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Heart-Centered Connections: Seven Essential Skills for Helping Neurodiverse and Marginalized Children Thrive
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- [00:01]
Dr. Nikki Elliott
Close your eyes.
- [00:02]
Voice Actor (1-800-Contacts Ad)
Exhale.
- [00:03]
Dr. Nikki Elliott
Feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today.
- [00:08]
Voice Actor (1-800-Contacts Ad)
Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh, my gosh, they're so fast.
- [00:16]
Dr. Nikki Elliott
And breathe.
- [00:17]
Voice Actor (1-800-Contacts Ad)
Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste.
- [00:25]
Dr. Nikki Elliott
Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-contacts.
- [00:31]
Dr. Christina Gessler
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Academic Life. This is a podcast for your academic journey and beyond. I'm the producer and host, Dr. Christina Gessler. And today I'm so pleased to be joined by Dr. Nikki Elliott, who is the author of Heart Centered Seven Essential Skills for Helping Neurodiverse and Marginalized Children Thrive. Welcome to the show, Dr. Elliott.
- [00:59]
Dr. Nikki Elliott
Thank you so much. I appreciate being invited to be with you today.
- [01:03]
Dr. Christina Gessler
I am so glad that you're here and that we're going to learn about these seven principles from you. To start us off, will you tell us a little bit about yourself?
- [01:11]
Dr. Nikki Elliott
Thank you so much. So I serve as the director for the center for Embodied Equity and Neurodiversity at the University of San Diego School of Leadership and Education Sciences. So I am a career educator with more than 34 years of teaching experience. I started off as a 4th and 5th grade elementary teacher. I worked as a assistant instructor in a continuation high school at Berkeley, a continuation program, excuse me, at Berkeley High School during my undergrad years. And so I have had a lifelong commitment to supporting children who are identified or show symptoms of but are not formally identified as neurodiverse.
- [01:57]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And early on in the book, you tell us that the book is both professional for things you've learned across your career and that you've developed and that you want to teach forward to other people. But also it's personal. You dedicate the book not only to the people who want to read it and learn it and grow forward, but to your son.
- [02:15]
Dr. Nikki Elliott
Yes, as a result of the successes that I experienced as an elementary teacher and then later on as a teacher educator, which is the role I play now as a clinical professor, I thought that that could easily translate into my ability to support a neurodiverse child through adoption. So my family adopted my son Chaz at 16 months. He came to our family and he had multiple diagnoses. And because of my success in the professional arena, I thought, oh, sure, I can do this. We can get him where he needs to go physically, medically, academically, socially. And I was in for a rude awakening to understand from the lived experience of a parent how challenging it is to keep bumping up against systems that are not designed to support children who have mood learning or behavioral challenges in mainstream society, not just within the classroom, but in Sunday school, in the ymca, on sports teams and summer camps, and before and after school programs. And it was through that lived experience of my son and our family consistently being marginalized and excluded from those type of formal and informal learning opportunities that my true mission as a teacher educator and an education specialist really came into light, to really help all of those people who say, sorry, we'd love to include your son or your family, but we were never trained to support autism, adhd, emotional disturbance, dyslexia. And it was a painful personal experience that has turned into this book, a
- [03:58]
Dr. Christina Gessler
lot of books on working with neurodiverse children, marginalized children, children who are in some way considered different than some cookie cutter mainstream idea, take us into an understanding of the child as though the problem is centered in something with the child's behavior or embodied in the child themselves. Your approach is very different. It's asking the educators to learn about and check in with ourselves to see what we bring to our teaching practice, to see how we, from the moment someone arrives to learn from us till the session is concluded, what kind of energy and behaviors that we are bringing and how those set the tone and create the patterns that we're noticing. And that's a very different approach. And you take us into that right away in the introduction. We see one of the workshops that you're teaching, and we meet a participant, and I'm sure her name is anonymized. She's called Cindy in the book, and she has a very strong reaction to what her seems to be some chaos in the joyful, exuberant art project that the adult students that you're teaching are doing. And as you draw her back in and offer a time of reflection for why she had this strong experience, she reveals that the ACE test, which I hope you'll take a moment and explain to listeners, revealed that she had a very high ACE score. And so she was bringing a whole set of factors every time she taught that she had been unaware of till she had this watershed moment with you.
