Trauma Doesn’t Stop at the School Door: Strategies and Solutions for Educators, PreK-College

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Karen Grose. Karen is an author and educator with more than 40 years of experience as a law professor, college president, keynote speaker, and consultant. She's the author of books for both children and adults, including her Lady Lucy series for kids and her new book, Trauma Doesn't Stop at the School Door, Strategies and Solutions for Educators, Pre-K through College. Karen, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:43] SPEAKER_00:

Hello, nice to be with you and your listeners.

[00:46] SPEAKER_01:

Well, it's incredible timing to have a book on trauma in... We're recording this in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and certainly your work on this book began long before that began. Tell us a little bit about why you chose to write this book and why you chose to draw attention to the issue of trauma in the education profession.

[01:10] SPEAKER_00:

So, what I noticed, both when I was a college president And when I was working in schools was that often there were many students who did not succeed. And despite what seemed to be best efforts in many cases by educators, these students were not paying attention or they were acting out or they were isolating themselves. And I kept thinking, what's behind all this? Can we come to understand who our students are? Who really are they? And once you ask that question, you start looking at things like what happened to them and asking questions about what experiences they bring to the educational table when they show up in school every day.

[02:00]

And that led me to lots of conversations, thinking, writing, researching on trauma and its impact on learning and psychosocial success. So, the work started before the pandemic, but to be fair, and not to place too much emphasis on the now, but we have even more trauma in the current environment. And so, a book that was timely has become, sadly, even more timely.

[02:36] SPEAKER_01:

I think as educators, we've all had that experience of seeing a student who is having difficulty, who is having a hard time with learning or with some other aspect of their lives, and we've maybe had a, you know, a thought that perhaps trauma was behind that, perhaps some sort of life circumstances were behind that. What do you think contributes to the huge range of different responses that students have to trauma in your research, because we know we've seen certainly many people who, you know, who seem to thrive in the face of trauma or to, you know, in spite of their trauma, and others who, you know, who react in a range of different ways. What in your research contributes to some of those differences in how people respond to trauma?

[03:21] SPEAKER_00:

Well, let me actually start by saying that many educators, sadly, are not trained in trauma. And we've done remarkably little, generally speaking, on how to help teachers and educational institutions become trauma responsive. And if they had that training, then teachers and institutions as a whole would be way more able to identify what they're seeing in students and wouldn't make as many mistakes in characterizing what's happening. Now, to the actual answer to the question, trauma's responsiveness in our, in us, is triphasic. Some children are what I call dysregulated, and that means they act out, they throw things, they shout, they scream, depending on their age, they are rude, they disrupt other students, they can't sit still, they have ants in their pants is an expression often used.

[04:22]

Then there are students who are almost the opposite of dysregulated. They're disassociated. Those are students who isolate themselves. They sit in the corner. They sit in the back. They look at their computer screen at the college level or at the high school level.

[04:41]

They sit alone in their room a lot using their computer. They stare out the window. They don't engage in projects. And in its extreme case, those students actually disassociate from their own feelings and become isolated even more than just from their peers. They self-isolate. But lastly, there are over-regulated students.

[05:05]

These are ones we rarely identify because these are students who do everything the teacher or principal wants. These are the students who some might call goody-two-shoes. They ask for more work. They hang by the teacher's side. They do everything and anything that's asked of them and ask for more. But in many cases, this is just compensation for covering up trauma compensation for things that have happened to them that they're not able to share.

[05:37]

So, what's interesting is that students can be dysregulated, disassociated, and overregulated on different days, the same student, or even within an hour of each other, or sometimes it's in phases, dysregulated for a while, disassociated for a while, and overregulated for a while. So, the answer is it's complex. We have complex trauma symptomology.

[06:02] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I can't wait to get into some of those specific recommendations that you have in the book, but I just first wanted to acknowledge the important point you made there, that for many of our students who do have, you know, impacts from trauma... Those impacts may not be... May not appear to us to be maladaptive.

[06:28]

It may be that some of our students who are, as you said, the best behaved, the hardest working, are not free from the effects of trauma, but are responding in that particular way. What are... Just to focus on that particular third group of students there who hyper-regulate or over-regulate, what are some of the, you know, just kind of long-term impacts of that trauma or things that we need to be aware of as educators rather than simply assume that because they're doing their work, because they're on task, because they're well-behaved, that everything is fine.

