5-Hour Training: Trauma-Responsive Foundational Principles for Leaders and Organizations (B23)

Principle #1 Understanding Stress and Trauma

Many children and adults experience trauma. Understanding the prevalence of trauma and adversity and their impacts on learning, development and human functioning is important and allows educators to create more inclusive and responsive learning environments for children and adults. Understanding how stress and trauma can affect individuals, families, communities and organizations can help to reframe otherwise confusing or frustrating behavior. When knowledge of stress and trauma and their impacts on development, learning and well-being informs policies, procedures, practices and intervention plans, educators are better able to provide supportive, compassionate and strength-based interactions with others. They are also less likely to re-traumatize and/or cause further harm to children and adults with histories of trauma. Educators can use this understanding to provide supportive compassionate communication and environments without knowing about, or focusing on, the specific details of others’ traumatic experiences.

Principle #2: Building Trusting and Respectful Relationships

When children and adults have relational support, they develop important coping skills and resilience. Young children and adults thrive in the context of consistent, nurturing and responsive relationships. When we build relationships that are attuned and compassionate, we strengthen trusting connections with others that buffer stress and support coping, resilience, healing and wellness. Attuned relationships are driven by empathy vers­­us reactive, engaged versus disengaged and require building capacities in self-awareness and self-regulation as foundations for responsiveness and equity.

Principle #3: Establish Safety and Predictability

Trauma impacts individuals’ perceptions of safety. Establishing physical, social and emotional safety is central to trauma-responsive resilience building environments. Reducing uncertainty by increasing consistency and predictability in relationships and environments, increases individuals’ feelings of safety and belonging. Children’s and adults’ stress is reduced in relationships and within environments that communicate feelings of safety, calm and predictability.

Principle #4: Focus on Strengths and Assets

­Children and adults must be understood to be complex human beings and not defined by the trauma they experience. Trauma-responsive and resilience building practice does not stigmatize, label or define people by their experiences of stress and trauma. Trauma and its impact are acknowledged honestly, however, it is never used to pathologize people. Deficit thinking (deficit language, stories and beliefs/assumptions) is disrupted and replaced with a focus a focus on “person-first” language and a strength-based approach that centers attention on the strengths, creativity/creative problem-solving, sources of coping, resilience and well-being and potential in children and adults, families and communities. Acknowledging strengths and assets also involves recognizing and celebrating progress and accomplishments in working for change—no matter how small

Principle #5: Promote Coping, Resilience, Healing and Wellness

Central to trauma-responsive practice is actively building the skills, knowledge and dispositions necessary for coping, resilience, healing and wellness. Examples include strengthening self-awareness, body awareness, self-regulation (emotional and behavioral), relationship skills and problem-solving and responsible decision-making skills. Wellness and healing are improved when individuals and groups are supported to identify their individual and collective strengths and the coping skills, they have used in the past to respond effectively to adversity. Resilience and healing is also strengthened when individuals develop compassionate resilience, that is, the ability to maintain one’s physical, emotional and mental well-being (a ‘resilience reservoir’) while responding compassionately to others’ suffering. This requires that educators build self-awareness to identify as well as skills/strategies to address their own stress, burnout, compassion fatigue and secondary traumatic stress/vicarious trauma.

Bonus: Trauma Responsive, Strength-Based Reflective Supervision and Leadership

There is evidence that trauma-responsive and reflective leadership and supervision is associated with resilience and helps prevent burnout resulting in lower rates of turnover and increased job satisfaction. Participants will learn ways to apply the trauma responsive strategies in their supervision practice and will be able to identify the foundations of relationship-based leadership as well as what it means to use a trauma-responsive and reflective lens in leadership and supervision.

5-Hour Professional Development Certificate Issues if Participant Watches 90% of each video.