Trauma-informed teaching cannot be simplified to cookie-cutter practices. Take this example: a teacher worked with a student to develop a silent signal that he could use when he needed extra breaks during class. Hearing how well it worked, another teacher tried to apply the signal without first building a relationship with the student. It bombed. With the second teacher, the signal became “an angry ear tug instead of a trauma-informed ear tug,” said Alex Shevrin Venet, who shared this story during a recent webinar on trauma-informed distance learning.

Venet is a college professor and consultant who facilitates professional development on implementing trauma-informed practices. She offered her webinar after seeing that, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, “many teachers were reckoning with their own experiences of overwhelming stress and anxiety and for some this offered a new window into what it feels like for students who experience overwhelming stress regularly.” Registration reached its max capacity of 300 participants for all four sessions she offered.

As shown by the ear tug story, what trauma-informed teaching looks like varies for different teachers and students. For that reason, Venet has developed “four core priorities,” rather than “strategies,” for trauma-informed classrooms. During her webinars, she explained the four priorities and how to consider them in the context of distance learning.

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