- Welcome to this session on Foundations and Practices of Trauma Informed, Relationship-Centered Education.

I'm Lissanna Follari, a faculty at UCCS and a Certified Trauma and Resilience Practitioner.

Before we embark on this session where we'll delve into some potentially painful or difficult topics, I wanna make this reminder about how important it is to remember yourself in this work, to take time when you need it, to pause to reground yourself, work on capturing your breath and regulating your nervous system if you start to feel anxious or activated from some of these topics.

And just a reminder that self-care is an act of self-love and how important that is.

Grounding activities like remembering your safe surroundings, looking around, looking out a window, just re-centering yourself in your setting if you start to feel anxious or unsafe, and may be triggered from some memories of your own experiences.

So that practice that we engage in is a way for us to help not only ourselves, the children and families we work with, and sustain us in this important work.

To start with, we'll look at understanding trauma and adverse childhood experiences, the drivers or the foundations of the practice that we build on.

As we start, let's think for a moment about what are your experiences with trauma or resilience-informed practice.

Are you familiar with this theme or topics?

Have you had some prior training that you wanna connect with today, and build on, expand your knowledge and skills?

Have you noticed practices in field experience or in classrooms?

Maybe you have even some personal memories of experiences you've had that with relationships that have been important in helping you move through troubling experiences or problematic or challenging experiences that have maybe given you some of those experiences of feeling overwhelmed in the past, and/or if you had prior learning on these topics.

So you wanna think about that.

Maybe connect in thinking about some of your memories, make some notes or jot some notes.

If you are watching this session with others around you, perhaps in your work or colleagues, maybe talk with each other about some of the background that you have coming in and maybe some of the things you're interested in learning more about the why behind you are adjoining this session.

All right.

So some big ideas, just the overarching concepts of trauma and resilience-informed practice.

First and foremost, this is really about a mindset that we bring to this work.

We wanna think about us being curious, interested in understanding the other people that we work with, understanding how our children's backgrounds are driving some of their behaviors.

It's a way for us to be curious about when we notice behaviors that are maybe causing some challenge or potentially disruptive in the classroom, thinking instead of thinking of that child as a problem or a challenge, thinking about what has happened in that background, what has experiences has that child been through that has prompted them to be behaving in this way?

How are they perceiving this moment differently than I am if it isn't activating me?

We build a practice around understanding the scope and breadth and prevalence of those adverse childhood experiences that we'll look at in just a moment.

Understanding the prevalence helps us be more responsive, maybe more sensitive to behaviors that we might see.

And perhaps it allows us to come at our work with a little more patience and grace, that understanding children's behavior is not directed or as a product of us, it's not about us, but it's really about their background and experiences in the way they're perceiving their world.

We wanna understand how that can impact their development and impact their growth and progress through life and through schools.

When we understand that we can help reset for resilience, reset through those trauma reactions and build that resilience to support children's growth.

We can think about trauma and resilience-informed practice as a universal precaution.

A universal precaution is a practice that is necessary for some children, but beneficial for everyone.

So we think about kind of the bumper sticker phrasing for a universal precaution, necessary for some, but helpful for all.

So we add these practices to our toolkit knowing that it's going to increase our capacity to serve all of our children, but especially those children that come from backgrounds that have experienced trauma or adverse experiences.

At the heart of all of this, first and foremost, is the fact that relationships really are at the heart of all resilience setting.

So when we look to support children's growth and development and really build and grow them through challenging experiences, reset their systems, their beautiful brains, and their beautiful bodies and hearts for resilience, that happens through our relationships with them.

So first and foremost, our strongest tool of practice is those relationships.

Wanna just do a brief overview of some of the research here to look at, what is the scope and scale?

Why is this so important for us to understand?

And why do we look at this as that universal precaution?

We add these practices to our toolkit because it will allow us to serve all of our children.

Now, we won't always know what backgrounds our children bring to the table.

So we can recognize by the scope of some of these statistics just how big the challenges are that our families and children are facing.

We can recognize that adding these practices is going to be useful even when we don't realize it.

Even when we don't know a child is bringing an extensive background of trauma into the classroom, we apply these principles and we know that we were able to reach them even when we don't have that information.

So noticing that over 50% of our nation's children have experienced one or more type of serious childhood trauma, that right there tells us that, in every classroom, you will face children who have experienced trauma.

And these practices will help reset them for that resilience.

