Alyssa Hadley Dunn is director of teacher education and an associate professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education, but just a month ago she was teaching at Michigan State. Her research has focused on how inequity and trauma can affect learning, and she wrote a book, Teaching on Days After, designed for educators grappling with how to deal with tragedies or upsetting world events.

Alyssa Hadley Dunn, an education professor at Michigan State until a month ago, said she had taught another student who had also survived the Sandy Hook shooting. That student had written something for Dr. Dunn’s book on how educators should handle the days after tragedies on campus.

Sandra Chafouleas, a professor at the UConn Neag School of Education, said she believed the increase in weapons was a signal that students’ “needs aren’t being met” — and specifically the need for connection.

“Belonging, social connection, feeling [a] sense of mastery … kids bring weapons to school because they’re not feeling those things or because they’ve learned it or modeled it as acceptable behavior in other spaces,” she said.

“Whenever a mass shooting takes place in schools, public discussion often focuses on laws or policies that might have prevented the tragedy. But averting school violence needs more than gun policy. It requires both prevention and crisis response that take students’ emotional well-being – not just their physical safety – into account,” say authors Sandra Chafouleas and Amy Briesch.