Fostering Resilient Learners

Strategies for Creating a Trauma-Sensitive Classroom

Kristin Souers, Pete Hall

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781416621102
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this galvanizing book for all educators, Kristin Souers and Pete Hall explore an urgent and growing issue--childhood trauma--and its profound effect on learning and teaching. Grounded in research and the authors' experience working with trauma-affected students and their teachers, Fostering Resilient Learners will help you cultivate a trauma-sensitive learning environment for students across all content areas, grade levels, and educational settings. The authors--a mental health therapist and a veteran principal--provide proven, reliable strategies to help you * Understand what trauma is and how it hinders the learning, motivation, and success of all students in the classroom.
* Build strong relationships and create a safe space to enable students to learn at high levels.
* Adopt a strengths-based approach that leads you to recalibrate how you view destructive student behaviors and to perceive what students need to break negative cycles.
* Head off frustration and burnout with essential self-care techniques that will help you and your students flourish. Each chapter also includes questions and exercises to encourage reflection and extension of the ideas in this book. As an educator, you face the impact of trauma in the classroom every day. Let this book be your guide to seeking solutions rather than dwelling on problems, to building relationships that allow students to grow, thrive, and--most assuredly--learn at high levels.

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Part I

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Trauma

Children are like wet cement. Whatever falls on them makes an impression.
—Haim Ginnot
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Pete and I talk a great deal about how we're in the middle of a "perfect storm" for education. Public accountability for educators is at an all-time high. Teachers are absorbing the blows of new evaluation systems, the advent of Common Core State Standards, debates over merit pay, rampant loss of tenure and job security, widespread fear of school shootings and security issues, the growing ranks of families in poverty, and a host of other challenges. That list doesn't even include our mandate to educate every child who walks through our doors, including the hungry, the angry, the anxious, the lonely, the tired, and the trauma-affected.

No one disagrees that students should be held to the highest standard of learning. Where conflict tends to occur is in how we tackle that goal. For many young people who have experienced trauma, success—academic or otherwise—seems out of reach. How do we support students who arrive at school affected by trauma and other not-OK experiences? How do we provide environments that are safe and predictable and motivational for learning?

Before we answer these questions, it is important to acknowledge some fundamental truths:

1. Trauma is real.
2. Trauma is prevalent. In fact, it is likely much more common than we care to admit.
3. Trauma is toxic to the brain and can affect development and learning in a multitude of ways.
4. In our schools, we need to be prepared to support students who have experienced trauma, even if we don't know exactly who they are.
5. Children are resilient, and within positive learning environments they can grow, learn, and succeed.

Those of us working in the caregiving field have long seen the effects that trauma has on young people. We have said, "I think this is a really big deal," and we were right. Thanks to the pioneering research of Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda and their colleagues (Felitti et al., 1998), who launched a landmark study investigating how ACEs contribute negatively to overall health, this globally significant issue can no longer be ignored. This study and those that followed opened our eyes to the fact that trauma is bigger than just a mental health issue—it's everyone's issue. After all, the adults providing services to youth are affected by their students' trauma; what's more, they are equally likely to have experienced trauma themselves.

It follows, then, that the issue of trauma pertains to you, the reader, as well as to your most vulnerable students. Now I'll ask you to be reflective: why did you choose this profession? What motivated you to enter the field, and what keeps you here? My colleagues and I ask these questions often in our trainings and consulting work. It is a powerful and foundational way to start connecting to those we work with. Many educators I've worked with reply that they believe they were "born to do this," that they understand what children need, and that they want to be able to address those needs in a helpful way. Some do it because they experienced trauma themselves and can empathize or connect with children who may also be experiencing adversity, while others had a positive experience with an educational professional and want to provide the same for the next generation. Others enter the field because their own experiences in education were not positive, and they want to provide students with a better experience than their own. Some are still searching for the answers to these questions. Take a moment and think of your own answers: why are you here, and why do you stay?

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Chapter 1

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Understanding Trauma and the Prevalence of the Not-OK

It is an ultimate irony that at the time when the human is most vulnerable to the effects of trauma—during infancy and childhood—adults generally presume the most resilience. (Perry, Pollard, Blakley, Baker, & Vigilante, 1995)

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From the Outside In…and the Inside Out

As a mental health therapist with more than two decades of experience working with children and families, I have seen firsthand the struggles that affect people's happiness, relationships, and coping ability. Not surprisingly, these struggles bleed into the school environment. Collaborating closely with education professionals, principals, teachers, and counselors, I know that students' complicated, stressful lives can create conditions that present massive obstacles to learning.