[06:59] SPEAKER_00:

So, if we don't acknowledge trauma, and if we either ignore it or pretend it doesn't exist or don't recognize it, the trauma doesn't go away. Actually, trauma never goes away. And the problem with trauma is that it gets re-triggered. So something else happens, some other event, some other happening, whether it's within the family, within the community, within our larger society, whether it's person-made or nature-made, And the trauma trips off again so that the student who's over-regulated then gets exposed to another trauma and becomes even more over-regulated and, in some sense, totally separated from their own feelings.

[07:50]

And here's the saying that I say to teachers and principals all the time. If you can't name it, you can't tame it. You have to know what's happening with one's students before you can ameliorate it.

[08:07] SPEAKER_01:

Well, let's talk about how we as educators respond to students who are responding to their own trauma. You know, we, obviously, we do things like, you know, impose discipline. We send kids to the office. What have you seen in your research that does not work? And what have you seen that is more helpful than maybe some of the punitive responses that we tend to default to in schools?

[08:30] SPEAKER_00:

Well, your question makes a really good observation that punishment isn't the right approach to dealing with trauma. And I don't want to be suggesting that students aren't responsible for their actions. But punishing someone for something that they didn't cause doesn't lead to a resolution of the problem. So understanding what happened to a student is key. And rather than sending them out from a classroom, I think the much better strategy is what I call processing in place. which is dealing with the issue in the classroom at the moment, not sending the student to the principal's office or the vice principal for discipline, and instead, perhaps, even bringing the principal into the classroom or the school psychologist to help that student process what's happening and share with the other students who are watching.

[09:32]

that this is what happens if you get dysregulated or disassociated or disruptive. Instead of punishing you, we find a way to help you. And I have to say that many people say, well, this is coddling. I mean, you do bad things, you should be punished, and you should develop responsibility. Well, that's easy to say, but what if what happened to you caused your behavior? And if someone just understood it, they could help you re-regulate.

[10:03]

Help like that doesn't discourage responsibility, it actually builds responsibility.

[10:10] SPEAKER_01:

I love that idea of teaching regulation and, you know, making school a place that is, you know, safe for that learning to take place and not a punitive environment where, you know, students mess up, they're out, and then there's no, you know, no further opportunity to, you know, to process or to learn and develop those abilities to regulate. Such an important reminder for schools.

[10:38] SPEAKER_00:

Well, it's also an important thing for other students to watch. See, if we do what we do now, we separate the students who are acting out from trauma, and we send them away as if they're bad, and then off they go, and the other students don't know really what happens to them, or at least not exactly. It's way better for other students to see the role modeling that can happen from processing in place, Because it's deeply effective, and it messages to the other students. Oh, wait. There are ways that we can learn how to deal with what's happened to us. And we can find ways to process really complicated, difficult feelings.

[11:26]

And that sends a message so that other kids who are struggling go, oh, okay, okay, I get it now. If something happens, I'm not going to get sent out or punished. Someone's going to help me.

[11:38] SPEAKER_01:

I think for so many students for so many years, school has been a place where There's not an opportunity to process what has been happening to you, and, you know, it's pretty much get straight to work, do your work, stay on task, and if anything pulls you away from that, then you're in trouble. What can it look like in a school environment where students do have the opportunity to process some of those, you know, those big feelings or those things that are going on in their heads and hearts that, you know, that we really have to be intentional about creating space for? How do we do that and provide that opportunity for processing in the school environment?

[12:14] SPEAKER_00:

Well, we can start doing that by recognizing that not every student comes to school ready, willing, and able to learn. And we often just assume that as they go into a class, at whatever level, that they're ready to just open the book and begin doing whatever it is that the teacher asks them to do. But particularly in today's world, with COVID and racial tensions and uncertainty, both political and economic, and all sorts of family dysfunction as a result of the pandemic and illness and death, and fear and tension, including in teachers and others within education, We have to start class differently. We have to start by helping people get on the same page, literally and figuratively.

[13:05]

And we can do that by helping students deal with the acute symptomology of trauma that they bring into the classroom. And we can do that by exercises that take two, three, or four minutes to lower their autonomic nervous system and enable them to get ready to learn. I often say to people, think about the first grade teacher who's the best reading teacher in America, but some of the children in the class haven't had breakfast. That teacher, no matter how good he or she is, won't be able to teach those particular students. They're not in the place to learn. And the same is true for traumatized kids.