The ACEs study is an important foundation that's really driving our practice.

It was a study conducted by a healthcare organization, an insurance provider, looking at in adults, the prevalence, widespread prevalence of health conditions, chronic health conditions and adverse health conditions later in life.

This agency wanted to understand, where did this come from?

What is this prevalence?

What can we do from a preventive perspective instead of responding to the health conditions and illnesses later?

What is driving?

What is causing, and at the root, and how can we prevent those?

Through that wide-scale research, they found that the common factors for adults with chronic health conditions was adverse experiences in childhood, experiences like poverty, being exposed to abuse and crime or neglect, having a parent incarcerated, multiple family transitions, and experiences of early trauma.

And so that these early experiences were major risk factors for illness and early death, as well as poor quality of life.

So that was groundbreaking research that really started to drive our thinking and drive our practice in early childhood as educators and professionals to think about our role in trying to reset those trajectories for children who've experienced early adverse experiences.

And now knowing the prevalence of those early experiences, why it's so important to bring this practice into every classroom, into every teacher's hands.

So when we think about some of those early experiences in those behaviors that we're seeing and the outcomes and impacts of those behaviors from the ACEs study, we wanted them to try and understand a bit better, what were some of the early traumatic experiences that children are faced with that are prompting and causing them to engage in those behaviors throughout the lifetime?

In this next section, we will look at particular types of trauma, definitions of trauma, and ways the children experience trauma.

This might be one of those moments where you might need to pause, ground yourself in your safe surroundings, understand that you are in a safe space, that we can explore these as a way to develop our professional practice.

So as we explore some of these topics, if they become difficult, remember to pause, remember to self-care, and remember to rely on those relationships, and reach out for that important nurturing human contact.

That's such an important foundation of resiliency.

So the overarching definition of trauma at the base of this work is any experience that leaves a person feeling hopeless, helpless, fearing for their life or survival or their safety.

The important piece here to understand is that the threat might be real or perceived.

It really is about that person's experience of that moment, the perception of that experience.

So it doesn't matter whether we as an outsider to that person think that the experience was real enough or severe enough or significant enough.

It is all about what happened to that person's body and brain, to their very physiology, an experience that left them feeling hopeless, helpless, fearing for their life or survival or safety.

And that can take many forms.

Some of the ways that we are exposed to trauma might be through a direct victimization of abuse, neglect, some kind of accident.

Again, that experience of being wholly out of control or helpless.

We may witness as a personal witness through domestic violence, or for first responders are often constant witness to trauma.

And that can have a real toll on the body.

Related to a person who has experienced a significant moment or experiences of hopeless, helpless, or fearing for survival, life, or safety.

Seeing that experience in a peer, siblings, or children, family members.

That can also impact our physiology, and then having that same experience.

But also potentially listening to those details.

So therapists through media exposure or video games or as educators engaging with children and families.

There are a couple of types of traumas to think about as well.

Type one is a single exposure.

There may have been one experience in a person's life in which they had that experience of feeling hopeless, helpless, or fear for their safety or survival.

Those kinds of one-time experiences or single exposures, we generally are able to regulate through, and they don't change our brains and bodies as much as the type two and three.

Type two is one type of exposure that may be an abuse experience or a witness experience that's repeated or exposure to one or two different events.

So this, again, is starting to see a repetition component.

And type three then is pervasive, toxic stress, developmental trauma.

This is ongoing in repeated exposures and experiences.

And that then creates even stronger physiological pathways, physiological responses that create pathways in the brain that change the brain structure and wiring due to that frequency.

Those are the individuals that struggle the most, those that may then have be in chronic fight and flight.

And that can really make structural changes, not just thought changes and behavior changes, but structural changes in the brain that we want to perhaps dig a little deeper with our relationship building and resilience building.

Another emphasis here, that the causes of trauma are less important than how the trauma manifests in that child's life.

So it's important to understand we can experience trauma at new anyways.

What happened is less than how it's impacting that child and how that manifestation of that behavior and that body reaction.

And we then just focus on the moment with them.

We don't have to focus on the history.

We focus on re-regulating, co-regulating the physiology in the moment, and we'll talk about how to do that.

So looking at brain-body connections is a good neuroscience and scientific foundation for this work.

We think about our brains and how our brains react.

Key parts of the brain that we wanna understand, this is just the basic neuroscience here behind trauma and resilience-informed practice.

