Dr. Sheldon L. Eakins:

What's up advocates? Dr. Eakins here. Today, we're talking about mindfulness for stress relief and self care. Today's special guest is Dr. Stephanie Romero. In our conversation today, we start with modeling mindfulness as teachers. Then of course it's COVID-19. So you know we had to talk about mindfulness during a pandemic and trauma informed care and creating a self care plan. We wrapped things up with mindfulness and its relationship to bias.

                Now, Dr. Stephanie Romero has 20 plus years of experience teaching all levels from elementary students to adults. She has been a mindfulness meditation practitioner for over 15 years. Dr. Romero is also a member of the university of Pittsburgh Center For Mindfulness And Consciousness Studies.

                Welcome to The Leading Equity Podcast. My name is Dr. Sheldon L Eakins and for over a decade, I've helped educators become better advocates for their students. What is an advocate? An advocate is someone who recognizes that we don't live in a just society. Advocates aren't comfortable with the status quo and are willing to speak up on behalf of others. No matter where you are in your journey towards ensuring all of your students are equipped with the resources they need to thrive, I'm here to help you build your knowledge and confidence to ensure equity at your school.

                Welcome advocates to another episode of The Leading Equity Podcast, a podcast that focuses on supporting educators with the tools and resources necessary to ensure equity at their school. Today, I got a special guest, Dr. Stephanie Romero is here with us today. So without further ado, Stephanie, thank you so much for joining us.

Dr. Stephanie Romero:

Thank you for having me, Sheldon. My great pleasure to be here.

Dr. Sheldon L. Eakins:

I'm excited for this. You were one of the presenters during the Creating A New Normal virtual summit and I appreciate your time for being able to meet with me because I wanted to have you on the show as well. So I'm glad that we're able to connect. Before we get into the work that you do or our topic for today in regards to mindfulness, I'd love for you to share a little bit about yourself and which currently do.

Dr. Stephanie Romero:

Yeah, so I was a public school educator for over 15 years and was getting my doctorate in education leadership and ended up writing my dissertation on mindfulness and education. Through that process, I thought I was going to go into upper administration, but really in Pittsburgh where I lived did not see that I could implement mindfulness in a school or a district the way that I knew could transform a school. Nobody was really doing that at that time. So with some friends, we started the nonprofit Awaken Pittsburgh and we started just bringing programming to teachers and students. From there, we've kind of branched out and bring mindfulness practices, social and emotional regulation skills to a variety of settings.

Dr. Sheldon L. Eakins:

Tell me more about the Awaken Pittsburgh. So who do you normally work with? Is it more on the education side of things or is it more broad in that scale? What are some of the typical things that you do?

Dr. Stephanie Romero:

So I love to do programming with teachers. That's my favorite thing to do, because I know that if I can train teachers to practice themselves, what we see as outcomes is reduced stress, reduced compassion, fatigue, and secondary trauma, increased wellbeing. The research tells us, although I have not done this particular research myself, but when we have better self-regulated teachers, they end up having better classroom climates and the outcomes for kids are better, both social and emotional outcomes and academic outcomes.

                So I love to just bring practices to teachers for that reason. But then we usually, if the teachers and the school or district is interested, take it one step further. After we build that base of practice with the educators themselves, then we teach them how to bring the practices to the kids.

Dr. Sheldon L. Eakins:

Starts with the teachers first, right? Teachers mindset to me, it sets the foundation with how the classroom climate and environment goes. Is that correct?

Dr. Stephanie Romero:

That's absolutely right. The other piece that's super important, especially with the younger kids, but also for the teenage kids, modeling the practices is actually the best way to teach them. So you can say something to a child, if you're screaming at the student to stop doing something, what you're not modeling there is social and emotional regulation. So just as an example, I had an incident in my classroom where I turned around to write on the board and one student pushed over the chair of another student.

