As teachers, I think it is a safe assumption that we all want what is best for our students and families. What we know is that not all students are successful in school, even life. Some students make us so frustrated, we can hardly stand them. We want them to succeed, why don’t they want to succeed, too?
Fortunately, we are learning much about how stressors early in life and throughout development can change the way a person’s brain forms, which can significantly change the way she interacts with the world. As schools become more trauma-informed, that is, understanding how a child’s adaptation to her environment might make her have more difficulty successfully navigating the complicated waters of our schools, how do we know whether what we are doing is having any impact at all? There is research that can help guide us toward practices that support students who have adapted to adversities; however, when we apply those evidence-based practices to our classrooms, what evidence do we have they are working? The answer comes with the idea that we have to slow down in order to go fast.
Grants Pass School District Trauma-Informed Practices
In the Grants Pass School District in Southern Oregon, we are working toward creating a culture of staff who are trauma-informed. Half of our schools are participating in a whole-school trauma-informed practice through Dr. Christopher Blodgett’s work out of Washington State University. The other half are participating in book studies, adult self-care practices, and brain research to move toward a school-wide trauma-informed practice. The project is called CLEAR: Collaborative Learning for Educational Achievement and Resilience. It is rooted in the results of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACES) combined with the therapeutic practice called ARC: Attachment, Regulation, and Competency. These concepts and practices are applied to school staff through staff development using teaching, coaching, and consulting. Dr. Blodgett’s research is very positive about the kinds of changes that can happen in a school as a result, but he cautions that the data is long-term and that the immediate results that we educators want can be difficult to see while the practices are being taught and implemented.
[For more on this story, go to https://traumainformedoregon.o...-informed-practices/]
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