[13:47] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, let's talk a little bit more about that and the autonomic nervous system. And, you know, maybe we could talk about an example or two of what that looks like to actually prepare kids to be in the school environment, to, you know, to regulate themselves or to get ready, as you said, to learn. What does that look like?

[14:03] SPEAKER_00:

So, the first thing is the teacher has to be willing to give up two, three, or four minutes to something that isn't defined as content. And for the teacher who's worried about that at whatever level, whether it's elementary school, middle, high school, college, or graduate school, My answer to that is, if you don't do this, you'll lose too many people on the content along the way. So, with that, one of the... There are many strategies for getting the autonomic nervous system, um, tempered or in a place that allows learning.

[14:39]

So, you have to open neural pathways, and the autonomic nervous system kicks in without the individual controlling it, and so a teacher can help that by a number of exercises. So, let me give you two or three of them. So, suppose I tell you right now to just stand up and stand on your non-dominant leg, and lift the other one up without holding anything, and just balance there for 15 seconds.

[15:12]

And if you were to try to do that now, it's not very easy to do, especially on your non-dominant leg, and you're likely a tad bit wobbly, but just allowing you to do that is the beginning of telling your brain to focus on something other than whatever is occupying it, and to open some neural pathways for something different to happen. Then, I would tell students, now, do the same exercise, but close your eyes. Balance on one leg with your eyes closed. And now you really wobble. You wobble all over the place. And that's because what's happening is you need your eyes for proprioception, for balance.

[15:55]

And then you redo the exercise again with your eyes open and actually now you're better at it. So that little exercise, two, three, four minutes, is opening neural pathways, it's messaging that we're trying to find our balance, literally and figuratively, and what it's doing is recognizing that balance, proprioception, on the outside is what we're trying to establish on the inside, interoception, inside balance. So there's just one exercise that can do that very quick, very easy, using your senses to get people on the same page. But there are many others. Happy to share another one. I mean, when I do trainings with teachers in schools, I have buckets of these that I share.

[16:49]

That I suggest they use. And they can swap them out, different days, do different ones. But the point is to do something at the start of class that's different, that allows people to get on the same page with you. And in doing that, you open...

[17:08]

the neural pathways, the trauma literally shuts down. I mean, trauma causes a variety of responses, fight, flight, fear, fawn, and faint, but bottom line, it crinks up, literally crinks up the inside of your brain. And carves out and diminishes neural pathways. So you gotta open neural pathways, including creating new neural pathways. Very possible, because our brain is plastic. Not as in plastic, like a plastic container, but our brain has plasticity to it.

[17:47]

One of its amazing gifts.

[17:50] SPEAKER_01:

I have to confess, I tried it while you were, uh, while you were talking. I stood on one foot, and then I stood on the other foot with my eyes closed, and, uh, quite a... quite a powerful exercise just to, uh, to kind of ready oneself and, as you said, open up those... those pathways.

[18:05] SPEAKER_00:

Do you want another one? So, when a... Let's look at an example of what helping kids understand what happens to you when you're traumatized and act out. So, if you take your hand and you put your thumb on the inside of it and then roll your fingers over the top, so now you have, like, a fist.

[18:28]

You with me? Then When you're traumatized or re-traumatized, here's what happens. Your brain literally flips out. So, if you just open your hand and spread your fingers, that's actually what happens. That's why, when you've been traumatized, your feeling system and your cognition go away. Your brain literally flips out.

[18:56]

And the only thing left to work effectively is the lower brain, the primitive brain, some people call it that. Yeah, the reptilian brain. And that part down there has to get under control before the limbic system, which is the feeling system, can come back and before cognition can wrap around the feeling system. So, if you think about that and say the only thing that's operating when your brain is flipped out is this very bottom part, the part that's your primitive brain, the part that's making you fight or flight or freeze or fawn or faint, and if you can get that under control, then your thumb can go back in and your fingers can go back over and your brain returns to its

[19:48]

Original position. Kids get that. And if you just... You can message kids.

[19:54]

If you just... If a kid is acting out, and you just do that with your hand, and you've done the exercise before, they know, oh, yep, I'm flipped out. I gotta figure out how to get the re-regulation of the autonomic nervous system. I have to put my thumb back in, and I have to put my fingers open.

[20:11] SPEAKER_01:

Let's talk, if we could, a little bit more about triggers, and in particular... Okay, um, sadly, we're going to have one coming up.

