Practice 5
Eradicate
isolation
Overview
Education as a profession historically has been a collection of individuals working in isolation – individual teachers isolated in their classrooms, individual principals isolated at their schools, individual superintendents isolated in their district offices. This has always been a challenge but the lockdowns necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic were a tipping point for an epidemic of loneliness and isolation affecting everyone, not only those in education.
Isolation is not only unhealthy for us from a mental and social well-being perspective, but it is counter-productive to learning. The experience of feeling that you are not as connected to others as you would like to be creates “noise” in the brain that distracts from the most focused attention on generativity and meaning-making.
Bessel Van Der Kolk writes, “Social support is not the same as merely being in the presence of others. The critical issue is reciprocity: being truly heard and seen by the people around us, feeling that we are held in someone’s mind and heart. For our physiology to calm down, heal, and grow we need a visceral feeling of safety.” To bring this to life means intentionally convening and gathering people and sanctioning time to build authentic human connections as productive time that is “getting something done.”
Quick Start Actions
Identify students most vulnerable to feeling isolation and meet them where they are.
Develop a list of students who might be likely to experience isolation - new students, students of subgroups that are a minority in the school, students who are not involved in clubs or extracurriculars, students who sit by themselves at lunch - and revisit weekly, assigning faculty members to connect.
Learn names and use them.
Make a point to learn every staff person’s name and use it. Integrate use of names in faculty meetings. Encourage teachers to do the same with students. Use a protocol like What’s in a Name to deepen understanding of names.
Shadow students.
Select 3-5 students representing a range of experiences and perspectives especially outside the “mainstream.” Ask if you can shadow them for a day to better understand what school is like for them, from the moment they first step foot on campus and including lunch. The aim is to simply experience school exactly as they do. After you have completed your shadowing, bring the students back together and share the insights you gathered with them. Invite their voice to shape a plan for change.