At the brain stem, in our lower level, we have our amygdala, which is part of the system that regulates instinctive, reactionary kinds of behaviors.

That's our fight/flight/freeze center.

This is our alarm state.

That is the lower level of our brain's functioning.

We then also have our connection center with the hippocampus where experiences get connected to learning.

That becomes part of that brain wiring.

So repeated experiences create stronger pathways in our brain.

And thinking about sometimes we feel like there's some phrases like, trauma changes the brain, repeated trauma can create stronger pathways for fight and flight and freeze and can make people see threat and danger where there might not realistically be.

But the perception is so strong from that repeated exposure, the brain has been trained to see threat.

But healing also changes the brain.

Relationships change the brain in positive ways and create resilience.

That's also important,, equally or more important brain fact to remember that we can leverage what we know about neuroscience, which is, repetition strengthens pathways, emotional connections strengthens pathways and strengthens our memories and experiences.

And we can use those realities of the neuroscience to build resiliency and overcome adversity and trauma.

When we think about the thinking center or the prefrontal cortex at the higher level of our brain functioning, there we see mood regulation, concentration, problem-solving, and higher-order thinking.

And important to understand is that it requires a calm physiology, a calm body, a calm nervous system in order to be able to activate that part of a brain.

So if a child or a person is in constant alarm state or regularly in an alarm state, or in a moment of alarm, that higher-level thinking in prefrontal cortex gets switched off so that we get into instinct, alarm center, brain state.

And that's just simply getting us primed for action, primed for fighting or running or freezing.

And we need to understand that so we can better understand our children's behavior and responses.

This kind of simplified understanding of our brain states is also something that we wanna teach children through simple graphics like this one.

It's kind of a cartoon graphic to help them understand their own physiology and brain states.

And we can also use great examples of children's books to do that as well.

When children are driven into an alarm state, their first instinct will generally be to avoid or run or flee, flight away from that environment.

And over repeated times where children are unable to run from a perceived threat or a real threat, they may develop into a fight re-activeness.

So when we see children acting out, externalized behaviors, throwing things or fighting, kicking, punching, that child has learned that behavior as their only escape.

That should bring with us some patience and grace when we work with those children, thinking about the challenge, then we wanna be careful about restraint.

When we restrain children who are externalizing in their body, we are removing that ability to regroup, to reground, to re-regulate that physiology and to reset that activated body that we then often, through our response and reaction to children, push them into the fight mode where they then are throwing punches, kicking, or throwing things.

So we wanna be really careful about that.

And we'll look at some strategies for how can we reset in those moments in a more productive way.

Thinking also about the importance of approaching children with a warm, responsive relationship.

A calm demeanor, a calm voice, a calm facial expression, and a calm body is how we help co-regulate them in an activated state.

So I want you to think about challenging behaviors you might have seen or observed or experienced in the children that you work with.

Thinking about what was the response to that child in those moments, either in yourself or in others that you might have seen.

And you might wanna think here about, what did you see that child do?

How were they responded to?

And now thinking from this trauma and resilience lens to think about, how might we have done that differently?

Did it escalate more of the situation, or did it help that child co-regulate and calm down?

Did you see practices that [breathing deeply] help that child find their breath and pace and calm that brain?

Was there a face-to-face contact that helped connect in that child's nervous system and cue that relationship center of the brain?

Or was there something more harsh that might have escalated that alarm or escalated that child's perception of threat?

Thinking about that and what positive ways have you seen children's activated behavior handled?

And what ways would you do differently?

Again, if you're watching this with colleagues or if you are in a group environment, maybe chat with your neighbors.

Maybe make some notes in your journal as you're thinking about connections to practice.

So now let's look at these important trauma and informed resilience-focused supports and practices in schools and classrooms.

It all centers around resilience.

You might have heard more frequently, trauma-informed practice, TIP, T-I-P.

I add in there the resilience.

So trauma and resilience-informed practice is the TRIP we're on.

We're focusing and grounding everything in resilience.

Yes, it is difficult and painful to look at the statistics on the prevalence of adverse experiences, the prevalence of trauma experiences and abuses that kind of disheartening it is to think that our bodies hold onto that trauma and changes our brains.

But also I want to keep us focused on how resilience changes our brains, relationships changes our brains and changes our physiology.

So we can't talk about making a school trauma-informed without talking about making the school resilience-focused.