[20:35] SPEAKER_00:

We're going to have an anniversary of the start of the pandemic and the shutdown of schools. Um, but there are lots of anniversaries that different schools experience. The death of a teacher, uh, a shooting at the school, some massive, um, natural disaster. So, the point is that we can't ignore anniversaries and just assume that with the passage of time, this will all go away, as if time heals all wounds. That's not true for trauma. You actually have to process it.

[21:19]

And you have to find strategies that enable you to navigate it. So, many people... sort of realize the importance of anniversaries, but way late in the game. So, I tell people, you have to actually plan for anniversaries.

[21:36]

You have to think about them. You have to think about what's best for your community, both the people who are there now, the families of survivors, if that's the case, The people who've left the community, the people who are affected by it, emergency workers and the like, so it really depends what kind of anniversary you're celebrating, and how you, quote, celebrate an anniversary depends on the age and stage of the children and what happened. But, but let me give you, um, an example. A year after a school shooting, some children have left that school, maybe because they graduated. Some students have moved out of town. Some families may have had children die or be wounded.

[22:28]

And so, one strategy for an anniversary may not be enough. And so, maybe there has to be an installation art project. Maybe there has to be a quiet space where some people can contemplate and reflect on what happened. Maybe there has to be a place where some people can write reflections about what happened. And one of the interesting things that the literature shows is that we've often thought that physical memorials that are, like, etched in the ground, like the Vietnam War memorial or the memorials at the Pentagon or the memorials in Oklahoma City are the best way to go, lasting memorials. But the problem with that...

[23:18]

is that as people move or go to a different school, they don't have anything to remember the event by unless they return to that location. So there is a value, a remarkable value, to material objects being given to memorialize something that people can take with them, have with them. carry with them. And if they want to look at it, they can look at it. If they want to put it away, they can put it away. But a tangible object turns out to be one of the best ways to memorialize something bad that has happened.

[23:58]

Um, so, in the military, they've figured this out, whether they knew a lot about trauma or not. Um, and they have coins that can be given away that, um, remember an event or, in that case, often honor a person. But there are other objects that one can use. Dirt from a building that was taken down that you put in a box that you can put on a keychain. Um...

[24:26]

other symbols of the event that may have arisen there, common phrases that were used. Um, so I think you need a range of activities, everything from installation art to takeaway items, to allow anniversaries to have real power. And not make things worse, but make things better. Recognizing an anniversary is the first step, right? You have to realize the need to have it. Once you've realized the need to have it, then you need to plan for it.

[25:00]

And once you start planning for it, you'll see that there's probably no one way to do an anniversary of a traumatic event, but rather several approaches that have to be personalized and contextualized. Um, so you need those steps. You don't just launch in the week or day before and say, oh, gee, hmm, hmm, we're having a An anniversary of a student's death or an anniversary of a shooting or the anniversary of a trauma. I'm actually, and this is kind of interesting, teaching a course on how to deal with trauma anniversaries, um, at the Rutgers Graduate School of Social Work, uh, this fall. Because there is a sense that there will be so many of them that we need ways to

[25:52]

manage those anniversaries in ways that don't exacerbate the trauma, but allow us to move forward.

[26:00] SPEAKER_01:

I think that speaks, Karen, to the need for a repertoire of strategies, just as we would have a wide range of strategies for, say, literacy, for helping students learn how to read and write. We need that same range and a variety of strategies that we can use to help students deal with trauma, rather than just say, okay, boom, we had an assembly, it's over and done with, let's hope nobody has to think about it again. Knowing and anticipating that it will come up, that there will be revisiting in students' minds of whatever it was that happened, we need to be ready with that range of strategies.

[26:36] SPEAKER_00:

So that's a really important, powerful point. And for me, one of the ways to speak to that is to say that we need a toolbox of skills. Um, or, you know, some people refer to, you know, arrows in your quiver. But we don't have that. And so, we need to supply and enable educators to get those tools so that they can use them effectively. And by the way, for teachers, this really matters because student trauma is catching.

[27:11]

Um, and that's how you get secondary trauma. And so, if teachers aren't skilled and don't have the tools, then they too can be traumatized by what's happening.

[27:25] SPEAKER_01:

Well, Karen, I know quite a bit of the book is dedicated to that repertoire of strategies and to models for trauma-responsive schooling. What are some ways that educators can pursue further resources for becoming a trauma-responsive school?