Educators have long known that what happens outside school can have a profound effect on what happens in school. When the Equality of Educational Opportunity Study was published in 1966, lead researcher James Coleman concluded that the home environment was more predictive of student success than was schooling (Coleman et al., 1966). The "Coleman Study" was an important piece of the educational sociology puzzle and opened the door for further investigation into the external factors that influence academic achievement.

Early research into this phenomenon included explorations of the racially biased orientation of the school institution, student IQ, parental attitudes about school, socioeconomic status, parents' educational attainment, access to resources, vocabulary development, primary language, structures for completing homework and studying, diet and exercise, and student motivation, among other factors. A full library's worth of research explained why some students were successful in school and others weren't (see Hattie, 2009, for a meta-analysis of external factors affecting student achievement).

As an educator, you don't need a peer-edited research article to validate what your gut and your experience have already told you is true: a student's life outside school matters.

What Is Trauma?

Let's explore the idea of trauma in a little more depth. The word itself has gained a great deal of attention in recent years, although not without a significant amount of misunderstanding. In 1980, when post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was first included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), the diagnosis focused on a list of narrowly defined catastrophic events (e.g., war, torture, rape, natural disasters, plane crashes) rather than what may be defined as ordinary stressors (e.g., divorce, poverty, serious illness). Recent revisions of the manual (DSM-5 was published in 2013), however, acknowledge the wide range of environmental, interpersonal, and experiential events that result in similar trauma-induced symptoms (Friedman, 2013). As the term trauma has become more mainstream, its definition has become broader and varies across fields. For the purposes of this book, I go by the following definition:

Trauma is an exceptional experience in which powerful and dangerous events overwhelm a person's capacity to cope. (Rice & Groves, 2005, p. 3)

(If you arrived here from the study guide and wish to return, please click here)

The term complex trauma was first explored in 2003 by the National Child Traumatic Stress Network's Complex Trauma Task Force, a collective of professionals representing a dozen universities, hospitals, trauma centers, and health programs across the United States. This term emerged from the recognition that many people experience multiple adversities over the course of their lifetime. The task force's concise and useful definition of complex trauma appears in the white paper Complex Trauma in Children and Adolescents:

Complex trauma exposure refers to the simultaneous or sequential occurrences of child maltreatment—including emotional abuse and neglect, sexual abuse, physical abuse, and witnessing domestic violence—that are chronic and begin in early childhood…. Complex trauma outcomes refer to the range of clinical symptomatology that appears after such exposures. (Cook, Blaustein, Spinazzola, & van der Kolk, 2003, p. 5)

Note that these definitions focus on the impact of the events, not the nature of the events. Although some events (the death of a parent or surviving the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, for example) may warrant a label of trauma in their own right, we all respond differently to trauma. Our own experiences and interpretations influence the degree of impact we feel following exposure to a traumatic event.

More Than Their Story

When schools first started integrating trauma awareness about 10 years ago, they tended to emphasize the events themselves and the details of those experiences. Educators and other professionals felt compelled to learn a student's "story" as a means of understanding his or her behavior. That approach often led to getting caught up in the trauma narrative rather than supporting and understanding the effect of that event on the young person. It's not that a person's story isn't important, but educators don't always have the luxury of knowing the story. We do, however, see the story's lingering effects.

For instance, let's say I work with two children who have had similar traumatic experiences: they both have a parent who has been incarcerated for the last two years, and they rarely get to see that parent. Although that life event is devastating for us to consider, the two young people have dramatically different responses: one is unable to process the reality and shuts down whenever something evokes a memory of his parent, while the other functions relatively well, compensating by building a stronger bond with the remaining parent. It is much more helpful for me to monitor the effect of the event on each individual, not to preoccupy myself with the details of the event itself.

This shift in perspective prompts us to be more sensitive to that effect and thus better foster healing and growth. Moreover, by altering our approach, we can begin to see students as more than their story. All too often, we reduce students to their experiences and make decisions about their capabilities based on those experiences. Changing our focus enables us to concentrate on nurturing the whole child and creating trauma-sensitive learning environments for all students.