- [05:29]
Dr. Nikki Elliott
Yes, and this is a critical point that I bring up in all of my trainings with adults, not just classroom teachers, but counselors, therapists, caregivers, foster parents. Thank you, Christina, for bringing up this point, because it really is central. What I've learned is that there are many, many adults who work with neurodiverse children who are themselves neurodiverse in many cases undiagnosed and untreated. And there are many adults that I train who are, who have high ACE scores. So I'll break down ACE scores. That stands for adverse childhood experiences. It was a study that was conducted by Kaiser Permanente and the cdc, the center for Disease Control. And that study looks at rating the number of adverse or traumatic experiences that an individual may have faced within their family life from birth until the age of 18. So that could be the original test. Tested for 10 instances of abuse, neglect, or other types of adversity, like losing a parent, having an incarcerated parent, experiencing physical, emotional abuse. So a score of zero means that you experience childhood with zero experiences that could be registered as traumatic. A score of 10 out of 10 would suggest that any, every type of childhood trauma was something that you did experience. And so what the research shows is that what A score of 3 or higher puts an individual at risk, not determined, but at risk for lifetime of potentially emotional dysregulation, physical changes and health conditions, as well as changes to the brain and nervous system that might produce learning disabilities similar to like ADHD. So in this case with Cindy, her ACE score was 10 out of 10. And so what that means is that from, in many cases, that impacts an adult's nervous system capacity. So in many cases I get people that say, this child with autism, this child with adhd, they won't sit still, they're crying, they're making noises. What do I do to make it stop? So they're asking what to do about behaviors after they've occurred. But from our perspective, when a case, like a teacher like Cindy, I had to help her. Look, what are the conditions that you create in your classroom because of what your nervous system needs to feel? A sense of safety or a sense of control. And so in Cindy's case, being a second grade teacher, her nervous system only felt safe and contained when everyone was still, when everything was quiet, and when she was in total control of how everyone moved in the environment. Because in her childhood, she had no control. If adults were throwing things at each other, if a fight breaks out, or if she's experiencing abuse, she needed total control, which even meant Christina not being able to handle physical touch. So when second graders need a hug or want to hold your hand or come close to you to settle their nervous system, that's a way that a child might connect Particularly neurodiverse children, many times have different experiences of personal space. They want to hug, they want to touch. For that teacher, she's pushing them away. So her attachment style with children, her instructional style, meaning no art activities, no movement around the classroom, all was dictated by what her nervous system needed to feel safe and controlled. And when second graders, now that's completely developmentally inappropriate for second graders in general, let alone neurodiverse second graders who need to move their bodies, stand up, have manipulative activities and art projects to engage in learning, her nervous system could not handle a classroom that functioned that way. So by restricting all of those opportunities for movement, for hands on engagement, it drove up the behaviors of not just the children who were neurodiverse, but many children in general, especially the boys. So then it dictated her discipline style, which meant kicking children out of the classroom. And so she had a high rate of expulsionary discipline, particularly for children with learning disabilities in her class. And so this awareness, this awakening through this heart centered connections process helped her understand that she was the antecedent, the thing that happened before the children's behaviors. And so through this journey, she changed her discipline style, her classroom management style, but mostly she built her nervous system awareness to be able to tolerate more unpredictability, more movement, more touch, more hugs, more connection with second graders. And that made all the difference in bringing her discipline to down 80% in her classroom.