[27:42] SPEAKER_00:

So, the book itself has many concrete suggestions. I mean, it's a book that I hope blends theory and practice. But, um, I, along with a colleague, have developed some actual other strategies that teachers can use and deploy, um, in their classroom. So, let me share some of them with you. Um, and they all will be available, um, or referenced on my website. So, remember when I talked early on about the need to get the beginning of class right, not just on the first day back, but every day, um, at least as long as we're living in a world as complicated and traumatized as ours.

[28:25]

Um, there's a new book out called Tongue Twisters and Beyond Words at Play. And it's priced, by the way, so that schools can buy it for their students. And it has tongue twisters, it has word games, it has, um, mad-like libs, it has... um, crossword puzzles, it has spoonerisms, but one of the points of it is to, to laugh with words.

[28:55]

One of the things trauma takes away is your capacity to play and appreciate play and learn while playing, which, as educators know, is critically important. So if you just try a tongue twister, and teachers try it too, and you struggle with it, and you laugh over how you mispronounce the words, um, that is a learning activity that can... double as a way of getting your autonomic nervous system under control. And when kids are acting out during class, you can just tell them to go to their tongue twister book and practice a tongue twister or read in a square or read in a triangle or read up and down as opposed to horizontally, all of which are activities in the book.

[29:38]

Then another resource is the Feeling Alphabet Activity Set, which starts with the recognition that if you can identify both your positive and negative feelings, you can name them and then tame them. And so it starts with an alphabet, and some sample words, and you can pick a few letters and come up with a positive word related to that letter and a negative word related to that letter, and then there are feeling crossword puzzles, um, called up-and-down feelings, and then there's a word search called searching for your feelings, and there are thought bubbles, and there are other activities that allow you to come into touch with your own feelings. on the same theory, if you can name it, you can tame it.

[30:30]

And then, um, there's an instruction sheet for how to create a trauma-responsive toolbox, um, which is a little different than the toolboxes we were talking about before in terms of teachers having the actual tools to help students. These are toolboxes that contain items that help kids, um, recenter themselves. So, in it is everything from Play-Doh to a little, uh, pad of paper with a crayon or pencil or pen. There's often pipe cleaners so that they can make something. There are little figurines that they can play with, um, with their hands. Um, and...

[31:13]

All of the ones that I've created have in them a feeling stone, um, on which, or feeling ceramic stone that you can rub with your thumb, and the one I use is hope, is the word I have on mine, and here's why. Um, and this is all in a box, by the way, and you can create these boxes with kids or for kids. They can have them. Just having the box, a trauma-responsive toolbox, says to you, oh, people recognize there's trauma. And then you can use the box. And just using the box helps you because it, in and of itself, eases the autonomic nervous system.

[31:52]

But the, the little feeling that you stone that I, you can put between your fingers has the word hope on it because of this story. When Pandora opened her box and all those really horrible negative feelings flew out of her box, um, there's one feeling that did not leave Pandora's box, and that was hope. Hope stayed in Pandora's box. And so it's there as a message that there is hope, There are ways of dealing with trauma, really constructive, thoughtful, and effective strategies for diminishing the trauma we experience and navigating ways to deal with it on a go-forward basis. So I hold out great hope that when teachers learn these skills, they can help our students of all ages and stages better deal with the reality of trauma in all of our lives.

[32:47] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is Trauma Doesn't Stop at the School Door, Strategies and Solutions for Educators Pre-K through College. And Karen Gross, if people want to learn more about your work or find some of the resources that we talked about today, where's the best place for them to find you online?

[33:03] SPEAKER_00:

So I have a website. The website address is really easy. It's www.karengross, spelled K-A-R-E-N-G-R-O-S-S,

[33:16]

education.com But if you forget that, you can always Google Karen Gross trauma and up I pop. Um, so you can find me, you can actually reach out to me on my website. There's an interface that allows you to connect with me and find me. Um, and I encourage your listeners to do that. I'd be happy to help them in any way I can.

[33:40]

This is a really hard time for kids and teachers. And I hope both my book and this conversation and other resources help them so that we can all find ways to deal with the world in which we live.

[33:56] SPEAKER_01:

Karen, thank you so much for doing this work and for joining me on Principal Center Radio. Delighted to be here.

[34:03] Announcer:

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