that if this child didn't do what she said at that time, then the rest of the classroom is going to go crazy. Everyone was going to start disrespecting her. She was going to lose control. It would be chaos.
Those were the internal issues that we had to go down. It was the process of going down, but why? And when that happens, how do you feel about that?
Kate: What happened in the future in that? That teacher, did they express more awareness in the future around those moments or what did you see happen?
LeTosha: Our coaching kind of became a trigger. She would stop. She began to stop and really figure out when it was happening. She actually said that she knew that it was going to happen because she had a feeling in her stomach. Those are the things we need to pay attention to, is your body having a physical reaction to the behavior of a child.
Let's stop there. Let's figure out why. What's going on here? Because I think that sometimes, almost times, triggers to get those physical reactions. You can just clearly see it in the video. You clearly see it. You can see her tense up. You can see those shoulders square up. She's looking at this child dead in the eye and they're at it. There was just a wall. No one was moving.
This child, I don't know where he is today, but he was fearless in that stare right back at her. So it just became a process. This doesn't happen overnight. That was a coaching intervention that happened probably over a course of a year.
Kate: So it takes time.
LeTosha: It takes time to change behavior. I won't even say that at the end of the year that all was perfect. But I can tell you she was absolutely more aware of her responses and her reactions, and understanding how to, which is another part of emotional intelligence, self-regulate. Not only for children, but for us. How do we regulate our emotions and our reactions to people in general?
Kate: And knowing when you're feeling that thing happening, to catch it before it becomes something you act upon with a child, especially. Out in the world, it would be nice to regulate ourselves all the time. But I think that this idea of it's not going to happen overnight. You've got to build that awareness. You have to build that skill of self-reflection, which is a skill, understanding where these things come from. How did this even get built into me that I have this reaction to defiance and the need for control and all of that?
LeTosha: Absolutely, because triggers are really events that are shaped by our own personal experiences, our own personal history. So it's somewhere in there that something happened. We just don't know what at times. Sometimes we're aware of it. I'm very aware of my triggers and I try to stay away from things and people that trigger me. But it's not always possible. So what we have to do is develop that self-regulation, controlling or redirecting those disruptors and pulses or moods.
Kate: So we might have moments where we pay attention to something and we're reacting to it. We might have a moment where we're like not wanting to pay attention to it because that's something that we are like ugh. Instead of calmly regulate and address something in a fashion that helps a child build regulation, that helps me as an educator, keep myself regulated and all that.
We are coming close to the end of our time together. I feel like there are lots of other things we need to talk about. Do you want to share with us specific information from the perspective of how we can support black children in our classrooms? Things we should keep in mind and just talk to us for a few minutes about that before we close up here today.
LeTosha: I think it all comes back to awareness again. I'm going to stay on awareness. It's so important. I think that teachers should get to know their students personally by learning about their interests, their strengths, and their challenges. Of course, having a welcoming, unbiased classroom environment is great.
Establishing again, going back to that family because community and family are important in Black culture. So establishing that open communication with families, picking up the phone, having a conversation. Not just a text. I think that engaging with the community outside of school is important and of course recognizing and acknowledging those family values.
Those are all key points that teachers should be aware of. Because like I said, back in the day, teachers used to be able to pick up the phone and call and talk to them. What's going on, Johnny? What's happening there? Oh, you know what? What happened was grandma moved into the home. So, you know, or whatever.
Kate: A whole new dynamic.
LeTosha: A whole new dynamic, yeah. So I think those are important tips.
Kate: Definitely. Awesome. As we finish up our time together, I always ask our guests to take a moment with this opportunity. You have this special opportunity to speak from your heart to the heart of educators out there listening. What would you offer in terms of encouragement for educators in classrooms right now?
LeTosha: I would just say build bridges. I think that's the most important thing that you could do. Be adaptable, open, and welcoming to families and family dynamics. But I think that that's the most important thing that we could do is just to build that bridge between school and home.
I think we'll see so, so many improvements and behavior issues that I often hear. That's one of the main concerns of teachers of behavior issues. Building that bridge to the family is going to be key to understanding what's going on with your students and understanding what's going on with your family.
Kate: Thank you. Thank you so much. We have to remember all of these things like awareness, self-awareness, empathy, and putting all of that into place to build those bridges. That's definitely a win.
LeTosha: Definitely it is, but at the same time, Kate, I think what's important to know, as we mentioned earlier, it doesn't happen all at once. I think that the way that we learn CLASS is by practicing it, modeling it, talk about the parallel process, same thing. We just practice it. We make ourselves aware. We give us that time to pause and we practice. And we get better at it.
Kate: Right, growth mindset.
LeTosha: Growth mindset.
Kate: Thank you so much, Tosha, for being with us today. I appreciate it.
LeTosha: [...] come back anytime.
Kate: Okay, awesome.
While LaTosha really shared so much with us today, so much to think about, with all of that information fresh in your mind, I hope you're feeling ready to explore these big ideas, to consider how are you doing in those three aspects of emotional intelligence that we covered today? Remember self-awareness, self-reflection, and empathy. And how is that awareness showing up in your responsiveness to children? What triggers you? How can you take that pause in that moment to reflect on what else might be going on that you haven't yet considered?
And one more thing to consider, how have you built bridges today? So much to think about. And well, there's one last thing to remember. Remember, thriving educators create environments where children can thrive. So please take care of yourself because what you do matters.
You can find today's episode and transcript on our website, teachstone.com/podcasts.