- [10:31]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And that's what this book is about it, it offers seven central skills that educators can learn through how it's laid out in the book. This is not a blame based book. This is an opening to ways that you can get different outcomes, mostly by starting with yourself. A lot of the questions that are asked in the book are about self support. Everything from how are you breathing? To how does the physical classroom setup make your body feel? Are you having a tense reaction to the way the room is? And it invites into a way of knowing yourself as an educator and as a human being at every level. And you bring in science to support this. One of the things that the foreword, which you had a guest writer write for you, emphasizes, is that there is science behind every skill that you are teaching. And there's science behind our physical reaction to it, the way our vagus nerve works. And so when we put all this together, we can feel confident that we have some skills to go forward. Because one of the things you point out in the book is that people can burn out. They can veer from pity to compassion to frustration. And this is really about learning these Seven skills that are designed as pillars, which is such a strengthening idea so that every educator can go forward feeling more confident about themselves. And then that in turn creates the results in the classroom that they're hoping for. You do say it's not magic and it's going to be a journey, but it will create more results than trying to have a rigid sense of control.
- [12:12]
Dr. Nikki Elliott
Absolutely. We've seen it consistently. And in the foster care community, we work with a wonderful organization in South Los Angeles called peace for kids. And they have trained, we have trained about 20 members of their community to go out into the world as ambassadors of this work. And so they deliver heart centered connections training to foster parents. And what they have noted is, um, initially, they have noted a 50% reduction in failed foster home placements when foster parents are trained in these seven pillars, because what it does is it helps them more accurately distinguish intentional behaviors from signs and symptoms of distress or signals of a diagnosis that need a different level of care and support. And so it is changing parenting practices, caregiving practices, as well as observations of children's behavior. And in a school district, La Mesa Spring Valley, where we trained an entire middle school, they completed the heart centered connection certificate. But the district tracked office referrals for defiance, disrespect and misbehavior and recorded a 38% reduction in one year of the number of teachers sending children out of the classroom for discipline. Because, again, using these seven tools, they had a better lens and more awareness of what to do proactively that reduced the number of overall behaviors and their interpretation of the behaviors of neurodiverse children.
- [13:43]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And while this book is aimed at children 18 and younger, for the people who work specifically with them, as someone who spends time educating adults and working in higher ed, I found all seven of these pillars really helpful to me and all of the skills and the way that you lead us through it to be incredibly helpful. So for listeners who say, well, I have children in my life, but my day job, I'm with adults, good news. You will feel better after you read this book. So the book opens with a section called before you begin, and it literally has a section called meet your nervous system. And in that, you talk to us about several things that I think are really helpful for us to know about. One is the important role of the vagus nerve, and the other is the science of safety. Safety. And you tell us that there's a lot of kind of language in pop culture about safe spaces and that this is not what you're talking about. That the science of safety is really at a regulation level and not at an avoidance level. Can you take us through some things you'd like us to know about how our vagus nerve has been affecting us in ways many of us aren't educated about yet. And the science of safety.
