What Is Trauma-Informed Teaching?

When students have experienced trauma, learning comes second to feeling safe. As more kids come to school with trauma and the behaviors that accompany it, teachers are responding. The situation is severe. In 2021, the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and Children’s Hospital Association declared a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In many ways, kids have not changed. Many children have experienced traumatic events in their lives, and they will bring their feelings and reactions to those events into the classroom. But in other ways, this moment in education is different. Kids are dealing with more traumatic events, and the aftereffects of living through the COVID-19 pandemic are producing more mental health crises in kids.

As a teacher or school leader, it’s important to understand what trauma is and how trauma-informed teaching can help your students.

What is trauma?

Trauma, simply put, is how someone responds emotionally to a negative event. The event could be an accident, a natural disaster, a family problem, or anything that makes someone feel unsafe and unstable. It could be a onetime occurrence, like a tornado that damages a town, or an ongoing event, as when a child experiences child abuse. Ongoing trauma, like being abused or experiencing a traumatic event across a long period, creates toxic stress.

Families Thrive

One way to think about trauma is thinking about adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). ACEs include experiences like physical or sexual abuse, emotional neglect, exposure to domestic violence, or substance abuse. The research suggests that the more ACEs a child experiences, the greater their risk for immediate and long-term effects on behavior, health, and other outcomes.

In addition to ACEs, other factors like experiencing a natural disaster, structural inequality, and community violence also play a factor in how kids grow up, and they contribute to how they respond to their environment and events. These can also contribute to trauma.

How common is trauma?

Trauma is very common in kids. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administrations (SAMHSA) reports that “more than two thirds of children reported at least 1 traumatic event by age 16.”

What are the impacts of trauma?

When a child experiences a traumatic event, they’ll have a fight-or-flight response. This adrenaline-filled reaction will make them either freeze or react. After experiencing a traumatic event, kids may feel shock or denial and have some negative emotions about it. A child may replay a car accident in their mind, for example, or experience headaches or panic attacks. It may take time for a child to move past even one traumatic event.

According to the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, children who experience ongoing trauma may experience difficulties across their lives in a range of areas including:

Relationships

Kids may experience difficulty in relationships with adults and peers.
They may have difficulty trusting others.
They may have difficulty regulating their emotions.

Physical Health

Kids’ brains and nervous systems may be impacted by trauma.
They may over- or under-respond to sensory stimuli, like sounds, smells, touch, or light.
They may have chronic complaints like stomachaches or headaches.
Kids may have more chronic health conditions in the long term.

Emotional

Students may externalize or internalize stress and may experience depression, anxiety, or anger.
They may demonstrate unpredictable or explosive behaviors and reactions and have difficulty calming down.
They may have difficulty managing their emotions.

Dissociation

If a child has become used to dissociating, or distancing themselves mentally from their situation, they may dissociate during stressful situations.

Cognition and Learning

Students may have trouble thinking clearly or problem-solving.
They may become accustomed to being under stress and won’t be able to think through situations.

Self-Concept and Future Orientation

Kids may demonstrate shame, guilt, low self-esteem, or poor self-image.
Their negative thoughts may impact their ability to function at home or school.
They may feel powerless to impact their surroundings or experiences.

How does trauma impact students in the classroom?

For children who experience toxic stress, even small interactions between peers or situations that don’t seem “triggering” to you could be a reminder of previous trauma. Kids who have experienced trauma see the world as a dangerous place, so their brains are on high alert and may overreact, resulting in behaviors and shutting down their availability to learn.

How a child behaves in the classroom may be a response to trauma. At school, a child who has experienced trauma may have unpredictable or explosive emotions. They may have outsized reactions to even small events. Or they may shut down and become “zoned out.” Any of these behaviors can impact their learning and relationships at school.

Trauma can affect basic learning too. For example, during lessons, students who have experienced trauma may have problems thinking clearly or reasoning. Their brains may be so focused on surviving that they aren’t able to concentrate on learning or taking in new information. Their distraction may impact how they follow directions or remember what to do from task to task.

