Helping Educators and Staff Become Knowledgeable About Childhood Trauma and Its Impact on Learning
The Center for Special Education at Lesley University is developing a training program that supports school educators and staff to become knowledgeable about childhood trauma and its impact on learning.
In partnership with Massachusetts Advocates for Children and Harvard Law School, as well as the Oak Foundation, Lesley is working to create a sequence of courses explicitly designed for school-based educators, administrators, and other staff, that focuses on trauma.
The Impact of Trauma on Learning: An Overview
This course will examine the impact of traumatic experience on student learning (both academic and social/emotional) and provide a structured approach to individual and school wide interventions. The biological, environmental, and socio-cultural aspects of traumatic experience will be presented, and participants will analyze the effects of their work with students impacted by traumatic experience on their own well being (secondary trauma). Download a course evaluation report [pdf].
The Impact of Trauma on Learning: Classroom and Student Supports
Trauma affects self-regulation, social skills and a child's sense of health and well being, along with interfering with more traditional academic skills that require language, memory and executive function. This course will address ways to promote these non-academic and academic competencies for students impacted by trauma, including which competencies can be incorporated into the learning flow of the classroom (as they benefit all children) and which are best taught with an individual support plan
Practices For Building Trauma Sensitivity
Using the Flexible Framework from Helping Traumatized Children Learn as their guide, educators enrolled in Lesley University’s trauma courses have recommended the following practices:
Identify and share interests.
Discovering children’s interests can be key to building a relationship with them, especially if they feel less confident or successful or engaged in school. To assist in this process, ask everyone in the school (students, teachers, administrators, and staff) to fill in a visual representation (e.g., 2 intersecting circles) with his or her interests. Then post them for all to see.
Use a morning meeting to create a predictable and consistent environment for learning.
Predictability and consistency can help all children to learn, but are especially important for those who have experienced trauma. Morning meeting times provide students with a clear and consistent start to their day, and when the meeting time is used to preview the day’s events and activities, surprises are minimized and transitions are easier.
Create a classroom “calming area."
High levels of arousal can make it difficult for anyone to learn. But traumatized children are not always able to recognize or say when they are having this experience. By making a space in your classroom for every child to go to when they feel hyperaroused, anxious or vulnerable, you are providing children with the opportunity to learn how to identify these feelings and to better regulate them.
Use a “hot spot” map to ensure safety.
Physical and psychological safety is a cornerstone of a trauma-sensitive school. To promote safety, create a “hot spot” map to identify areas in and around the school for troublesome behavior. Make those areas known to administrators, teachers, and staff. Develop plans for making these areas safe. Monitor success in implementing your plans.
Plan and set priorities for improvement.
Developing trauma sensitivity requires assessing a school’s strengths and identifying areas where teachers and staff see needs. Teams enrolled in Lesley University’s courses on trauma have found it helpful to use a tool developed by Lesley’s Center for Special Education and the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative of Massachusetts Advocates for Children and the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School.
Download the Trauma-Sensitive School Checklist.