- [14:57]
Dr. Nikki Elliott
Thank you. Okay, so yes, I'd love to do that. Where would I like to begin? I'd like to begin with helping us understand that most of us have been taught to approach learning from this top down cognitive frontal lobe perspective, meaning that we give instructions, we prepare a lesson, and we assume that the student, whether a child or adult learner, has the capacity to automatically execute their executive function, activate their executive functions, time management, task initiation, working memory, all of those things that help a learner learn the science of safety. And our understanding of the vagus nerve and the autonomic nervous system actually flips that understanding upside down. And it helps us understand that our approach to learning to pro social engagement and connection is actually a bottom up affair. Meaning we have to settle the nervous system's demand for a sense of safety and connection before it can turn off the vigilance or the survival state of the nervous system so that we can activate the higher order thinking skills. And so in order to do that, we have to have something that the literature refers to as higher vagal tone, meaning the vagus nerve, which is the brakes of our nervous system, which only gets activated when we come out of that sympathetic fight or flight, low vigilance or hyper vigilance. The vagus nerve activation is the brakes of our nervous system that says ah. In this space, I feel safe physically, I feel physical safety, I feel emotional psychological safety, and I feel a sense of sensory safety, which means the sensory system, my sense of touch, sound, light, all of that ways that my physical environment and my nervous system is interacting to register my environment are signaling that I'm safe. Here. The vagus nerve can activate, turn down that state of vigilance, which then opens up our ability to access the body's ability to heal physically, the heart's ability to bond and trust and boost oxytocin and care, as well as now the frontal lobe and the brains and the hippocampus ability to access memory, access executive functioning. So our work is understanding that for neurodiverse people, the literature actually shows that for many diagnoses like autism, ADHD, or people whose nervous systems are impacted by trauma, that they register something as referred to as lower vagal tone, which means that by nature their nervous system is easier to trigger into states of dysregulation harder to settle, which then can produce more cognitive inflexibility or rigidity, which makes it harder to manage change uncertainty, which are behaviors that we often see in many neurodiverse individuals. So our work is bringing awareness that we don't just jump to task, demand or demand of instruction, but that a big part of our work, both for the student as well as for the instructor, the adult, the person who has power or authority within an environment that creating conditions where the nervous systems of everyone in the space can come into that settled sense of in this space, I feel safe, I feel respected, I feel good enough to belong. Those are emotional indicators that would say would start to set up the conditions under which an individual's vagus nerve can activate. So now there are medical parts of that that are beyond the scope of this. But holistically, in the classroom we use breath work, we use movement, we use sound, we use co regulation, which is an settled adult lending their settled nervous system to a person who's in a state of distress that can help to activate another's vagus nerve. Hugs, touch, high fives, boosts of confidence. These are things that activate a communal vagus nerve. In a learning community, so does things like storytelling, right? Singing, vocalizing, all of these things are things we teach adults to help get the physiology of students who live in more stressed state to be settled enough to engage in pro social behavior and optimal learning.
- [19:27]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And for listeners, each chapter has a review list at the end. It also has questions throughout the book. There's a place to stop in each chapter and to ask if you would be comfortable in the situation that you just put the student in and if you would be able to learn in the same environment with the same behavior from the educator that that you have just created for your students. And so again, this works for students at all levels, in my opinion. I know it's written for 18 and under, but as someone who, who works with people of older ages in that I am aware of can someone do what I have just asked them to do? Is this a reasonable thing? And am I providing them the right support? And so this book offers questions we can ask to to see how we are either facilitating or not learning environments. And it has samples as well as we get towards the end of the book, there is a section for reflection and repair and it has a whole sample questionnaire how to get feedback so that we can actually continue to grow forward. But as we get into the beginning of the book, the first pillar is self awareness. And it literally asks us to ask what is going on with me when I'm teaching. And I invite listeners to dig into that chapter and ask themselves those questions. I found it really helpful. The second pillar is interpersonal awareness. And this is where we're guided through considering our biases and how we unconsciously react. And we're tuning into our body ways we tense up, that we haven't been allowing oursel to pay attention to what our nervous system is doing and how that impacts our ability to teach and to learn. And that gets into some of the co regulation that you were just explaining. But it also talks about its opposite, which is co escalation. Can we talk a bit about co escalation?
