The Hardest Days: When Schools Ignore Tragedy

I will never forget certain teaching days — when I can recall, with startling clarity, our classroom, my students’ faces, even exact words exchanged. Some of the days have numbers: 9/11 and 1/6. Some have names: Newtown, Ferguson, Parkland, George Floyd. Most were of national significance; others were too local, including that following the death by suicide of my young colleague.

Several of these days of tenacious memory involved gun violence. Since the horror in Columbine but especially Newtown, teachers have received a lot of training, controversial as it is, meant to help us keep students safe from school shootings. But while many of us have received extensive, specific training on handling active shooter situations, our students are much more likely to need help processing terrible events that have occurred outside the building.

Yet most of us receive little training in how to approach the hardest days of our teaching lives: when violent tragedies take place.

I had a week under my belt as a second-career teacher when planes took the twin towers down an hour away. Could I have been prepared for that? It’s hard to imagine how. On September 12, we were back in school though some students and staff had lost family, told only that we should go about our daily lives so the terrorists wouldn’t win. Like many teachers, all I felt equipped to do was give my students time to write about what they were experiencing and then time to share their thoughts if they wished. They wrote a lot. Some spoke — in fear, anger, shock, confusion.

I would do this again on later days: when my students’ phones began pinging during AP Literature with reports of fatalities at an elementary school twenty miles up the road in Newtown. And last year, after they saw an unthinkable attack on the US Capitol unfold.

But two decades later, I left teaching never having received professional development around planning for and teaching to or through these events. When each one is unpredictable in nature, location, and timing, but entirely predictable in that there will be another, that’s just wrong.

Too many districts and schools sidestep this responsibility because some educators and parents persist in believing school isn’t the place to address these events, wishing politics kept out of it. And these events each tend to be flashpoints in long-raging political battles: over guns, race, religion, war, policing, the vote. To pretend we can keep them or the larger battles out of schools is to pretend that students don’t have smartphones, don’t talk, aren’t prey to dangerous disinformation, haven’t personally experienced violence, aren’t eyewitnesses to history in the making, can’t find contemporary relevance in the history and literature they study.

The outside world makes its way into the classroom whether we lock and alarm the door behind us or not. So how do we handle that in healthy ways?

Critically, schools can’t ignore these events because they are of such emotional magnitude that to try to “keep them out” is to deny the impact that fear, grief, and anxiety have on learning and to deny the impact that they have on teaching. On the topic of “large-scale tragedy,” the National Association of School Psychologists states simply: “how adults express their emotions will influence the reactions of children and youth.” How adults don’t express them influences students, too: it can communicate that emotions should be ignored or that terror is normal or that we don’t care about their mental health.

Some districts reach out with guidance and materials during these moments. Because so many don’t, however, teachers often turn to each other. A “Teaching on Days After” Facebook group has nearly 19,000 members, 12,000 of whom joined after the Capitol attack, according to Michigan State University Professor Alyssa Hadley Dunn, who administers the group. On the page, a range of attitudes and advice is found from educators determined to tackle an event with a historical or other lens; wanting to allow students to express themselves before returning to planned academics; or reluctant to do anything but proceed with business as usual. That teachers flock to other resources such as the Facing History and Ourselves website demonstrates their eagerness to do right by students.

There are ways to do right and ways to do well-intentioned wrong. We should worry about that, as educator Dr. Tracy Edwards points out: “Knee-jerk reactions are not teachable moments. They can be harmful, particularly when teachers have not familiarized themselves with issues at hand or even processed the issues on their own, prior to unpacking them with students.” This is why they need formal training and shouldn’t have to rely on last-minute emails or to scramble for resources. Schools also need coordinated, age- and subject-area appropriate efforts that don’t confuse or overwhelm students.

There’s no greater wrong than ignoring this need. It serves everyone’s interests — including members of communities fearful of teachers imposing their own agendas — if we take an organized approach, driven by psychological and educational research, to traumatic events.

The environment that led to January 6 seems an unlikely one to lead to thoughtful teacher training around events like January 6. If protecting and educating children is a key objective, however, schools have little choice but to make it happen.