In the long run, students who have experienced trauma may face more high-risk behaviors that can also impact their functioning in school.

What does it mean to be trauma-informed?

The first step to helping students who’ve experienced trauma is being trauma-informed. First and foremost, this means being curious about what a student’s behavior is telling you. What does their behavior tell you about what they’ve experienced? What does it tell you about what they need right now?

Once you’re asking the right questions, being trauma-informed means knowing and applying strategies and techniques to help students calm down and stay regulated. It means using your knowledge of how the brain responds to build relationships with students, create classroom community, and help students be ready to learn.

If you’d like to learn more and be able to apply your knowledge to support students, check out Starr’s Certified Trauma & Resilience Specialist (CTRS) training. Through this training, you’ll learn about how trauma and toxic stress impact learning, and how resilience can support students’ outcomes. Then, you’ll be able to diagnose behavior and create a culture where students thrive. Learn more and register at the Starr website.

How can educators incorporate trauma-informed teaching?

For students who have experienced trauma, school can be overwhelming. Conversely, it can be the place where they feel safe and build important skills, like resilience and cognitive flexibility. Being a trauma-informed teacher means starting with classroom culture and then responding to student behaviors with curiosity and problem-solving.

Focus on building a nurturing, safe classroom environment.
Add a calming corner with clear procedures for how students access it.
Build mind-body techniques into daily instruction. Mind-body techniques, such as yoga sequences, brain breaks, and movement breaks, can help a child bring their body into a calmer place.
Teach cognitive flexibility, or being able to think in different ways and think of different solutions. You can do this by posing questions that ask students to consider how others are feeling. Ask: What did that character think? What were they feeling when they made that decision?
Build resilience, or the ability to move through a challenging event and have a positive outcome by encouraging students to try new things, and supporting students who need additional help to do this.
Encourage a growth mindset by pointing out when students’ hard work paid off.
Teach that mistakes and failures are opportunities for growth and learning. Encourage students to reframe mistakes as opportunities.
Reframe the conversation. When a child acts out, the knee-jerk reaction may be to ask what’s wrong with them. Instead, reframe your questions to focus on what happened by asking, What’s going on with the student? What does the student need? How can I help?

What does a trauma-informed school look and feel like?

When school is a safe place for all kids, students who have experienced trauma build important skills as well. Across a school, being trauma-informed means that, according to SAMHSA, all adults:

Realize the impact of trauma on students
Understand and can recognize trauma symptoms
Respond to trauma while keeping students safe
Avoid re-traumatizing a student or adding to their stress

Teachers who are trauma-informed create routines and classroom environments that promote safety. They focus on the behaviors we want to see from kids, and use restorative language to address negative behaviors. Educators use a variety of trauma-informed teaching strategies to help students stay regulated and focused, like limited choice and sensory tools. There are calming corners in each classroom to help students who are dysregulated calm down.

Creating a trauma-informed school takes work, and partnering with an organization known for excellence in the field is one way to do it right. Starr Commonwealth offers a Trauma-Informed and Resilience-Focused accredited school program that provides the coaching, support, and information to school teams so that they can bring successful trauma-informed teaching to their schools.

How does trauma-informed teaching benefit students?

Since 2017, Starr has worked with schools in its Resilient Schools Project to create safe, supportive environments where teachers are trauma-informed and students can thrive. In general, Starr has found that schools that incorporate trauma-informed teaching see improved student social-emotional skills, improved student behavior, greater academic achievement, and improved collaboration between teachers and staff.

Specifically, schools that participated in Starr’s Resilient Schools Project reported:

A 40% decrease in major referrals
A 49% decrease in minor referrals
A 58% decrease in suspensions
An increase in staff self-reported self-efficacy around supporting students
An increase in staff reporting that relationships are foundational for working with students who have experienced trauma