- [21:23]
Dr. Nikki Elliott
Yes. So many times I would say I observe people with good heart and good intention have limited nervous system capacity. And that kind of sometimes goes back to the fact that so many people who work with young children themselves again have higher ACE scores or they are themselves neurodiverse, which makes their own nervous system more likely to be rigid or inflexible with change or uncertainty, have more of a demand for consistency and predictability and an environment where children cannot always provide consistency and predictability. And so if a child is stressed, then the adult voice is raised, then that pushes the child's nervous system higher and the behaviors become more extreme. And so that co escalation can become a thing. And then when the child now is having a full meltdown or throwing a chair, now the adult has the power, so they punish rather than the adult pausing to ask what did I do? That contributed to that, that situation, going from a level 2 to a level 10 escalation. Also too, we see a lot when disability gets conflated and intersects with race and gender. So for example, I've seen times where let's say an African American male student is approaching a teacher's desk and the teacher is sitting at her desk. And in this case it's a Caucasian teacher that I'm telling this story. And the student is just approaching her and he's walking up to ask for something to be checked. But when the student approaches, he visibly sees the teacher tense. So her jaw clenches, her hands tense, and she leans back away from him in the chair as if. And what she non verbally communicated to him was fear of him. And he's like, what? What did I do? All I did was walk up. Why are you looking scared? So then he was escalated from her nonverbal nervous system tensing of fear of a tall, large black male body standing over her desk. Then it starts an argument between them. But now again, she has the power to punish. He gets kicked out of class. And it's never reflected back on the fact which we did later. Why does your nervous system and your body tense and recoil and retreat when a black male body approaches you? And so that becomes the unconscious part of our nervous system. Reactivity that leads to the kind of escalations that we just see the behavior. But we didn't ask what happened before that that escalated that children are noticing. Wow, when a student that didn't look like me walked up to you, you leaned in, you softened, you smiled, you gave them a hug, you gave them a handshake. And so for that student, it signaled safety and connection to the teacher. But for the other student, they observed the non verbals that when I approach you, you don't smile, your face tenses up, you don't reach out your hand, you don't look at me with soft eyes, you frown, you, you clench your jaw, you ball your fists, you tense up in your chair and you back up away from me. So that is where this interpersonal awareness really comes in. Because so often again, this intersectionality of the intersection of race, gender, ability, socioeconomics, all of these things are engaging and interacting with us below our level of awareness. And they impact the end result of how we connect and relate and speak to children. And so that second pillar asks us to unpack all of that. And it's amazing. And it's not just white versus black, because at every level of identity I've even seen teachers of color have the similar nervous system reactivities to students of their own race, particularly when they are having unconscious biases around ability or sexual orientation toward students. So it becomes a very important part of our work to understand how we communicate felt safety through our non verbal engagement and connection with others.
- [25:34]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And the sixth pillar, which is mindful communication, builds on many of the skills that you start developing in your interpersonal awareness. And in the sixth pillar it reinforces what you've just been talking about, that it's not just what you say out loud and to interrogate your assumptions, to look at your frame of mind. I want to be mindful of how much time we have together today. The book is specifically hoping to support neurodiverse and marginalized children in their thriving. And so I'd like to talk about the third pillar with the time we have left, which is about neuro inclusive spaces. And you point out there that what young people need, adults need too. So it's A win win to create a neuro inclusive space. And you also state that these neuro inclusive spaces, they support all thriving and well being. So some people who are exhausted or burnt out might think well I'm doing a lot for the one or two who have an IEP or a 504 plan, but in fact this supports everybody including the teacher. Can we talk about neuro inclusive spaces please?
