My Hurricane Ian Lesson Plan — How to Help Students in a Natural Disaster

By Zainab Cheema 

A Florida Educator on Hurricane Ian

This week, my university (and just about everything else) in southwest Florida, got shut down because of Hurricane Ian. In a flurry of emails, my students informed me of their situations as deadlines shifted or got suspended. Needing to help their family in a red zone storm surge area. Having to evacuate with their family because they live in the predicted path of the storm’s eye. According to Jim Cantore, Ian is now a Category 4, trying it’s best to morph to a Category 5. It’s set to be one of the most powerful storms ever to hit the southwest Florida region. This got me to thinking—what is the best way to help students during and after a disaster?

Thanks to climate change, natural disasters are now the norm rather than the exception. In 2021, the Emergency Event Database recorded 432 disastrous events related to natural hazards worldwide. In 2020, there were 416 recorded events. As educators, our playbook for supporting our students (and ourselves) during and after a natural disaster must be ready to go. As hurricanes, floods, and wildfires increase, the concept of the resilient classroom and campus has become all the more crucial as schools and colleges become lifelines for students and for their larger communities (The Hechinger Report).

For educators, strong communication and letting students know of our care are key. Early on Monday, after reports first starting coming in about Hurricane Ian’s severity, I took the initiative to put all my classes on Zoom. In my email to my students, I informed that my decision was motivated by my desire to give them maximum flexibility to make their emergency plans. When my university announced on Tuesday that it would be closed for rest of the week, I was proactive in informing them and extending or temporarily suspending all deadlines this week. I also provided students with links to weather updates and state and federal emergency response organizations, while acknowledging the importance of their networks as they navigated this crisis. I monitored my inbox for updates from my university and Florida Emergency Response services, as well as emails from individual students. A simple email answering a question but in a way that lets the student know that their wellbeing matters to me can become a source of emotional support in the thick of the moment. My individual efforts and those of my colleagues are being reinforced by my university, which recently announced that all students who elected to stay on campus during Hurricane Ian had to move into university designated shelters where food and beverage services would be provided. All my educator friends and colleagues were doing variations of the above, along with juggling plans for our own survival. What else can we do?

What should Educators and Teachers do after a Natural Disaster? Surviving Hurricane Ian Together

For now, I’m trusting and sending out good energies that everyone makes it out okay. But I’m also thinking ahead about how to acknowledge and use Hurricane Ian in the classroom after everyone returns to school. Here is my gameplan for when we meet again in a Zoom or F2F classroom:

1. Self Care Module for Hurricane Ian

Self Care—Mental health help is key for students after surviving through a natural disaster like a hurricane. According to a 2016 American Psychological Association Study, 25% to 30% of students exposed to an extreme weather disaster are at risk of mental health effects. In my email to students before they return to classes and on the first day of class, I plan to share with them (through a downloadable powerpoint) the information of our campus counselling services, as well as free or low-cost community counselling organizations. I’ll include other tele-counselling services too, in case local services need some time to regroup in the wake of Hurricane Ian. Here is the list I plan to share with them, which you can adapt to fit the needs of your school or university or county.

1. 1. FGCU CAPS (Counseling and Psychological Services) – Florida Gulf Coast University’s student counseling service.
   2. FGCU Community Counseling Center – a service assisting the surrounding community of Florida Gulf Coast University
   3. Crisis Center of Tampa Bay — helping the Tampa Bay region, but they can also connect you with help through the right channels
   4. SAMHSA Disaster Distress Helpline – a national disaster distress helpline that can connect you with the resources you need.
   5. If you are a first responder, check out these helpful helplines (helping others means that you need to be extra careful about taking care of yourself)

2. Community Care after Hurricane Ian

Community Care—Talk to Students about how surviving a natural disaster means coming together and caring for one another as a community. Share some of your favorite strategies for helping others to get back on their feet. On a shared google Doc, I will include my favorite places for making donations to the university community and the surrounding communities. FGCU campus food pantry for hunger vulnerable students. As students often know of important community care organizations and services, I will ask them to put their favorite charities, organizations and services on there too. For now, here is what I am planning to share with them:

1. 1. FGCU Campus Pantry—Serves hunger vulnerable students, who will be all the more at risk after the hurricane ebbs. Other Florida schools and universities may also have campus pantries that you can donate to.
   2. The Harry Chapin Food Bank serves five counties in the Southwest Florida Region and will be supporting vulnerable families with food and other emergency supplies.
   3. The American Red Cross—The Red Cross has already set up the supplies and resources to distribute after Hurricane Ian. They are also supplying blood for individuals in critical condition.
   4. The Florida Disaster Fund will also be serving individuals and communities with disaster relief aid across the state of Florida.

