Care Is a Muscle: Strengthening Trauma-Informed Practices to Enhance All Students' Well-Being

Learning about, talking about, and making meaning of stressful, harmful, and traumatic experiences can be upsetting. The goal of this article, and the textbook from which it is drawn, is not to upset anyone, yet readers (and participants in the paired AFT professional learning course) may experience unpleasant and even triggering moments. This article is designed to share information and to help readers understand skills to promote children’s health and well-being. The research reviewed here focuses on ways of thinking and acting that help people—who may or may not have an illness—tilt toward wellness no matter their starting point. This text does not offer strategies to manage, treat, or cure illness. Rather, the strategies elevated here are universal, tier 1 approaches—good for all adults in school to use with all students all the time.

Most educators understand intimately that students’ mental health poses incredible challenges and opportunities at school. Mental health is one of educators’ top priorities for work on children’s well-being.[1] Trauma-informed educators go further than naming the problem by learning and practicing key skills to positively promote children’s mental health and overall growth. They strive to

• Understand the ways unaddressed stress and adversity undermine mental health;
• Prevent further traumatization by proactively introducing and sustaining protective factors so students learn to navigate issues and grow, rather than shut down;
• Effectively support students experiencing unpleasant feelings and human responses to distress (see here for common experiences students may have after traumatic events);
• Identify students who may benefit from more intensive supports;
• Coordinate warm and safe learning environments for all students; and
• Balance powerful bonding with ethical boundaries so relationships are sustainable, reciprocal, and ultimately effective in shifting toward well-being.

Being trauma-informed demands considerable reflection on your worldview, practices, and impacts (not just intentions). Trauma-informed education offers an important lens to support young people—but it also has limitations. Sometimes, being trauma-informed means focusing only on harm, injury, and traumatic effects. Related programming can seem to say, “You are the worst thing that ever happened to you,” which is a deficit-based, harmful message.[2]

We cannot risk focusing on the treatment of traumatic effects rather than fostering possibility or well-being. The absence of disease doesn’t constitute health. The absence of violence does not constitute peace. And the reduction of pathology—anxiety, anger, fear, sadness, distrust, and triggers—doesn’t constitute well-being—including hope, happiness, imagination, and trust. Everyone wants to be happy, not just have less misery.[3]

Educators have opportunities every day to help students enhance their well-being and boost their happiness by facilitating positive experiences and de-escalating stressful scenarios. Let’s take a look at how to do both.

Facilitate Positive Experiences

Unmitigated trauma leads many young people to strengthen their internal emergency response systems. They are quick to assess how power, status, and rank influence social situations; quick to label stressful occurrences as threatening; and quick to retreat from or to aggress against perceived threats. The intense brain activity needed for the stress response can look like less practice in mental activities that are essential to learning, such as nuanced information processing, complex problem-solving, and setting and pursuing long-term goals. As a result, students grappling with trauma often have lower academic achievement, higher rates of chronic absenteeism or dropping out, and lower self-esteem. Protective factors are important to prevent traumatic events from having these kinds of lasting traumatic effects. Here, we explore the ways that educators’ everyday practices can promote healing.

Protective Factors

A combination of protective factors can enhance a child’s ability to cope with or bounce back from harmful traumatic effects. These factors include [4]

• Academic achievement and extended learning opportunities;
• Appropriate interventions before, during, and after challenges;
• Cognitive skills such as problem-solving, responsible decision-making, and perspective-taking;
• Community that respects and celebrates students’ identities and cultures;
• Consistent practices and predictable routines;
• Physical and emotional safety;
• Physical and mental health;
• Positive instructional strategies;
• Relationships with caring and supportive adults;
• Restorative behavior supports that teach skills such as taking responsibility and making amends;
• Sense of agency (“I can make meaningful choices”);
• Sense of belonging, mastery, and purpose; and
• Social and emotional competence, which entails: self-awareness (identify emotions and develop accurate self-perceptions); self-management (manage stress and feelings, control impulses, and use diverse coping strategies); social awareness (take others’ perspectives, empathize, and appreciate diversity); relationship skills (communicate, help, and cooperate for healthy relationships); andresponsible decision-making (identify problems, evaluate, reflect, and act with consideration for the well-being of oneself and others).