                They apparently had had a fight on the football field the night before. I was in middle school and that little thing happened and I turned around and the whole class was gasping and looked horrified. So what do you do in that moment? Do you lose it or do you say to the whole class, "Wow, that's really upsetting for me. I'm going to take a moment to breathe. How about if we all take a moment?" Before you react to that situation and kind of lose it and then you give everyone a moment to be able to express what actually happened after they're kind of calm and you're calm.

                So that's the kind of example of our own modeling, how we use practices to control ourselves, to regulate ourselves and to also be able to be fully present with what's happening because that event might've been really triggering for some of those kids. How do you bring them back to the present moment?

Dr. Sheldon L. Eakins:

Well, how do you train yourself to do that? Because if I'm a teacher in it, I'm in the classroom and that happened to me, I'm going to react in a certain way. So I'm assuming that you get to a certain place to where you're able to do that. Walk us through that process maybe. How do we get to that level to where something happens in that nature, we're able to respond without flipping our lids and going off and who did it? We're not doing any of those things, but we're saying, "Let's take a deep breath." How do you get there?

Dr. Stephanie Romero:

Yeah. So I would say that it's the daily practice of the teacher. So we know from all the studies now on neuroplasticity and brain research that we have that when we do something regularly, when something becomes habitual, we're building the connections in our brains for that to be a habitual reaction. So I'll just give you the example of seated breath focused meditation. So my instruction would be for this take your seat. I would probably go through checking in with ourselves and then I would ask whoever is receiving my instruction to put their attention on the body breathing. As best they can.

                What happens is your mind wanders 100 times in the 15 minutes you're trying to keep your attention on your breath and you notice that and then, okay, no big deal. You just bring it back. So in the classroom, when that incident happens, it's like when your mind wanders. It's an interruption in what you're trying to do. So you've already build the response to that of, "Oh my mind wandered. I'm going to bring it back to where I would want to focus." So when the incident happened, you have a response of something unexpected, "Oh, I need to bring it back to my breathing." So you're building that kind of noticing what's happening and being able to readjust your attention through the daily practice. Does that make sense?

Dr. Sheldon L. Eakins:

I'm with you. So daily practice. So you and I just talked early before we started recording. I'm trying to get myself into some mindfulness practices myself. So as a person who is an aspiring, mindful individual, I had to know how did you get there? Because there's no way as of today, there's no way that I would respond in that capacity. I know a lot of our educators would feel the same way. So that kind of leads to the next part of my question that I have is because we've got a pandemic going on right now and right now we're recording this in July.

                A lot of up and air as far as what school looks like. When I say what school looks like, folks who are in leadership don't even know what school looks like, but they're giving you something to chew on if you will. So why is mindfulness so important during a pandemic? I know it was important before, but what is your take on why mindfulness is so important that we should be considering these days?

Dr. Stephanie Romero:

Well, I just think everyone's level of stress is so high. How do you work with that? How do you work with the additional demands on you? If you're a teacher learning how to do everything online for the first time. We know now, like in Awaken Pittsburgh, I'm no longer in the K to 12 classroom, but we've had to shift all of our programming online. Just like everyone else. So what you do in person is not the same as what you're going to do online. It just doesn't work. So for the deliverer of programming or content, wow, that's a huge learning curve if you've never delivered something fully online. Then in addition, what I hear from the educators that I work with is I'm trying to learn how to do this. I got half a class because kids aren't showing up.

                Then on top of that, I've got my own kids that I'm trying to get online and help them, especially if they're younger kids. They're not so computer literate and they can't manage their content. So teachers that I work with ooh, their stress level is through the roof. What are you doing for yourself? That's my question. Mindfulness works for me, but I would say everyone, their self care plan, you need to review that self care plan. What are you doing? Are you taking care of yourself physically?

                We're shut up in the house. Are you still getting some exercise? I've been walking my dogs every single day since this happened and the dogs are loving it because before they weren't getting out as much, but it has to be, what is your self care plan and what is your stress reliever?