That's what this is really all about.

We think about trauma and we understand the scope and the research there so that we can apply the resilience-focused practices.

We can't change their history.

We can't change their past.

We also may not be able to change the exposures children are having right now.

But what we can do is focus on those new experiences, repeating those relationship, warmth, and responsiveness, and repeating those and building those resilience wiring in their brain.

Resilience equals hope for their future.

This is how we reset those pathways towards those later outcomes that were so troubling when we looked at that ACEs study.

To think at a very core, to define for us what is resilience, this is the ability to achieve positive outcomes mentally, emotionally, and socially, and spiritually, despite adversity.

So we wanna look at lessons learned for school practices.

So 10 big practices that came out of this case study research that we can look at here, district and school administrator commitments.

These are the ways that we build a school-wide or a program-wide focus.

In our individual practice, but this is a team effort, all across our organization, our schooler programs.

We design these globally across the school community, engaging with our families, but also all across the school.

We think about a holistic approach to wellness, nutrition, health practices, health behavior, prevention, engagement as a community, civic engagement.

How are children contributors to this community and how are they able to rely on this community?

Being careful to hire teachers that have a good fit and choosing community members that are aware, awake, and encouraging of practices around resilience.

Looking at how relationships are the core of resilience-based practice and encouraging those in all aspects.

Particular schools that do this well as a school-wide practice look at creating relationship assessment as part of teacher evaluations.

So looking beyond how are children, you know, how are children faring on academic outcomes?

And looking at, what is the climate of the relationships between adults and children in this community?

We embed mindfulness practice, learning, and models.

We look at embedding mindfulness, which is understanding our brain states and our body states and how those are interacting.

It is neuroscience and physiology.

But at an appropriate level, we do that a lot through sharing literature and practices, breathing practices, yoga, brain breaks, having children understand this body sensations and how those are connected to experiences.

Looking at that social-emotional learning.

All of those experiences are part of social-emotional learning.

At a district or program administration level, really focusing on caring relationships, willingness to be vulnerable together, building strong relationships as a team of adults here centered around our focus on supporting children and families.

Having careful and explicit professional development on topics like this of understanding trauma and resilience practice as universal precaution.

Valuing emotional intelligence and an understanding of our own needs.

Self-care, that self-care practices, grounding practices.

Together engaging, that helping to reduce fear and co-creating a space where we can be vulnerable, authentic, real.

We can make mistakes together and pick each other up and not have fear around those.

And importance of having mental health training, which again connects into that professional development piece.

So where we start in our own practice, we wanna be curious about cultivating the foundational knowledge of trauma and resilience, the neuroscience and the physiology understanding.

Ensuring, first and foremost, a physical, psychological, and emotional safety.

In our programs, classrooms within ourselves, within our relationships.

Focusing on guidance, restorative practices, and guidance, and discipline.

Avoiding any kind of punishment and exclusion.

Any time we remove and forcibly remove or exclude people from environments or children, sending children out of the classroom because they are struggling, to regulate themselves, is antithetical to using that one-on-one connection to re-engage the part of our nervous system, the social engagement network that is so essential to resetting, re-regulating our bodies.

And so we wanna look at those co-regulating practices.

Thinking about connections between that social-emotional learning, which is understanding components of myself, how my emotions feel in my body, how my emotions drive my decisions, and my behaviors, and understanding emotions of others.

Those are topics that we explicitly teach children.

We have lots of great books where we look at how it feels when we might be struggling.

This is a popular one you might remember, might be familiar with, for example, "Wemberly worried," and how her anxiety and anxiousness about different experiences was felt.

When we teach children about how the butterflies in their tummy or the prickly skin or the body changes, I'm tense, I'm tense.

My brow is furrowed, my shoulders are high.

That's how my body is telling me, giving me cues that my nervous system is unregulated and I need to co-regulate that.

We can help children in calm moments when their prefrontal cortex is activated, to have those experiences, build those learning moments.

That hippocampus connects those into long-term storage so that when we start to get into an activated state, as we're moving through there, we have those memories and we have those pathways to use my breath, calm my body, use my strategies.

That's that explicit instruction.

We look at increasing our understanding of the connection between experience and our body's response so that when we start to feel triggered or, you know, dysregulated or activated, we recognize it.

We've learned it enough to know.

And we strengthen those skills to create long-term trajectories where we can reset for resilience.

