Teaching With Strengths in Trauma-Affected Students: A New Approach to Healing and Growth in the Classroom

Tom Brunzell, Lea Waters, and Helen Stokes

Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne.

The National Child Traumatic Stress Network in the United States reports that up to 40% of students have experienced, or been witness to, traumatic stressors in their short lifetimes. These include home destabilisation, violence, neglect, sexual abuse, substance abuse, death, and other adverse childhood experiences. The effects of trauma on a child severely compound the ability to self-regulate and sustain healthy relationships. In the classroom, the effects of trauma may manifest as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, conduct disorder, oppositional defiance disorder, reactive attachment, disinhibited social engagement, and/or acute stress disorders.

In this article, we contend that the classroom can be positioned as a powerful place of intervention for posttraumatic healing both in the context of special education and in main- stream classrooms that contain trauma- affected students. The current landscape of trauma-informed practice for primary and secondary classrooms has focused on teaching practices that seek to repair emotional dysregulation and fix broken attachment. In working for more than a decade with mainstream and specialist schools, we have discovered that positive psychology has a role to play in contributing to trauma-informed learning. We argue that combining trauma- informed approaches with positive psychology will empower and enable teachers to promote both healing and growth in their classrooms. This article presents scientific and practice-based evidence to support our claim. We present education interventions aimed to build positive emotions, character strengths, resilient mindsets, and gratitude, and show how these can be embedded in the daily routines of classroom learning to assist struggling students.

Trauma and Students

Trauma has been described as an over- whelming experience that can forever alter one’s belief that the world is good and safe. A simple trauma can be defined as a short- occurrence or one-time event that threatens bodily injury or serious harm (e.g., accidents or natural disasters), which can be accompanied by a social innovations response such as coordinated support from civic organisations. Complex trauma, sometimes referred to as relationship trauma, describes traumatic exposure that can be longer in duration and involve multiple incidents, ongoing personal threat, violence, and violation. Examples include child abuse, neglect, bullying, and sexual or domestic violence. In simple trauma, the victim often receives little blame. For complex traumas, however, the social innovations response may be morally ambiguous or cloaked in shame. In these cases, the child does not receive the same kind of immediate care response given following simple trauma and is often implicated or blamed for the trauma.

The American Psychiatric Association advises that directly experiencing a trauma, witnessing a traumatic stressor, learning about trauma events, or exposure to adverse details can lead to enduring, debilitating conditions such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Childhood PTSD can have significant effects on child development, including problems with self-regulation, aggression, attention, dissociation, and physical and motor problems. As part of the PTSD response, the child’s acute alarm reaction when perceiving external threat triggers the body’s stress response systems. When this system is repeatedly triggered it damages key neurological and psychological systems in the long term.

As a consequence of the neurological and psychological damage resulting from trauma, trauma has been shown to lead to disadvantages in a child’s educational journey. Robert F. Anda and colleagues conducted a large epidemiological study of adults who reported adverse childhood experiences in their youth. The study was funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the sample was sourced in a large HMO. The study found that individuals who experienced childhood abuse were more likely to have been suspended or expelled, failed a grade, have lower academic achievement assessments, be at significant risk for language delays, and be assigned to special education. Given these alarming rates of school struggle and failure, teachers must have the strategies and support needed to meet the complex needs that students bring to the classroom.

The Need for a Trauma-Informed Teaching Approach

It is important for children who experience trauma to receive therapy by qualified psychologists, psychiatrists, and/or social workers. However, many students and their families lack access, motivation, and ability to successfully participate in therapy and follow treatment plans. For most senior secondary students, access and adherence to treatment may be lacking, but those same young people will choose to attend school in an attempt to meet their needs for social belongingness and opportunities to improve themselves. Help can be gained in some instances by school-based counselling, but we also suggest that teachers are well placed to be front-line trauma healers in the context of the classroom. Although teachers are not therapists or clinicians, and are nei- ther trained nor prepared to delve into personal trauma histories with their students, there are techniques they can use that can have a healing effect. Indeed, the very relationship they form with students can be a key element of healing in and of itself. We believe that schools can be healing institutions—in addition to academic institutions for the 40% of the student population who are adversely affected by trauma.

Effective classroom teaching approaches must address these underdeveloped neural pathways before attempting to teach in ways that require higher regions in the brain needed for the cognitive integration and memory required in successful academic learning. This statement is based on foundational understandings of trauma’s effects on stress activation and the regulatory capacities of the body’s most basic functions such as heart rate, body temperature, and blood pressure. Indeed,classroom learning depends on a well organised and regulated brain or at the very least, moments of regulatory alignment allowing students to access neural resources to meet developmentally appropriate and challenging classroom tasks. To gain a comprehensive understanding of trauma-informed models, we completed a review of the last decade of therapeutic principles adapted for teachers working with trauma-affected students. We found that existing trauma-informed education models include two broad intervention areas for trauma-affected classrooms: healing the dysregulated stress response and addressing attachment capacity. 

(The above article is an abridged version to comply with copyright terms)