Unburdened by false humility, postmodern trauma activists claim to have understood for the first time what drives all of human suffering
Trauma DispatchTrauma news you can't get anywhere else. |
|
Trauma DispatchTrauma news you can't get anywhere else. |
|
CATEGORY: SCHOOLS Cover of the 70-page CorruptED report Source: Parents Defending Education Read time: 1.7 minutes This Happened On August 28, 2024, a report was issued that reviewed syllabi of college courses for future teachers across the nation which exposed the radical ideologies being taught. Who Did This? Parents Defending Education produced the report. The organization website describes itself as “a national grassroots organization working to reclaim our schools from activists promoting harmful agendas.” The Premise The report, CorruptED: Colleges of Education and the Teacher As Activist Pipeline, examined 110 syllabi and 53 course descriptions from over 50 universities and colleges. The purpose was to document guiding principles being taught to the next generation of teachers which included radical left-wing ideologies. Organized by state, university or college, and course title, the report was narrative in style, listing specific phrases of course content. Oft-repeated topics included:
Analysis What is the connection to trauma? Multiple courses that taught these progressive views included trauma as another source of unequal and unfair form of oppression. Their definition of trauma, however, was from a distorted reality. Discrimination, whether real or perceived, is viewed as trauma. Because certain groups suffer discrimination as “trauma,” the remedy is implementation of trauma-informed classrooms. While the other topics of woke ideology get all the attention, many may not yet have realized how the leveraging of trauma over the past thirty years is part of the same movement. The psychiatric concept of trauma is a victim of its own success. The designation of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in 1980 and the following explosion of research to validate the disorder and develop effective treatments is one of the great success stories of psychiatry. Part of the success of PTSD research has been to show that the development of PTSD is always limited to experiences of life-threat because those are the types of sudden, unexpected, overwhelming moments of panic and fear for one’s life that causes the syndrome with true functional impairment. Experiences that do not rise to that level may be stressful and cause other problems, but they do not cause PTSD. It seems to have been inevitable that any social justice cause that sought status worthy of political action would claim their unique situation of social stress was trauma. Hence, nearly every form of perceived or real oppression is now being exaggerated as trauma in the progressive vision. Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe here to a weekly email notice of new posts. CATEGORY: SCHOOLS Cade Brumley, Louisiana State Superintendent of Education Source: Louisiana Department of Education Read time: 2.5 minutes This Happened On July 29, 2024, the top administrator of a state education department issued a memo to district school leaders to promote stricter school discipline consistent with two new state laws. Who Did This? Cade Brumley is the Louisiana Superintendent of Education. He was selected in 2020 by a state board under a Democrat governor. In 2024, the governorship changed to a Republican, who, with majorities in the House and Senate, passed multiple laws to return to conservative cultural values in education and law enforcement. The Premise Brumley’s memo stated, “As we approach a new school year, please recommit to assertive discipline action to create safe and orderly environments where teaching and learning can flourish.” It also noted two new laws. One law replaces the phrase a “teacher may” have an unruly student removed from the classroom with a “teacher shall,” and protects teachers who do that from retaliation by school leaders. The other new law adds possession of knives and illegal drugs to behaviors requiring expulsion. Not mentioned in the memo is that the competing philosophy of assertive discipline in schools has been the practice of restorative justice. Developed in part as a response to zero-tolerance school policies of the 1990s, restorative justice advocates claim that suspensions facilitate a path to prison, and that punitive discipline is inherently racist because it is disproportionately given to Black students and minority groups due to structural racism and implicit bias [1]. Originally crafted for the criminal justice system, restorative justice does not have one standard definition. Common elements include emphasis on communication in face-to-face circles, often called peace circles, where victims express how the “deeds” effected them, and perpetrators, gently referred to as “doers,” take responsibility for their actions in apologies or service work. It must never be implied that the doer is a bad person [2]. At least three states passed laws (California, Colorado, and Minnesota) to make restorative justice government policy in public schools in the past decade. Many school districts have adopted it, including Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Oakland, Philadelphia, and San Francisco [2]. Analysis To some in the criminal justice system, trauma is a guiding loadstar: victims of violence should not be re-traumatized by being forced to testify in formal proceedings, and perpetrators should not be newly traumatized by incarceration. Psychiatrist Judith Herman, inventor of the fictitious complex PTSD, devoted her latest book in 2023 to promoting restorative justice [3]. In the school system, negative impacts on perpetrators and victims are called “harms” instead of traumas. The emphasis is more on trying to correct perceived racial discrimination and reduce discipline disparities. Louisiana never formally adopted restorative justice in schools. An effort to enshrine the practice into code failed in 2013 in large part because there is no good evidence to suggest that it works. Only one study on restorative justice in schools has employed a randomized design, and had mixed results on suspension rates, and showed that academic outcomes