Trauma Informed Schools

1. Introduction

The Trauma Informed School's perspective includes looking at challenging behaviors as ways for students to cope with traumatic experiences. At times, stress behavior is misinterpreted as maladaptive behavior. Trauma Informed Practices seek to alter perspectives by examining all behavior as stress behavior first by changing the question from: 

 ...what is wrong with you? 

to 

...what has happened to you? 

This change in question helps to frame the teacher’s perspective towards the student.

Trauma Informed Schools focus on environmental changes that promote a positive school climate and culture.  A positive school climate and culture creates a safe environment for students to be able to express their fears, anxieties, and struggles without judgment.  It establishes a sense of belonging and creates an environment where emotional sharing and expression become safer and more acceptable.

2. There are four (4) pillars of trauma informed schools

There are four different pillars of addressing trauma.

1. Safe Environment
2. Belonging
3. Social Emotional Behavioral competences
4. Regulation. 

Pillar 1: Safe Environment 

A safe environment refers to a school’s climate and culture. On a universal levels, schools need to possess a positive climate and culture where students feel safe learning, exploring and expressing themselves. Staff also want to work in an environment that feels safe and is secure.

Pillar 2: Belonging 

Schools that create a since of belonging, a basic need as indicated by Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs for each individual student, typically have better student attendance and fewer student behavioral challenges.  A sense of belonging also communicates safety and security. One way to create a sense of belonging is to give every student a job in the classroom environment that is unique to the student. Internal motivation can then come from the student knowing that if they are not attending school that their job is not getting done.

When teachers frequently or repeatedly send a student from the classroom to the office this communicates to the student that they are not wanted and do not belong to the class. It also might communicate that the teacher is not willing to deal with the student. The idea that teacher is unwilling to deal with the student sends a message to the student that the teacher cannot keep me safe, and it is not safe to express and share my struggles with the teacher.

Pillar 3: Social Emotional Behavioral Competencies 

With Social Emotional Behavioral competencies, it has been said that content knowledge can be what gets you a job, however it is the Social Emotional Behavioral Competencies that allow you to keep the job. Students need to know how to get along with each other, how to resolve conflicts and how to problem solve situations. There are several different social skills more commonly referred to as Social Emotional Learning (SEL).  SEL knowledge and skill helps students be successful in developing relationships, making decisions and navigating the process of learning.

Pillar 4: Regulation 

The last pillar of Trauma-informed care is regulation of emotions. Emotional regulation is a learned skill that does not come naturally. The only way to learn how to regulate your emotions is through a process called co-regulation where regulation skills are modeled by adults within the child's environment.

3. Provide choices

Flexibility and choice are important with the Trauma Informed perspective, moving away from ridged systems that do not tolerate individual student needs. Many times, students feel like they are told what to do all day long and how to do it, that everything is dictated to them. When it comes to being flexible and giving students choices, it's about looking at how many small choices can I give them across the day.  Some examples would include:  

1) Would you like to write with the red pencil or a yellow pencil, or green pencil? You could write with the crayon or marker, or a colored pencil.

 2) Do you want to write on lined paper or unlined paper? 

3) Do you want to use the red eraser, or the yellow eraser? 

Students need to be provided with many different choices over the course of the school day. It is also important to increase the student awareness of the number of choices that they make each day.

4. Automated Behaviors

Trauma Informed Practice also promotes the understanding that sometimes challenging behavior might be an automated response. This automated behavioral response is sometimes referred to as amygdala hijacking. The amygdala is an almond shaped part of the brain, that takes over for the purpose of survival, activating the body’s survival mechanism. When the survival system is activated, the prefrontal cortex is not accessible.   For survival, a response without thought is needed.  If we have to think about what our response, this might not end well and could result in indecision.

The limbic system which includes the amygdala is your emotional response system that triggers your fight, flight, or freeze responses. Research has shown that the limbic system also stores and activates repetitive patterns of behavior from past situations where safety was indicated and successfully obtained. From the trauma informed perspective, it is important to replace socially inappropriate stored patterns of behaviors with more socially appropriate patterns of behavior that meet the same need of promoting physical and emotional safety. It takes more repetitions than normal to get the limbic system to store these new patterns. The new patterns are only stored if they result in feelings of physical and emotional safety.

5. Positive Discipline

Trauma Informed Practice includes the use of positive discipline that is instructional and restorative.  Positive discipline is all about shifting from the concept of a one size fits all student discipline process, where the focus in on what rules have been broken, to individualizing student discipline. This shift is achieved by utilizing a continuum of responses that are meaningful to the student and focuses the attention on repairing the harm done and rebuilding damaged relationships.  

6. Practice VS Treatment

There are two main aspects to Trauma Informed Practices. The first is a system-wide approach, that we have discussed so far.  It is organized around the goal of addressing the trauma-based needs, prioritizing physical and emotional safety, building trust, maximizing student choice, and focusing on empowerment and skill building for students and staff thereby building resiliency.

The second aspect is trauma treatment which refers to treatment specifically designed to treat trauma symptoms (e.g., Trauma Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Parent-Child Interaction Therapy, Trauma Systems Therapy) which can be included within a trauma-informed approach, when necessary. Trauma informed treatment is only a small portion of Trauma Informed Practices.

7. Research

The research on Trauma Informed Practices indicates that trauma informed schools have made an impact on the use of Restraints and Time-outs.

• Trauma-informed care (TIC) is receiving growing interest and support as a promising approach to reducing the use of restrictive measures (restraints, seclusions and time-outs) in children and youth living in residential care.

• This study adds to the evidence on TIC staff training as a promising approach to reducing the use of restrictive measures on children and youth in residential care. Descriptive data indicated there were reductions in the number of restraints (41.82%), seclusions (19.91%) and time-outs (48.15%) following the initial training; in other words, there were about half as many restraints and time-outs per child over a year.