Student: What does it mean to make the world a better place?

Lindsey Minder: Nice! So those are those big questions we’re focusing on.

For me, being Trauma-Informed has so much to do with mindset. Accepting that different people come into a school setting with incredibly varied life experiences. Some of those life experiences may be traumatic. And the way in which that plays out in my particular classroom could look a number of ways. And by me having that lens, it makes it less about are they doing the right thing or the wrong thing, and more about where is that behavior coming from? Why is that happening?

Dr. Pamela Cantor: Adverse childhood experiences like poverty, neglect, exposure to violence can bring about overwhelming stress, which can cause negative effects on the learning brain and on behavior. If children have the experience of adversity. They will have uneven development of these foundational skills, like self-regulation, and executive function, or relationship skills. These are the children who are at risk to fall further and further behind. But the good news is that there is a powerful antidote to stress. And that is the effect of the human relationship and the presence of trust. Schools are an ideal place to produce many different kinds of relationships that are capable of buffering stress. Schools, themselves, can be healing places.

Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond: If you’re fearful, if you’re anxious, if you’re distracted about something that’s happened to you, you literally can’t learn. Your brain shuts down. So it’s essential to give kids social and emotional tools that allow students to recover from the challenges that they have experienced. Take actual classroom time to work on the building blocks of how to perceive your emotions, how to talk about them, how to get along with other people, how to take a moment and become calm when you need to. How to express your needs so that others can meet them.

Dr. Pamela Cantor: When we start to understand what it takes to be responsive to the effects of trauma, we need to think about the environment, about individual services, and we need to think about the skills and mindsets of kids that won’t develop as they should when they’re impacted by trauma.

Lindsey Minder: I do a lot of work around self-awareness and being able to name emotions and then make a choice around those.

Student: When I get mad, I take deep breaths and that helps me get more calm.

Lindsey Minder: Hm.

Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond: Many of the things we think about doing for who kids who may have experienced trauma are good for everybody. And everyone will encounter some kind of adverse circumstance at some point in their life. And for some children, we’re helping them deal with what’s already happened in their lives. For others, we’re preparing them to deal with the challenges later in their lives.

Lindsey Minder: If you can hear my voice, say, “We. Are. Awesome!”

Class: [clapping] We. Are. Awesome!