Students’ Growth Potential

Children’s willingness to engage in learning is experience-dependent.[5] In contexts with rich relational connections, emotional support, and collaboration, students are more likely to de-escalate into the calm and concentration that ground strong, lasting learning. In contrast, in competitive, stressful, agitated environments, students are more likely to withdraw, become distracted, and act out.[6] Resilience is a skill set, an ability to adapt successfully—not a trait.[7] Trauma-informed educators help students develop resilience that attunes their brains, bodies, and behaviors for healing.[8]

Healing Gestures

Research strongly supports the following five regular practices to show young people love and care, bring protective factors to life in the classroom, and help students develop resilience.[9]

1. Listen: Encourage and model active and supportive listening. A positive school climate is one with norms that support respectful listening among all members of the community. Create processes that allow students to share and be heard. Remain curious and ask supportive questions.
2. Comfort: Create predictable routines and transitions for children so they know what to expect. Establish safe and cozy spaces where students can calm down when they are upset. Respond with kindness and compassion when a child is escalated or triggered. Use grounding techniques such as yoga, meditation, breathing games, and affirmations to help students learn and practice emotional regulation, social awareness, self-awareness, relationship skills, and anger management. Try playing music or ringing a meditation bell to signal that it’s time to transition.
3. Collaborate: Plan for students to work together during in-school and after-school activities. Facilitate peers sharing strengths toward a common goal using agreed-upon rules and expectations. Demonstrate to students that group work can help identify multiple solutions to problems and that some might be more effective than others. Teach problem-solving skills and encourage working through conflicts together. Teach nonviolent resolution skills and model a problem-solving process rather than just giving students answers. Notice when children are frustrated and offer supportive guidance. When possible, help them identify other sources of support in school, in the community, and at home.
4. Inspire: Demonstrate a belief in your students’ potential, create a climate of achievement by setting high standards, and provide a positive example as a role model through the ways you approach tasks and relationships. Help children identify their natural talents or abilities and use them in the classroom. Connect children to after-school programs such as theater, dance, and sports, and to opportunities to join in community service. Create opportunities for children to learn about different career paths and take on leadership roles inside and outside the classroom. Explore their future goals and engage them in short- and long-term goal setting—and establish realistic, achievable goals. Build community by inquiring about friend networks and helping students identify friends who make them feel happy and confident.
5. Celebrate: Recognize student efforts and encourage positive interactions between young people and their peers, as well as other educators. Engage children in open-ended free play. Point out their talents and strengths and offer more opportunities to build on these skills, including with small wins and incremental progress. Publicly recognize and praise children when they are doing things right. When you need to redirect their behavior, do it privately and calmly. Greet children by name and offer rounds of applause or high fives as encouragement. Take children’s concerns seriously and offer validating statements. Tell them that you like them and why you think they’re special.

These healing gestures are great examples of how trauma-informed education is good for all students. While crucial for children and youth who have experienced traumatic events, it is beneficial for everyone (including our adult colleagues) when we establish a climate of respect; ensure our interactions with students are affirming, encouraging, and validating; identify and reinforce children’s areas of strength; and give positive reinforcement when they show skills like perseverance and focus. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, when children have setbacks or frustrations, we must do our best to praise their efforts and help them figure out next steps.

De-Escalate Stressful Scenarios

Despite our best intentions or proactive and preventive efforts, conflict and tension still occur in learning environments. Stressful and traumatic events cause emotional and behavioral escalation. In the face of any stressor, the body activates the stress response and circulates stress hormones that affect a variety of body functions. A severe stress response happens to everyone sometimes. Young people are more susceptible to poorly controlled escalation because they’re still growing mechanisms to manage it. One effect of trauma is to “train” the body to activate the stress response more often and more intensely.[10] Thus, helping students learn to de-escalate is helpful for all students and especially healing for students with trauma.[11]

Phases of Escalation

Trauma-informed educators understand how students can be triggered into emotional and behavioral escalation, which changes their readiness to learn as well as their coping approaches.[12] The following five phases of escalation are helpful for recognizing when students feel triggered.

