Trauma effects many children in our schools. The diagram below outlines the primary types of harm inflicted on abused children in Australia. This article, written by Kim Gulbrandson from Committee for Children, authors of Second Step, provides useful information regarding how social-emotional competencies help support every child to feel safe, supported and ready to learn - even those experiencing trauma.
Percentage breakdown of primary substantiated harm types in Australia in 2015-16
Read Kim Gulbrandson's full article below:
Kids who experience trauma can be silent sufferers. That’s partly because trauma is stored in the nonverbal part of the brain so it’s not something easily identified, talked about, or expressed verbally. It may only show up through behaviours. Trauma is also in the perspective of the person experiencing it, so an experience may be traumatic for one person but not for another. Because we cannot typically know which children have experienced trauma, it’s important to use trauma-informed practices with all children and provide universal, trauma-informed supports throughout schools and classrooms. Social-emotional learning (SEL) is key for ensuring this happens, and this blog discusses why and how.
Adult SEL Skills Are Directly Tied to Our Ability to Be Trauma Sensitive
Trauma-informed practices are primarily about providing kids safe spaces and environments. Adults need social-emotional competencies to be able to foster this type of environment so that kids feel supported and can thrive. To be able to recognize when someone is experiencing an emotion or not feeling safe, adults need to have and use good listening skills and understand other perspectives, seeing as best they can through the child’s eyes. Adults also provide safe environments by approaching kids with empathy and understanding, validating feelings and behaviour, and building relationships. When we aren’t calm we respond more quickly to triggers and often in negative ways, so it’s important to manage our stress and control our impulses. Trauma-informed practices also means building social-emotional competencies for students to empower all who are affected by adversity and help them cope with the trauma. It would be difficult to teach, model, and foster these skills if we did not have them ourselves.
Supporting Student SEL Is a Trauma-Sensitive Practice
SEL helps children survive and cope in various situations. Trauma affects kids’ social-emotional skills, such as their ability to identify, express, and manage emotions. Children exposed to trauma may internalize their feelings because they don’t have vocabulary to express their experiences, or they may externalize aggression, anger, and fear because they learn to perceive situations as dangerous.
SEL teaches kids to connect their actions to their thoughts and feelings by noticing feelings and physical sensations in their bodies, such as heat (embarrassment, shame), pressure (stress), tingling, muscular tension (anger, nervousness). When kids start understanding the physical sensations of their bodies and connecting them to emotions, only then can they learn how to name and describe their feelings, such as sadness, frustration, or anger.
This is how they safely learn to express their feelings in a healthy way, verbally or nonverbally, and learn the coping strategies for managing their feelings as well.
While not all kids will experience trauma, they will all face challenges at some point in their lives, so all can benefit from learning skills for managing adversity. A trauma-sensitive environment that supports kids’ need to feel safe and supported—paired with strong adult social-emotional competencies and SEL supports for students—helps ensure kids will cultivate healthy student behaviours and have opportunities to thrive in the face of difficulties and hardships. So why not get started by making those explicit connections between your trauma-sensitive and SEL practices!
For more information on how Second Step aligns with Trauma-Informed Practices in schools, click here to download the alignment chart.
Positive Pieces Education is the Australian publisher of the evidence-based Second Step Program.