3. My Lesson Plan for our First Day Back in the Classroom

My Hurricane Ian Lesson Plan: When we have experienced a natural disaster together, it’s important to use it rebuild community, foster resilience and learn from our common experiences. After covering my Self and Community Care modules, I will be using lesson plan on our first day back (please note that it is subject to change). These are the three steps. 

• Storytelling is a powerful way to build community, and it also doubles as talk therapy. In Step One, I plan to use the first 15 to 20 minutes of class to open up a space for students who wish to share their stories and experiences of Hurricane Ian. I’ll begin with a Google Form asking them to describe their experience in 1-3 words and then pop the results in a Word Cloud generator. Next, I’ll ask students to share their stories. In such scenarios, it’s important to stress that their participation in the story sharing activity is by choice – some students simply may not be in the right mental space to share their experiences. One possibility is to divide students into groups and then invite groups to share with the whole classroom. For the educator, improvisation and adaptation is key in this lesson plan— if the classroom vibe is that students are not ready to talk, proceed with the regular curriculum-based lesson plan. Sometimes simply providing structure and an external goal to focus on (like Shakespeare’s Othello or The Mahabharata in my case) proves to be the most therapeutic choice. Alternatively, students may wish to use the entire classroom to talk through and process their experiences, which is fine too.

• Resilience: If my students end up being in the right mind space for the Hurricane Ian Lesson Plan, here is Step two. I will be introducing students to the work of psychologist and Holocaust Survivor Viktor Frankl. Frankl is most well-known for his powerful book, Man’s Search for Meaning, where he distills the lesson that he learned in the camps about survival and the human spirit. Examining his own experiences and those of other prisoners, Frankl found that our survival was linked to our human ability to make meaning out of our suffering. To come up for ourselves (often in a piecemeal fashion) with the value-endowed story about traumatic events or experiences that seem to escape the very scale of human comprehension. Frankl found that the prisoners who lost their hope and who were no longer able to orient themselves towards the future in their stories were the ones who weren’t able to survive till the camps’ liberation. Citing Nietzsche, Frankl believed that “He who has a strong enough why can bear almost any how.” Trauma is recurring and often doesn’t even physically register until some time past the event. Healing is process that takes time – rebuilding our bodies, minds and stories are acts that we need to return to again and again. But sometimes getting started in a supportive community (and once more, only with choice), can start the process. 
  • Here’s a short video with clips of Frankl’s speech that you can use in your classrooms
  • Consider accompanying it with Diane Coutu’s article, “How Resilience Works”

• Reflection Activity: In Step 3 of this lesson plan, I will be assigning students to write a blog or write a Canvas Discussion Post on the following Reflection Question: How does Frankl’s theory of story and meaning-making apply to your experience in Hurricane Ian? What aspects of his story did you relate to and why? What aspects didn’t apply to you? What is your story (individually or collectively) during and after Ian? Has Ian changed or reinforced your perspective on things in any way? What is most important for you at this time? What is less important for you at this time? Write and respond to the posts of at least 2 other peers. [I plan to make this activity extra credit, because once again, some students may not be in the right mind space to share].

If you liked this blog post, you’ll love my newsletter—sign up today. You’ll find the sign-up box on this webpage under “About Me.” I publish my newsletter on a bi-monthly basis. It’s full of additional content you won’t find on the blog—info-rich summaries, e-resources, book reviews, and cutting-edge ideas for the educator and businessperson of tomorrow. It won’t clutter your inbox, but it will give you an edge over the competition.