I can't emphasize enough, the single most common factor for children who develop resilience is at least one stable, committed relationship with a supported parent caregiver, teacher, or other adult.

We are us, us alone.

You alone are enough to change the trajectory for a child.

Your relationship, the heart that you bring to their world, to their classroom, to their relationship, that honest, open heart you bring is enough to change the whole game.

So we looked at a little bit of how that face-to-face interaction relationship, how that respect and trust and loving relationship can help.

When that brain is dysregulated and gets triggered into its alarm state, that's when a child isn't able to necessarily listen or use their words or make a better choice.

They're in reactive mode.

We wanna think about our three Rs: regulate, relate, and reason.

We regulate that nervous system through those breathing activities, grounding ourself in our safe environment.

We have to disrupt that alarm state of fight, flight and freeze, recognizing our safety.

And then we relate, "I'm here with you.

I can see how upset you are.

I'm going to be here while you work through it.

Let's breathe.

Let's calm our shoulders down.

Let's find a way to reground in the relate."

And then once that nervous system is activated, once that alarm state is dissipated, and we can move back up into that thinking brain, then we can get into that reasoning state where we can talk through, "Wow, what just happened?

What were you feeling in that moment?

What was going on in your body?"

And then trying to connect in what was going on in your brain and behavior.

So regulating, sometimes that looks like we can say, "Let's focus on those body sensations," feeling wigglys in your tummy or butterflies.

Is your skin feeling hot?

Do you feel tenses in your muscles?

Can we squeeze and then release?

Put your hands on your belly and feel that belly breath to try and regulate a nervous system.

Relating with that child, letting them know, activating then that social engagement part of the nervous system.

"I'm right here with you.

I'm gonna be your oak tree in this storm.

And I'm not going anywhere no matter what blows on around me."

Once we've dissipated those stress chemicals, then we can do that reasoning phase.

So this is part of the social-emotional learning, and that is so important in the curriculum.

Talking about noticing those body sensations, doing the self-calming activities, breathing exercises, clenching and unclenching, naming feelings then.

"Boy, I felt like a storm inside my stomach.

I felt like, you know, a hot lightning in my body.

I felt my muscles tense up.

I felt like I wanted to do punches."

That's when we can start to name those experiences after that body is calm when we're activated in that brain state.

Social-emotional skills are so important in that emotional literacy.

We want children to be able to recognize that their experiences are prompting feelings in their body and thoughts in their brain that drives their behavior.

And we can do that by learning in our circle time and in our curriculum, creating lesson plans where we practice awareness, we practice mindfulness, and we can learn together in those prefrontal cortex, calm-learning moments about different experiences that may have been driving our triggers, which can also include wanting to think about building knowledge and skills with that appropriate literature.

We wanna include carefully selected and screened books.

Always inform your families.

As you see from some of these titles, these are books that discuss explicitly personal safety, privacy, boundaries, and when those boundaries may be being violated.

There are topics of abuse in these books as well.

We wanna create an environment where we can open dialogue and invite children to share those difficult topics that we become the safe space where they know that they can talk about scary things, talk about painful things, talk about things that aren't going right in their world or that are violating their boundaries.

We have to co-create environments that allow children to do that.

Some of these book topics also talk about racism and the experience and the prompt, you know, that can have in the body as well.

That is another form of experiencing trauma.

Loss and grief through death or family transition.

We wanna include some conversation there for children also so that they understand they're not alone in those big overwhelming experiences.

Experiencing a loss can make a child feel hopeless and helpless as well.

So back to that definition of trauma.

So thinking about the importance of carefully using literature as a prompt for dialogues and discussions.

Some of the practices we've thought about today, those three Rs, using literature, building social-emotional learning, understanding that our relationships are really the most powerful tool we have for resetting, for resilience, and supporting children through adversity.

Now as a universal precaution, our strong relationships help all of our children.

But they're especially necessary for those children who have experienced adverse backgrounds and trauma experiences.

So thinking about those things we've heard today, what was standing out for you the most?

Try and take some notes and think about some practices that you really wanna try, adding to your toolkit and your practice kit and bringing into your practice.

I wanna leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Maya Angelou.

"Do the best you can until you know better.

Then when you know better, do better."

I hope today you've learned some practices that will help continue to grow your practice and continue to elevate your relationship building with your children and resetting your own resilience, as well as theirs.

Thank you for being here.