ACEs Wild

In the late 1990s, Dr. Robert Anda and Dr. Vincent Felitti led a collaborative project between the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Preventive Medicine at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego, California, to explore the relationship between children's emotional experiences and their subsequent mental and physical health as adults. This groundbreaking research (Felitti et al., 1998) revealed a strong correlation between adverse childhood experiences and adult health and, perhaps more significantly, signaled that these ACEs were far more prevalent than previously thought.

What constitutes an ACE? Many of us can probably come up with some ideas, but the initial eight ACEs that Felitti and colleagues studied were

• Substance abuse in the home.
• Parental separation or divorce.
• Mental illness in the home.
• Witnessing domestic violence.
• Suicidal household member.
• Death of a parent or another loved one.
• Parental incarceration.
• Experience of abuse (psychological, physical, or sexual) or neglect (emotional or physical).

Many would argue now, and I would agree, that the list is not complete and should include other experiences, such as exposure to a natural disaster, criminal behavior in the home, terminal or chronic illness of a family member, military deployment of a family member, war exposure, homelessness, and victimization or bullying.

Despite this limitation, the details of the original ACE Study are fascinating. Anda and Felitti collected data from more than 17,000 adult patients who were insured by the major insurance provider in Southern California (Kaiser Permanente), tallying how many ACEs from the list each respondent had experienced. Each ACE listed was given a value of 1, so individuals reporting none of the above would have an ACE score of 0, whereas those who experienced all of the ACEs would have a score of 8. The researchers found that more than half of their subjects had experienced at least one ACE during their youth. Roughly 25 percent had experienced multiple ACEs, and 1 in 16 had an ACE score of 4 or above (Felitti et al., 1998). Not only did this study's result shock the belief systems of many people working in the caregiving fields, but it also helped dispel the myth that trauma happens only in populations of poverty. Although living in poverty increases the likelihood of ACE exposure, poverty itself is not considered an adverse childhood experience. This study supported what many of us already knew: trauma does not discriminate. It happens everywhere—across all races, religions, socioeconomic levels, and family systems.

One of the more profound implications of this study was the acknowledgment of the prevalence of trauma in our society. One might even hypothesize that these numbers were low estimates of the actual occurrences, owing to social taboos against seeking or sharing this type of information and the fact that the traumatic experiences were self-reported. In fact, in two similar studies (Breslau, Kessler, & Chilcoat, 1998; Burns, 2005), more than 90 percent of respondents reported at least one lifetime traumatic event. These studies have been replicated with hundreds of thousands of subjects and across several arenas (including, for example, health care, education, and military), but the results remain consistent. These findings have been so powerful that many states are incorporating ACE awareness into their state studies and census data.

Effect of ACEs on Adult Health

The original ACE Study investigated the relationship between ACEs and overall health and found, quite simply, that the higher an individual's ACE score was, the more likely it was that he or she would adopt or present with significant health-concerning outcomes, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, hepatitis, sexually transmitted disease, intravenous drug use, depression, obesity, attempted suicide, or early death. In fact, there is a clear "dose effect," meaning the likelihood of having physical or mental health issues later in life increases in direct correlation to an individual's ACE score (Felitti et al., 1998).

Those working in the medical and mental health fields have long known that trauma exposure is toxic to the human body, and the ACE Study gave health professionals permission to begin to significantly address this issue on a global level.

Effect of ACEs on Children

The ACE Study shows a remarkable link between not-OK childhood events and health issues later in life. What the original ACE research did not explore, however, was the immediate effect that these traumatic experiences had on children. This is crucial information that can inform educators' practice and the supports we offer to the young people under our care.

First, is childhood trauma as prevalent as the original ACE Study suggested? Sadly, yes. Recent research indicates that there are now more children affected by trauma than ever before:

• Nearly 35 million U.S. children have experienced at least one type of childhood trauma (National Survey of Children's Health, 2011/2012).
• One study (Egger & Angold, 2006) of young children ages 2–5 found that 52 percent had experienced a severe stressor in their lifetime.
• A report of child abuse is made every 10 seconds (ChildHelp, 2013).
• In 2010, suicide was the second leading cause of death among children ages 12–17 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2011).

Having established the continued prevalence of trauma, let's look at how these experiences affect children's educational outcomes. Inspired by the original ACE Study, Dr. Chris Blodgett and his research team (Blodgett, 2012) at Washington State University's Area Heal...