                A lot of us have lost it because of Coronavirus. So for me, my practice is part of my stress relief. So I described the kind of meditation practice. I also do yoga because I need that movement and body connection as well. I have been really upping my healthy eating because I know when I get stressed, first thing that happens is chocolate. So being aware of that and really noticing it, and it's not that you punish yourself and don't do it, but just really notice do I really need to eat the half of the chocolate cake or cook one piece just to be okay?

                Something like that. Really just taking care in every way that we can. Especially we had coronavirus and then we had all the racial tension and strife. Wow. Trauma on top of stress level. What are we doing to care for one another and ourselves? That I think is the most important thing.

Dr. Sheldon L. Eakins:

I love the self care plan. At least the idea of a self care plan. I know it's different for everyone, but could you maybe tell us if I'm a teacher who's also teaching my own kids, who's trying to figure out should I go back to school in the next few weeks? Should I stay home? Why is the self care plan so important to our operation of our professional and our everyday lives?

Dr. Stephanie Romero:

I think burnout and compassion fatigue are really high among educators. If we're working in populations that have high trauma themselves, which a lot of us are in schools that have a population that has a lot of trauma, we take that in. We take that in and that ends up being secondary trauma. So the only way not to burn out and to maintain empathy and compassion for our kids is to be caring for ourselves in every way. It's that old thing like I can't pour from an empty tea pot. So I have to be refilling my teapot every time.

Dr. Sheldon L. Eakins:

Here's my next question. So, okay. I think we've established that we needed to discuss how it's so important for our teachers to be self regulated and to be in a center and to be at a certain place because that impacts the school climate. Could you share with us a little bit on maybe some details as far as what does mindfulness from a teacher translated into a classroom? Tell me what that environment looks like and the climate looks like so that our educators out there can kind of understand why it's so important that we're doing these activities.

Dr. Stephanie Romero:

So, what we've just talked about for the teachers being able to pause and take a moment is the same for the students. It could be very simple as test anxiety. So for example, I had a chime in my room that when we would have a quiz or a test, I would have everybody get ready for the quiz, the test and then we would pause for a moment and just listen to the chime. Nothing else. Just everyone would close their eyes if they wanted to, they could leave them open if it felt like they didn't want to, but they would close their eyes. I'd ring the chime and I would just say, "Raise your hand when you don't hear it anymore."

                Then I'd wait for everybody's hand to go up and then we would take the quiz or the test and just that moment for everyone to pause, notice what's happening, gives them a deescalation, the nervousness of taking a quiz or a test. Did I study enough? Am I going to know it? Then I would say something like, "Okay, it's all good. We're going to do this. And you're going to do great." Then we'd pass out the quiz or the test. If it was a day that I forgot to do it, ooh, 10 hands would go up.

                So just something simple to let kids just bring themselves into the moment and notice what's happening. It could be a breathing technique. It could be a listening activity like the chime I just described. It could be even notice the feeling of your feet on the floor. Just notice. Think about what that feeling is like. Can you name whatever you're feeling in your feet on the floor? Maybe your shoes are a little tight. Maybe your hot, maybe you're cold. Whatever it is. Name that for yourself, bringing them just into the moment. That's helping them self regulate and not be somewhere else. How can you learn if you're not fully present? We're not showing up for the learning if we're not fully there.

Dr. Sheldon L. Eakins:

I like that. I think that's a great way to try to reduce test anxiety as I do special education. I think about my five or four kids and how sometimes they come to my room, our resource room to take their tests or take their exams. Maybe I need to start doing that with the kids before they get started. Hey, let's do this activity. So that's some good information for me. How do we make sure that when we do these practices in our classrooms, how do we make sure that we're not taking ... cause I know I could hear folks saying, "Oh, this is going to take up too much class time."

                What is maybe some of your thoughts on maybe how we can do mindfulness activities with our students without making us feel guilty, especially when we have accountability issues and we need to maximize standards and we need to get all this stuff in. What are some of your thoughts on that?

