 Tip of the Week:
Gruesome or Difficult Deaths
It seems that so often the news takes time to focus on the most inhumane deaths - the most tortured - family homicide/suicides and the like. When those kinds of deaths touch your school community, there are a couple of steps to take that can help immeasurably.
One is to have a staff meeting, even though many staff may not directly be affected by the death. This is a time to give them language and concepts they can use if students ask about it. As teachers, if we don't know how to answer a question with clarity, we may opt to tell students that we're not going to discuss that, or to go home and talk about it with their parents. But when we aren't open, it doesn't mean they aren't going to talk about it, it just means they're going to do so out of earshot and without adult support to help make sense of (what for the child is) a frightening and difficult world.
Give teachers and staff guidelines and ideas about some ways they might let students know that they're open to hearing their concerns, even when we might not have an answer. One place to begin is to have teachers brainstorm the kinds of fears and questions they think students might have, and to give them time in small groups to come up with what they think the best answers might be. Then their ideas are all shared with the whole group and some decisions made about how they will all answer those kinds of questions.
And perhaps most important at the staff meeting is to ask teachers, "What questions do you most dread?" Sometimes there is a huge and terrifying aspect of the death that has been mentioned repeatedly by media, and if students in several classes ask about it, teachers will likely all give different answers unless you've taken time with this up front. Students are on buses together, at recess and lunch together, and they continue the conversations and talk about what they've heard. Having some consistency in the building is helpful.
And finally, "What do any of you know about this that many of us might not?" often brings out issues that perhaps a teacher who is a neighbor of the family might know that could be helpful so people aren't surprised. Before you wrap up, ask teachers what kind of support they want in the classrooms or what else they think will be helpful.
Cheri
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