1. Calm and engaged: Many pedagogical engagement strategies assume that students are calm and engaged. In this phase, students are not escalated; rather, we tend to see them on task, following rules and meeting expectations, and responsive to positive affirmation. They are usually excited to learn and initiate positive, socially constructive behavior. Within the brain, the cortex (the “active learning center”) is responsive to engagement and challenges, including those that require planning, reasoning or logic, imagination, and complex communication.
      At this phase, students show focus, contentment, confidence, problem-solving, and patience. They generally respond well to new information, big ideas, and constructive feedback. Students who are calm and engaged easily make eye contact and are relaxed throughout their bodies. They also collaborate well and tend to have fun with large-scale projects, including working with partners and groups.
2. Agitation: When triggered or stressed, students may first show agitation. As the body initiates the stress response, chemicals such as cortisol and adrenaline can interrupt the cortex. Agitated students find it challenging to access old memories and form new ones, establish and respect boundaries, understand consequences, inhibit their impulses, or imagine constructive solutions. This phase is marked by students being distracted and switching between being off- and on-task as well as in and out of group or partner activities. Students may also leave their seats (or spaces) and talk with others about unrelated content or ideas.
3. Acceleration: If agitation is not resolved and a stressor is insufficiently addressed, students may accelerate. At this phase, stress hormones intensely call the brain away from active learning functions in the cortex and toward the midbrain, which is more responsible for things like emotions and visual and auditory processing. Students may show avoidance, withdrawal, and escape behaviors, such as lack of eye contact, head on desk, covered ears, hunching, or turning away. They may flush, with their skin turning red or darker. Their bodies may show tension, such as with veins emerging on the forehead or temples. Accelerating students exhibit high distractibility, such as asking tangential or unrelated questions. They often pair desirable behaviors with inappropriate ones and seek attention or confrontation, such as by arguing or using profanity. Overly simple thinking at this phase makes it difficult for students to perceive nuance and constructive options, so educators may hear language that suggests an “us vs. them” or “me vs. you” mentality.
4. Peak distress: At this phase, which is also called the rage phase, a student’s stress hormones are disrupting the cortex, midbrain, and even brainstem. The brainstem is responsible for breathing, temperature regulation, hunger and thirst signals, and raw alarm and threat assessment, as well as sleep routines. Students who reach peak distress may show extreme crying, clumsy and erratic movement, flushed skin, and ragged, rapid, or irregular breathing, including hyperventilation. Enraged students minimally use and respond to language. They may shout, have rapid or incomplete speech, or fail to answer clearly or at all to verbal prompts. Consistent with a severe stress response, students may try to run away or leave the situation. They may also make loud noises or aggressive suggestions or gestures, or attempt to destroy, which can include self-harm.
5. Recovery: As the body starts to process stress hormones, students often take a deep breath or a few gasping breaths. This signals the beginning of a return to equilibrium, not arrival to calm or readiness to learn. As students continue to de-escalate, their brains and bodies recover from the strain of the stress response. They may be fatigued and thirsty and have a strong desire to reconnect with a trusted adult. Cortisol can take up to five hours to return to baseline levels; water and a snack can help. In this phase, students may be confused, wandering, staring, fidgeting, or sleepy.

Contagious Calm

For many educators, students’ emotional and behavioral escalation is assumed to be misbehavior, a deliberate step away from the values and norms of the learning community. Such personal interpretations of behavior—that students are motivated to bother or deliberately upset daily goals, rather than that they are reasonably responding to a perceived threat—usually trigger adult escalation.[13] Reacting to these misconceptions often unfortunately further triggers students, creating a whirlwind of escalation where each party mirrors and amplifies the other’s distress.

Trauma-informed educators practice self-regulation, such as by incorporating mindful moments and grounding activities into their routines. Regular mindfulness practice increases the brief time between a stressor and an action, helping to transform educators from reactive to responsive.[14]

At every phase of escalation, trauma-informed educators invite students to mirror de-escalating, nonverbal strategies. These include

• Breathing deeply, deliberately, and regularly;
• Connecting with a calm gaze that shows caring;
• Disengaging and decreasing stimuli;
• Opening palms and making them visible to indicate a willingness to listen and collaborate;
• Practicing patience;
• Providing a warm, safe, and comforting space;
• Relaxing their jaws, eyes, and shoulders;
• Stabilizing their stances and taking up appropriate space, with their faces, shoulders, and hips pointing forward while staying upright (this can include kneeling for easy eye contact);
• Stating boundaries simply; and
• Vocalizing authority with a low, resonant tone.