Dr. Stephanie Romero:

So if you're in a K to five environment especially, and you're allowed to put social and emotional objectives on your lesson plan, then you could be listing objectives that are related to social and emotional learning and those mindfulness practices would line up with that. So building empathy and you could do a practice that relates to building empathy. You could also do self regulation or noticing emotions and do different practices that would relate to that. So if you're in a school environment where you're doing social and emotional learning, these all line up with social and emotional learning outcomes that could be on a lesson plan.

                If you are in a high school, then I would just, middle school, high school, it depends on the school climate that you're in. Bringing that back to climate. Because some educators are going to be in places where this is not going to be as accepted and others are going to be in places where it's really going to be embraced.

                So you have to just, like the bell ringing for example is just part of what we do when we're getting ready for a test to just feel ready and centered to take our test. That literally will take one minute. Maybe two. It's not going to be 15 minutes of your class time. I'll just say, when I was doing this, I was teaching alongside another teacher teaching my exact same curriculum and we were comparing data regularly and outcomes and stuff. I don't think I was a better teacher and my test scores were always slightly better. I think it's just that moment of mindfulness to allow kids to perform to their full ability.

Dr. Sheldon L. Eakins:

I wish that when we do like our ACTs and our SATs, I wish folks would do the same thing. The proctors would do something to where they're like, "Okay, let's take an activity, a mindfulness something and let's do that before we start to test," because I would imagine there's got to be some relation when it comes to students who do mindfulness before they take those college entrance exams as well. Have you come across any of that kind of research?

Dr. Stephanie Romero:

There's a lot of research on lowered test anxiety. There's a lot of research in general just on everything from self esteem, health and wellbeing, increased focus, all of that stuff, but just like for the grownups, it works best when it's become a habit for the kids. So if you just, on the test day suddenly introduce something totally new, it may not work so well, but if it's just that's of what we do. That's just part of what we do. Now we have this thing that we do. Then just to mention too, teachers happen to have, and with good reason, this kind of approach to education that everyone is on the same page at the same time, doing the same activity in the same way. I would say with mindfulness, you can't do that.

                To be trauma informed because we know mindfulness actually has been shown to help people heal with trauma PTSD, for example. But when we get still and we start to notice what we're feeling and thinking, if we have unresolved trauma, there's a possibility that's going to surface. On the one hand, that's great for someone to work with, but that's not what you want in the classroom space. You don't want to trigger someone's unresolved trauma.

                So everything that I do with kids that's mindfulness is optional. I give them different options for what they want to do. In the younger kids, well, even in the middle school and high school, I buy those little bendy guys, little creatures that are wire and they're rubber coated. So for example, if there's a student who's very, very active and sitting still is very difficult for them, everyone could have one on their desk, but not everyone ops to use it, but they could be bending that while we do the practice just to give them that little movement.

                They don't have to close their eyes, for example, because for some kids that leaves them feeling more vulnerable, takes away a feeling of safety. So just a couple of examples, but we really, really need to shift the way we do practices with kids and don't do it in the ordinary way we kind of do school because it's just not trauma sensitive. So that would be my one little caution to educators is take a minute and kind of investigate what that looks like to be trauma informed with mindfulness before. First start yourself. Then what does it look like to be trauma informed? Because we really don't want to put kids in a situation where they're being triggered.

Dr. Sheldon L. Eakins:

Yeah. We don't want to put the kids in a situation where we think we're helping, but actually we're not helping them because we're doing the exact opposite and we're triggering, and I'm glad you brought that up. So thank you for sharing that. I want to touch on trauma informed care and mindfulness as well a little bit more because I'm thinking about our students who are returning to school in whatever capacity that looks like.

                So maybe we have some students that are going back online, or maybe we're having students that are required to go back into the school buildings or in some sort of format. It's going to look a lot different. In addition to the experiences that they had, their COVID experiences that they've had over the last few months, what are some of the trauma informed mindfulness practices that you would suggest that you've been helping educators with to support our students?

