Emily Read Daniels, M.Ed., MBA, NCC, SEP™ is the author of The Regulated Classroom©, an approach to cultivating conditions for felt safety in the classroom. She developed this approach after spending years as a school counselor working with dysregulated students and staff.
In 2014, she founded HERE this NOW, a trauma-responsive schools consultancy and educator resource. HERE this NOW began as a way for her to bring basic trauma-informed information to schools and educators. To help educators apply what they were learning to their classrooms, she designed a new approach that blends tools and strategies with educator self-awareness —The Regulated Classroom. Through this framework, she teaches educators how to co regulate with kids and to make their classrooms safer, more joyful environments.
Emily joined me on the podcast about a year ago to talk about her work with schools. (You find the link to that episode in the show notes for this episode.) So, I was eager to catch up and find out what she’s noticing about how things have changed for classrooms since the last time we spoke.
Keep Reading or Listen on the Podcast
What’s happening in schools now?
While protocols around COVID have shifted and some are experiencing improvement in social engagement and a sense of getting back to normal, along with some of that collective trauma of the pandemic settling, more mental health concerns are bubbling to the surface. In addition, the politicization of matters related to schools and education has impacted connection for many.
Physical Safety vs. a State of Felt-Safety
One of things that makes The Regulated Classroom© so unique is Emily’s focus on the educators themselves. First and foremost, she works with them on understanding the impact of their experiences on their own bodies and their body’s stress response calibration, and teaches them how to co regulate with their students. This helps teachers cultivate conditions for felt-safety in the classroom.
When we think about safety in the classroom, this most often brings to mind the ways in which classrooms are secured to prevent physical harm or litigation of some sort. However, those things are not what helps us actually experience a state of felt-safety, which is a regulated state our bodies experience that enables us to learn, to relate, and to engage with one another. Focusing on felt-safety is about recognizing that we can convey specific cues of safety through relational ways of being and through the environment in the classroom that helps students and teachers feel a part of something, to feel safe with one another, and to feel a sense of belonging.
Offering an Abundance of Cues for Felt-Safety
Based on her study with Dr. Stephen Porges, Emily emphasizes an awareness that the ways in which schools have responded to keep children physically safe from the threat of mass shooting sends the body and nervous system cues of danger.
Some of the ways we secure our schools to keep children physically safe actually remind our bodies that we are not safe, so we have to pair this with many, many cues of safety to offset those cues of danger.
How can we send warmth and welcoming? How can we convey an abundance of cues of safety? This is exactly what her work with schools addresses.
“Befriending the Nervous System”
But first, she teaches educators to recognize their own bodily experiences of safety and danger by helping them get curious and comfortable with their own nervous systems. Deb Dana, a therapist who has incorporated polyvagal theory into clinical training, calls this “befriending the nervous system.”
To hear more about how Emily is changing the way educators heal burnout, create conditions for felt-safety in the classroom, and learn some of the tools and strategies she uses, listen to the podcast or read the full transcript below!
Listen on the Podcast
This blog is a short summary of a longer episode on the Parenting after Trauma podcast.
Find the Parenting after Trauma podcast on Apple Podcast, Google, Spotify, or in your favorite podcast app.
Or, you can read the entire transcript of the episode by scrolling down and clicking ‘transcript.’
Robyn
Would you like to explore a complete paradigm-shift on how we see behavior? You can watch my F R E E 45(ish) minute-long masterclass on What Behavior Really Is and How to Change It.
Just let me know where to send the links!
