trauma edit: building a trauma informed mindset

NPR recently released an article questioning if childhood trauma should be considered a public health crisis. Based off my life experiences and work with children, my answer is absolutely yes. Trauma a public health crisis. It is our achievement gap, our opportunity gap, the challenging behaviors we see in our schools, it’s the 2.3 million people in our prisons, and the individuals who are making our world feel unsafe.

Something that you can’t always tell from looking at my instagram or blog is that I am obsessed with behavior science and understanding the impacts of trauma. I have an ACE score of 6. If you aren’t familiar with ACE scores, ACE stands for “Adverse Childhood Experiences” and was a study with profound results conducted in the 90’s. Here’s a little info-graphicthat I found out pinterest to help explain some of the findings!

More relevant research is currently in the process of being reviewed and published, however, the ACE study guides much of the work around trauma-informed practices and current behavior science, especially around childhood development.

Throughout my journey of turning my aces or early childhood trauma into my gifts, I’ve realized that trauma and experiences that make us feel less than are really difficult to talk about and accept. With that, it’s even more challenging to separate what worked for you and what you needed as a child and what your students may or may not need, especially the ones who have or are experiencing trauma.

I shared in an instagram caption a while back, that some kids need tough love and other kids need unconditional love. Each child is entirely different– from you, from their classmates, and from member of their families.

When teacher’s are often concerned with finding the time to learn new information, are diving into their own personal stories, and trying to make sure everything is aligned to common core standards, the idea of throwing in a new concepts to learn can be challenging. Another layer to this large walla-walla onion is society and our culture has conditioned us to hide away the bad or scary parts of our life. We are already conditioned with a negativity bias, but what if our negative stories can be shared in a positive light? How can we create a safe environment for ourselves and our students that allow us to share our stories of hardship as tools for closing the achievement gap? How do we even start this journey? How can we look at their behavior as communication?

My belief: it starts with building our self-awareness of our story and slowly changing our mindset. Changing our mindset and the way we’ve been conditioned is… well I don’t even know if there is an answer to this, but I know that it starts with understanding myself and being open to different thoughts and verbal statements… and it’s hard.

I spent a month trying to catch my mind or my words when working with a student who was exhibiting challenging behaviors, sitting in a team meeting, or trying to support another teacher to see what I tell myself or others. The visual above is what I came up with.

When I was first starting this journey, I remember writing hurt people, hurt people all over a piece of paper in different fonts. It helps me internalize the messages and add the words into my pattern of thinking.

With childhood trauma at a documented all time high, my goal is over the next 6 months to really dive in to sharing what I have learned about childhood trauma and how to develop a trauma-informed classroom. I’m not really sure how it’s always done… but giving yourself permission to love all the hard things you’ve experienced in life and identify what you learned from them and how they made you stronger is a start.

I challenge you to read some of the thoughts I hear often and think about what they mean to you… and how they might relate to your students. Are their any you read and you reallllly disagree with? Any that hit home with you? I would love to hear but what I would love even more, is people being open to changing their thoughts and mindsets to help support each and every student, in a way that allows for failure but doesn’t allow for giving up.

If you’re looking for a good book to read about creating a trauma-informed classroom, I reviewed Foster Resilient Learners here. It’s my favorite!

What do you think?

More to come 🙂

with kindness  |  ashley