Dr. Stephanie Romero:

So the self care for ourselves, I would say the kids need to be doing that too. I know the educators and community mentors that I work with, the things that they've been reporting to me is for a lot of our kids, school is their safe place. So if they don't have school to go to which they haven't, they may be in difficult home situations. Maybe they're in a homeless shelter. A lot of our most vulnerable kids are experiencing extra stressors and potentially more trauma by not actually being in school. That might be even lack of meals as well. We know that schools have been doing a lot to make sure that they're providing the meals.

                So when kids come back really acknowledging whatever their experience has been is the first thing. If a kid is telling you difficult stories or if the kid is acting in a way that is more agitated or disruptive to really just honor where that kid is at right there and not kind of dismiss it. I think building a vocabulary with them to name whatever their experience is, especially for the younger ones that don't have a fully developed vocabulary and that could be ... We didn't talk about a definition of mindfulness, but really being able to name what's happening right now, including our internal way of being.

                So just naming it is so powerful. For the little, little kids, we do things like, what color are you today? If you could pick a color to say how you're feeling, what color would you be today? All kids can and school age kids can name a color and that helps them then just develop a way. For the older kids, we do an emotional thermometer,. A check in.

                If you have a group that you can just do an emotional check-in, whether that's you're running a group with kids that are having extra difficulty or I know a lot of times special ed kids have a little more time with the same teacher. So if you have the space in your curriculum to just let them do a temperature check in. Are you running hot? Are you running cool? Are you boiling? The older kids, they don't have to actually give up too much information to feel too vulnerable, but they could just name it. You as the teacher then, oh, okay. So I got six kids that are saying they're boiling. Something's happening in the room that maybe we could work with.

Dr. Sheldon L. Eakins:

When we're talking about our students that as teachers, a lot of us are focused on academics. Oh, kids have been out of school for months. You know, I never saw Johnny the whole time. That's a lot of folks focus is how do we get kids caught up? What do we do academically? Would you suggest that we need to stress the mindfulness piece first and the trauma informed care before we address the academic side of things?

Dr. Stephanie Romero:

I believe that the best classroom situation is where kids feel in relationship and cared for by their teachers. I always tell the teacher, so imagine you going to work and you feel like your principal hates you or is disinterested in you, does not really like you. You're not going to be able to feel as happy and engaged at work. Even you go to your classroom, you close the door. If you feel like your principal does not like you, does not care about you, it's not going to be great.

                That's the same for kids. When they show up in the classroom, they want to feel cared for. They want to feel important to their teacher. They want to feel seen. So whether you do it through mindfulness practices or some people just naturally connect. They're just connectors. Whatever it is, something that says to those kids, "I am so glad you're here," whether that's virtually or in the classroom.

                For me, the mindfulness practices was the thing that really helped me connect with kids in that way and really be also my own individual practice. Mindfulness practice, if you're doing the kind of full spectrum of mindfulness practice, it also increases your own compassion and empathy. So, when that kid is taking you off task, instead of being like, "Ugh, I'm not going to get through the lesson. We have a test tomorrow. Ugh," it's more about, wow, what's going on with that young person that they're not able to attend? Something's going on.

                I was in middle school for many, many years and it was, so and so's boyfriend broke up with them, a lot of relationship drama, the kind of frenemy thing, friend yesterday, enemy today. That emotional stuff really impacts their ability to be on task. So if we're not honoring the whole human being in our classroom spaces, we're ignoring the thing that is the obstacle that's going to get them to where we want them to go. How do they pay attention when they're dealing with all the emotional stuff and they don't have the skillset? So how do we build that skill set? That's the other great thing about the practices is it helps them build that self regulation skillset.

Dr. Sheldon L. Eakins:

One of the other things that I wanted to chat with you about was mindfulness and its relation to bias and how we as teachers address or approach our students. Why don't you share with us how those two are related?