actually worsened in grades 6–8 [2]. One other study employed a randomized design but it was narrowly focused on bullying, and failed to show an overall effect [4]. Both studies suffered from inconsistent implementation practices that may have weakened the effects. All other research in schools are uncontrolled studies [5]. Advocates can point to decreased suspensions in some, but not all, studies, but usually neglect to mention how that is circular. Suspensions decrease simply because restorative justice eliminates suspensions as a first response. Nearly all studies failed to measure underlying disruptive behaviors. The main evidence that advocates of restorative justice can cite is that teachers’ or students’ perceptions of school atmosphere improve, although even that is mixed. Further, perceptions don’t make anyone safer, develop academic skills, or improve lives in tangible ways. Why Is This Happening? Returning to assertive discipline may be seen as a correction to social justice types of reforms based on claims that racism causes children to be disruptive. For social justice movements to both energize the elites in power and create public buy-in, the time-tested progressive Leftist strategy is to identify a source of perceived oppression that is the cause of all problems, the thing one can point to with definitive clarity as the cause of all disadvantages and inequities in society. Trauma and racial discrimination consistently serve that purpose well. Evidence of causation has been harder to come by. REFERENCES [1] Gregory, A., & Evans, K.R. (2020). The Starts and Stumbles of Restorative Justice in Education: Where Do We Go from Here? Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/restorative-justice [2] Catherine H. Augustine, John Engberg, Geoffrey E. Grimm, Emma Lee, Elaine Lin Wang, Karen Christianson, Andrea A. Joseph (2018). Can Restorative Practices Improve School Climate and Curb Suspensions? An Evaluation of the Impact of Restorative Practices in a Mid-Sized Urban School District. RAND Corporation: Santa Monica, CA. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2840.html [3] Judith Herman (2023). Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice. Basic Books: New York [4] Acosta, J., Chinman, M., Ebener, P.,Malone, P. S., Phillips, A.,& Wilks, A. (2019). Evaluation of a whole-school change intervention: findings from a two-year cluster-randomized trial of the restorative practices intervention. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 48, 876–890. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-019-01013-2. [5] Studies are reviewed in: Sean Darling-Hammond, Trevor A. Fronius, Hannah Sutherland, Sarah Guckenburg, Anthony Petrosino, Nancy Hurley (2020). Effectiveness of Restorative Justice in US K-12 Schools: a Review of Quantitative Research. Contemporary School Psychology (2020) 24:295–308. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40688-020-00290-0 Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe here to a weekly email notice of new posts. Federal bill aims to add trauma-informed practices to Lyndon Johnson’s still-expanding Great Society8/8/2024
CATEGORY: SCHOOLS Rep. Katherine M. Clark (D-MA) Source: Congress.gov Read time: 2.2 minutes This Happened On July 11, 2024, text became available for bill H.R. 8526 – Trauma-Informed Schools Act of 2024. It was introduced into the House of Representatives on May 23, 2024 and referred to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Who Did This? Katherine M. Clark is a Democrat representative from Massachusetts. As the minority Whip, she currently is the highest-ranking woman in Congressional leadership. The Premise H.R. 8526 proposes to amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to mandate trauma-informed practices in schools. The bill has not moved out of committee. Specifically, it proposes to insert a definition of trauma-informed practices: a “shared understanding among teachers,… school leaders,… and other staff that— ‘‘(i) adverse and potentially traumatic experiences are common among students; (ii) trauma can impact student learning, behavior, and relationships in school.” The bill aims to implement three practices:
The rest of the bill contains details on amending the application process for federal funding. To receive funding, eligible schools (those with a high proportion of at-risk students) must submit applications with implementation plans to local school agencies, who must submit plans to state agencies, who must submit plans to the federal government. Thus, every level of education bureaucracy would include mandates to implement trauma-informed practices. Analysis The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 was part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society aimed to eliminate poverty and racial injustice by greatly expanding the federal government’s control of health care, education, and welfare programs. H.R. 8526 continues that progressive leftist tradition by adding trauma as another domain for federal intervention. Consistent with other definitions of trauma-informed practices, the definition in the bill is enormously broad and includes “adverse” experiences that are everyday stresses, not life-threatening trauma. This allows governmental control of language that redefines any perceived inequity in society as a more pernicious threat of psychological harm than it really is. Trauma-informed trainings are not balanced presentations of scientific evidence (see here and here). They are biased to present a liberal theory that human nature is highly malleable via the hypotheses of toxic stress—that trauma permanently damages brains—and the adverse childhood experiences (ACE) literature—that early childhood common stressors cause a huge variety of physical illnesses in adulthood. These hypotheses have been debunked as lacking credible evidence (debunked here and here). The definition of trauma-informed in the bill is revealing for its intent by the bill’s sponsors to primarily create a “shared understanding.” The intent is not to educate educators and students on the research of what we know about human nature and our response to trauma, it is to enthrone a fabricated sense of reality that the science is settled in support of their theory. