Arkansas Teacher of the Year talks about ‘Closing the Empathy Gap’
In Wednesday’s final session of the Arkansas Department of Education’s annual summit, held at the Hot Springs Convention Center, 2021 Arkansas Teacher of the Year Susana Post, the keynote speaker, shared insight into her teaching experience at Belle Point Alternative High School in Fort Smith.
Post, who worked as a professional in the business world for 12 years prior to becoming a nontraditional teacher, said it was somewhere during her first year at Belle Point that she started truly building relationships with kids.
It was then, she told the audience at Horner Hall, that “everything changed.”
“We were operating from this position of mutual respect for each other,” she said. “And it took a little bit, but I’ll tell you by the time I got to the end of that first school year, I knew that I would never go back to business. I can say that in the oil and gas industry, there was the opportunity to make a ton of money. There was. But I didn’t feel like I was making a difference.”
Post was selected as the 2021 Arkansas Teacher of the Year on the platform “Closing the Empathy Gap.” Teaching math and business courses in grades 7-12 at the alternative high school, she drew from her business background in Texas to incorporate project-based learning, which she believed helped her foster relationships and connect students with content in meaningful ways.
“Educators speak of gaps that need to be addressed in our classrooms, ways that we can ensure success for every student; Why aren’t they equitable? Why would we still see these gaps? Why is it based on socioeconomic status or ethnic
group or gender or religion? Like, why do those things matter? I have yet to meet a teacher that goes into a classroom and thinks, ‘I only want to reach 65% of my students?’ Right? None of us goes into the classroom or into education thinking that, and yet the statistics don’t lie about the data,” she said.
When trying to adjust this problem, some educators focus on the opportunity gap, or the disparity and inputs, she said, but providing more inputs for students does not necessarily mean they are going to receive an equitable education if the inputs and opportunities are not getting fully to that child.
This not only resonates with her “teacher heart,” she said, but with her “mama heart” as well.
“My empathy path at Belle Point was there because my lived experiences were so drastically different from my students,” she said. “It was sometimes hard to connect.”
Post noted the importance of opening the classrooms to the community, citing an occasion in which she used tattoo artists to teach her students lessons she could not. Students participated in a contest revolving around the best tattoo designed.
“I just want to challenge everyone — I know that we’re kind of wrapping up with COVID, hopefully, but we’ve got to open our classrooms to the community. We’ve got to get more diversity, if I can just be frank, in our classrooms,” she said.
She said she once attended a professional development class concerning empathy and how it was actually the number one discipline strategy. She said so much of being an effective teacher involves understanding brain science.
“Here’s why I feel like we need to know about brain science right now maybe more than ever: the past two years have been hard. Our business is learning. Learning happens in the brain, and yet we’re not neurologists; We’re not doctors. But there is a lot right now on brain science, and learning, and how all of that works,” she said.
This is why professional development, she said, was a “game changer” for her.
“When we talk about the importance of being trauma informed, when we talk about the importance of understanding what’s happening in those brains and these lives that have experienced trauma — again, that’s why this is so important,” she said.
Arkansas was, at one point, the number one state in the nation for children with adverse childhood experiences, she said, noting things can happen in the classroom that can tie back to particular life experiences, triggering certain behaviors in kids. At this point, their executive function is no longer in control.
“In an alternative school and in any school, when kids are in that state of mind, there’s no teaching them,” she said. “There’s no rationalizing, there’s no reasoning. All that they need in that moment is empathy. They need for that executive part to be able to take control again. Then they can reason and then they can rationalize.”