Dr. Stephanie Romero:

A few years back, I started to see some research and some writings on the connection between mindfulness and bias work. I was like, "Whoa, this is so interesting." So there's a practice in the mindfulness community and in practitioners, it's a loving kindness meditation. So you could imagine different groups of people or different people in general and just send them love and care basically. What they found in the research, it's sometimes called meta, is that when people did this, their bias got less. So maybe there's a group that I feel is other, some other group, if I could send them loving kindness, I would somehow reduce my bias.

                I though, "Well, this is just so interesting." So at the time I was working with my own personal training in anti-racism and working with groups of white identified folks that work on anti-racism and how to just work on ourselves in that regard and being trained as an anti-racist trainer. I thought, "Well all of this is great, but I know that when I do my mindfulness practices, I'm more aware of what's happening internally for me and that actually brings up more bias." You see it more in yourself.

                So the other great thing about mindfulness is you build these self compassion practices. So you're actually able to see the bias in yourself. If you're a person of color that could be an identification as racial inferiority. If you're a white folk, it could be as racial superiority, but you can hold that and bring in the self compassion, understanding, the full range of awareness that you've been socialized in that way. That gives you a space to then actually work on it. In my anti-biased work with white folks, the whole idea of white fragility, which I know is debated, but the reactivity I guess I want to say to even look at it is the pain.

                It's the pain and the shame. Shame is such a blocker. Once we get into our shame, we don't want to touch anything. So if you could hold that all with compassion through the mindfulness practices, it creates an opening to actually look at all of that. So right now at Awaken Pittsburgh, we're about to pilot in one of the schools that we've been in a mindfulness based, we're calling it Mindful Connections For Dismantling Bias, a whole program for educators.

                Because what I started to see when I was working with educators is we touch on the fact that once you're practicing mindfulness, this might bubble to the surface. You might start to notice some bias and I would have these teachers tell me, "Oh no, no, Stephanie, I am not biased. It's just a coincidence that all of my discipline referrals happen to be the black kids. That's just a coincidence."

                I'm like, "Whoa, that's a really interesting coincidence there." Or things like that or where they would get really angry at me at just the suggestion. They would say something like, "I bring breakfast for my students every day. There's no way that I could be racist. There's no way." So how do you hold what for them felt like a contradiction? How do you help them hold that? The only way I think people can hold that is with a lot of love, a lot of self love, a lot of self compassion. Those are the practices that allow us to work with our bias. It's for others, the loving kindness for others and growing to see them as fully human and ourselves as well.

Dr. Sheldon L. Eakins:

Stephanie, you have provided so much goodness today. I consider you as providing a voice in leading equity. Could you leave us with one final word of advice?

Dr. Stephanie Romero:

I would say find the practice that works for you. It doesn't really matter what it is. What's your self care thing? What's your go to thing that makes you feel calm and centered and just do it for 5, 10 minutes every single day. Whatever that is for you. It could be prayer. It could be reading a Bible passage or the Koran, whatever that is for you, but just be doing it every single day for at least 5, 10 minutes. That's the thing that people should understand the most is it's the regular repetition of these things that feed our soul that help keep us centered so that we can be our best selves to the kids we work with.

Dr. Sheldon L. Eakins:

I love it. So if we've got some folks that want to connect with you, what's the best way to reach out?

Dr. Stephanie Romero:

They can email me. It's S Romero, R-O-M-E-R-O at awakenpittsburgh, all one big word with an he at the end of pittsburgh.org.

Dr. Sheldon L. Eakins:

All right. Do you have social as well?

Dr. Stephanie Romero:

Yeah. We're on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, all of the things.

Dr. Sheldon L. Eakins:

Okay. Yeah. Well, good. Well, hopefully ... I'll leave some links on the show notes as well, but once again, I'm here with Dr. Stephanie Romero. It has truly been a pleasure. Thank you so much for just providing so much information for us today.

Dr. Stephanie Romero:

Yeah. My great pleasure. Thank you for allowing me the opportunity, Sheldon.

Dr. Sheldon L. Eakins:

This episode was brought to you by the Leading Equity Center. For more podcasts, interviews, and resources, head on over to leadingequitycenter.com.

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