How can Teachers help students deal with Trauma and Stress?

 

For some students, school is not just a place of learning and growth but also a refuge from abuse.

On average, every classroom has at least one student affected by trauma. According to a verified survey, close to 26 per cent of students in different parts of the world have been exposed to some form of traumatic stressor in their lives, with sexual assault, physical assault, and witnessing household brutality being the three most predominant.

These types of stressors, known as complex trauma, have the added wound of being perpetrated by a person with whom the child or teen has an ongoing relationship. The people who are supposed to support and protect are those who misuse and exploit.

It leads to continuing states of grief, loss, dereliction, negligence, constant anxiety, fear, and depression—all when the brain is in crucial stages of development.

For some young people, school is the only place in their lives where they know they are safe and can form entrusted enduring relationships. It is, therefore, a brutal satire that many students who are affected by trauma also have situations engaging at school. They may attend school with the best intentions, hoping to form friendships, feel connected to their teachers, and succeed at the day's tasks. Yet they can find themselves rebellious, pressing, and disengaged—unable to learn and confused about why they can't relate and bond with others.

What do the latest scientific findings from traumatology, neuroscience, and positive education tell us about how to best help students affected by trauma? 

 

Mending and rehabilitation

 

The new domain of "trauma-informed learning" has made great strides in helping teachers better understand the developmental, emotional, and social challenges that students who are impacted by trauma face at school. While teachers are not mental health specialists, trauma-informed learning trains teachers in healing techniques that can wind into the classroom to redress the stalled growth, underdeveloped neural pathways, and over-regulated nervous systems that students experience due to trauma.

For example, teachers can directly teach students about their body's stress activation response and help them find techniques to regulate their heart rate, body temperature, and blood pressure. They are teaching through rhythm—for example, learning about math to the beat of a drum, reading an English text while riding an exercise bike, or having a disciplinary conversation while walking around the schoolyard together. It is now an accepted classroom technique that assists trauma-affected students to regulate their nervous system through rhythmic movement.

Feeling calmer in class has the knock-on effect of helping students get along better with others, think more clearly, and stay on task. These approaches nurture students' stamina and persistence, allowing them to better deal with frustration, which benefits their social behaviour in class and their capacity to take on greater academic challenges, undoubtedly a promising method.

 

Development and solidity

 

Trauma-informed education has helped teachers evolve from the question of "What is wrong with this student?" to "What has this student been through?" In positive psychology, we add a further question: "What does this student need to reach their potential?" That allows teachers to extend the focus from what is wrong, what is needed, and what is possible. Building the mental health and academic capacities of students affected by trauma requires more than repairing psychological disorders and developmental delays—it requires the dual mantra of healing and growth.

 We don't always need to wait until something is fixed before we work on building our strengths. Indeed, growing the psychological strengths affected by trauma can be a core part of healing their psychological struggles.

Working with students affected by trauma requires schools to assist in providing individual counselling services, safety and crisis planning, behaviour plans, self-care plans to address triggers, and case management. Most of these services are not provided by the classroom teacher, yet the teacher is the person who spends the most time with trauma-affected students. A key way positive psychology adds to the trauma-informed strategies above is by empowering teachers in the classroom to help their students daily.

 

Here are five teaching techniques that you can use in your class, knowing that these practices aid your mainstream learners.

 

1. Positive connections. 

Teachers may be the only people who help these students learn what a healthy, supportive relationship feels like. Building relational trust involves simple teaching practices such as smiling, sharing parts of your life with your students, getting to know your students as individuals and using yourself as a role model of a reliable and regulated adult.

Trauma-affected students have more relationship challenges to navigate than most. These students can be dealing with toxic relationships at home and then come to school to manage relationships with their teachers and social workers, police officers, and clinicians—all while living out their daily lives.

We must help these students feel safe and trusting where possible so they learn to develop social intelligence and seek out positive bonds with others. 

 

2. Favourable physical area. 

Consider how the furniture and seating are arranged in your class. Is it helping students to feel safe and connected? You could also bring plants into the room or create a mindfulness corner, a dedicated space that students can visit when they need to regulate their stress response. The corner can include a bean bag, mindful colouring books, squeeze toys, noise-cancelling headphones.

You could use your physical layout, and your classroom looks to build positive emotions. Putting up positive visuals and quotes can inspire creative thinking and teamwork in your students. Increased natural light or soft lighting can enhance an open, warm, and relaxing environment.

 

 

3. Optimistic priming. 

According to Fredrickson's theory, helping your students build up their bank account of positive emotions changes their brains to help them learn more effectively, form better relationships, and become more resilient. Next time you are planning a lesson, think about how you can use positive primers throughout the learning experience.

 

Brain breaks are one helpful technique. The teachers who work with us have found that brain breaks are most effective when students reflect on the type of energy they need at that moment for learning: Escalating brain breaks build positive energy and emotions such as joy, happiness, and wonder (e.g., clapping games, thumb wars, laughter yoga, racing around the desk) while reducing the intensity of the brain build calm emotions such as pleasure and stability, which help a student to feel safe and focused (body movements such as shoulder shrugging or pumping your toes inside your shoes).

You can also use positive primers to boost positive emotion when students first enter the classroom (such as by greeting them with the healthy touch of a handshake or a high five). During evolutions (by turning change routines into a silent game such as "follow the leader"), or during independent work breaks (by having students deliberately savour their accomplishments and share with a peer).

 

4. Using personality resilience. Teaching strengths in schools have been shown to increase achievement and well-being. All students, especially trauma-affected students, need opportunities to identify, recognize, practice, and use their character powers, including kindness, humour, creativity, and bravery.

 

 

5. Building stability. Sadly, you cannot always impact a student's life outside of school. Still, you can teach resilience strategies that help a student affected by trauma better understand their situation and neutralize the negative messages of shame they often absorb from their opinions and ideas. 

 

Use Your Strengths

Ways to help students learn about their strengths and the strengths of others include:

• Surveys to identify strengths based on their literacy skills
• Strengths cards.
• Strengths spotting exercises—like identifying strengths in their heroes or playing a secret agent game where they are invited to "spy" on a fellow student to identify that student's strengths.

To teach about particular strengths, you could focus on stories in English and Humanities curriculums where characters or historical figures displayed those strengths. Through performing arts, sports, and other co-curricular activities, strengths can also develop strengths.

Teachers can also use moments in the learning process when students feel frustrated or have self-doubt. They can coach them on how to dispute their pessimism and automatic negative thinking ("I can't do this"; "I'm dumb") to make room for optimism and constructive thinking ("Maybe I'm tired, and I need a break"; 

 

"I solved the problem last week, and I can do it again"; 

"It takes me a little longer than others, but I've come a long way"). Learning resilience skills can provide an internal psychological buffer for students when they are outside of school and provide empowering experiences at school.

Every teacher wants to impact the lives of their students positively. For students affected by trauma, the teacher plays an even more vital role. The introduction of positive psychology into the classroom has huge potential to change the trajectories of many of these young people's lives by moving beyond repair and inspiring growth.

 

 

Concentrate on: 

1. Aid, Validate and listen to learners

2. Be candid and optimistic, rather than reassuring

3. Promote a gradual strategy, not escape

4. Credit and reward scholars for being fearless

5. Sample exemplary coping behaviours for students – be calm, honest, and caring

 

 

 

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