School has always been a place of growing and learning, both academically and emotionally. Now more than ever, we have seen an increase in the needs of student emotional well-being, evidenced through the unique behaviors being exhibited post-pandemic. At all stages of development, children have moments of frustration or fear where they opt to use behavior as a form of communication, rather than language.
For some children, this response to frustration or fear becomes more habitual or reinforcing as it increases in frequency or severity. Schools must employ staff with specific emotional support training to provide the much-needed programming to develop the weakened social and emotional management skills to move forward in their learning.
Emotional Support Teacher: Education and Training
Special education has many facets and specialties, from speech and language to occupational therapy and specialized academic instruction. An emotional support teacher fits under this umbrella of a special education teacher and may be referred to as different things in different districts, whether a behavior analyst or social-emotional learning (SEL) interventionist.
Regardless, it requires a staff member to be expertly trained in responding to the intense emotional needs of students and supporting their colleagues in the programming implementation. An emotional support teacher must have a bachelor’s degree and a certificate in education, most often under the special education certification.
Certain coursework is critical to being prepared for this position:
- Trauma instruction
- Social skills instruction
- Behavioral assessment
- Data collection
- Programming
- IEPs, FBAs and BIPs
Emotional Support Teacher: Skills Needed to Be Effective
Going further, emotional support teachers have a firm handle on soft skills including social integration, de-escalation strategies, and emotional management programs like:
- Michelle Garcia Winner’s Social Thinking Curriculum
- Zones of Regulation
- Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence’s Ruler Program
This balance of assessing intensity and causal relationship between the behaviors and antecedents for a child, with rich proactive and responsive programming, is critical to the success of an emotional support teacher.
Children with disabilities requiring this level of support are providing notable challenges to their general education, the learning environment of others with atypical development, thus requiring an intensive plan of support through an IEP.
How Did COVID Impact Emotional Support Teachers?
Unsurprisingly, the primary challenge created by the COVID-19 pandemic for emotional support teachers is the sheer volume of needs demonstrated by students over the past few years. While many schools anticipated drastic spikes in behavioral needs and depression during the pandemic among students, our shift to the “endemic” phase has been more impactful in this regard.
During the pandemic, caregivers and society instituted rigid boundaries for children, from masking and cohorting in schools, to limited social exposures outside the home, reducing demands on students significantly to prioritize health and safety. With these adjustments, we also invested energy into ensuring students had moments of pleasure and limited moments of conflict, understandably so as we feared anxiety and depression would develop under the challenges of a pandemic.
Despite these measures keeping us healthy and well, there were unexpected impacts on children’s social and emotional growth and development. They missed many natural opportunities to deal with conflict and practice adaptive social skills. In turn, we are now seeing a significant increase in student discomfort in the shift “back to normal.”
The overwhelming feeling of not knowing how to handle conflict with a peer, a challenging demand, or a complex social situation results in students searching for any way to escape the challenge and communicate with us through maladaptive behaviors. Whether it is eloping, physical aggression, or avoidance, schools need staff now more than ever to support and manage the emotional needs of students in crisis.
What New Challenges are Emotional Support Teachers Facing Post-COVID?
It has been necessary for the work around SEL to be a shared responsibility and not only live with one or two staff members in the building. Ensuring that your school has a collective approach to emotional instruction, whether shared mindfulness practices, everyday language, or a specific tier one program like Second Step, all students need instruction related to social and emotional well-being.
For students that require more than the classroom level of support, emotional support teachers must be diligent in ensuring that documentation of need and response are completed to reflect the level of demand of each child and the work being done by the school. Data collection like ABC charts are critical to informing the programming for a behaviorally challenging student.
Once that programming is developed in the form of a BIP, it is of the utmost importance that the school team implement all preventative measures to optimize students’ chances of success in the school setting.
An additional major challenge is qualifying students for this level of intervention and support without over-diagnosing students. Environmental factors are not descriptive of a learner profile and do not constitute diagnoses related to how a student’s brain functions:
- Inconsistent school access
- Changes in routines and adult behaviors
- Increased anxieties around illness
Unfortunately, without a diagnosis, some of these services and supports can be withheld for the child to work through these temporary delays and challenges, resulting in growing deficits down the road. School teams must be cautious in the evaluation period of a child’s intense behavior while not letting red tape get in the way of appropriate SEL instruction and support.
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