- [26:37]
Dr. Nikki Elliott
Yes, this actually after pillar number one, self awareness is the most critical pillar for any type of educator to be aware of when creating an environment where students can learn. So we know that at least 20 to 25% of students are identifying as neurodiverse. And whether that again is autism, adhd, dyslexia, sensory processing disorders, or again nervous systems that have been impacted by exposure to trauma. Sensory sensitivities are shown to be a significant part of many people's neurodiverse profiles. So for some that can be strong sensitivity to fluorescent lights. We know that for some autistic eyes can see the flickering and fluorescent lights that is not visible to a neurotypical person's eye. And over time that creates a strong taxation to the nervous system which then can be sending signals of danger that could make a person feel like they're being chased by a lion. And so if it's not your experience to be impacted by low tones in the environment, the sounds of H vac systems, projectors, high echoey buildings, they like building these warehouse type buildings that have tremendous echoes, that are very dysregulating and overwhelming to many of our neurodiverse learners. And so one thing that I promote with a lot of success is asking educators, as well as summer camp operators and people who operate temporary spaces like before and after school programs, to conduct a sensory profile. So in the book you'll see that we help scan for hypersensitivities and hyposensitivities. So hyperarousal means I get overwhelmed and I'm sensory avoiding. I need less sound, less light, less crowded spaces. Whereas conversely, hypoarousal means a person would be sensory seeking. I need bright lights, more sound, more stimulation, stronger touch, spinning around, hanging upside down. So understanding the sensory seeking or sensory avoiding profiles of children really helps adults design spaces that give more flexibility of seating, of placement and also more opportunities for movement for children, especially those with adhd, who actually need more arousal, more movement, more stimulation in order to settle their nervous systems enough to regulate and to be able to focus. So helping understand the sensory needs of the adult, because most adults design spaces for what feels good for them. And so we help them become more aware that while designing a space for their comfort can sometimes be the opposite of what a good third of the children and individuals they serving need. So then they learn to redesign their spaces to support those sensory needs. And from that we see significant reductions in overwhelmed behaviors.
- [29:42]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And the fourth pillar is called activated genius. And there's a section that starts on page 148 called Genius is not what we Think. So I'll invite readers into. Into that. And there's also a section about learning about the Theta state. The fifth pillar is engaged learning. And it takes us into what engaged learning is. And it really stresses that the brain cannot focus on survival and learning at the same time. And there's a good section on that that starts on page 170. In the fifth pillar, you'll see a chapter review that starts on page 193. And this is where it really takes us into what safety in a classroom is outside what pop culture says, but. But what it means to feel safe so that you can have engaged learning. And what it means as the teacher or the workshop leader for how we are leading things and our own reactions to when someone isn't learning at the pace that we expect or modeling what we think learning looks like. And so every chapter also has a self assessment section which goes through a review for listeners who want to get started right away. There's a section on self awareness questions that are on page 46 that take us right to it. We what is self awareness? And it's questions like what is happening in your nervous system right now? It takes you through your nervous system capacity and it gives you permission to really look at what works best for you. And you say there to lead others first lead yourself. It gives us permission to care for ourself as educators, which I think is something that is skipped in a lot of education training. We're starting to come to the very end of our time together. And one of the things that you say in the book is that the societal shift that you hope to see in your life lifetime is one toward celebrating neurodiversity. And the conclusion is called creating the world we wish to see. What is the world you wish to see, Dr. Elliott?
- [31:41]
Dr. Nikki Elliott
Thank you so much. The world that I wish to see is one that makes it foundational that any adult who touches the life of a child again, whether as a parent. I've. I've also had grandparents and aunts and uncles tell me, oh, wow, my grandchild is autistic. My nephew has adhd. My niece is dyslexic. I'm going to go buy a copy of your book. For my daughter, for my sister, for my brother. What? The world that I wish to see is a world where the grandparent, where the aunt, where the uncle will buy a copy of the book themselves and read the book and understand the principles so that they can fully include that grandchild, that niece, that nephew in their own life and in their own care. Because so often relationships are not formed within a family because people say, I don't know how to handle my autistic grandchild, so I just don't pick him up or he never comes to spend the weekend with me. I dream of a world where children who identify as Neurodiverse are fully included on sports teams, in summer camps, in Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, in before and after school programs, where every adult who touches the life of a child understands these basic principles of reimagining our relational spaces as well as our physical spaces, so that at least I believe 80% more of the children that we currently turn away can be fully integrated and supported in general education as well as in mainstream society, in Sunday school, in temple, in mosque, in all of the faith based family education spaces where they are currently turned away. I envision a world where no family ever hears, sorry, I was never trained to support your child.
- [33:35]
Dr. Christina Gessler
Thank you so much for being here today, Dr. Nikki Elliott, and sharing from your book Heart Centered seven essential skills for Helping Neurodiverse and Marginalized Children Thrive. You've been listening to the academic life. Please join us again.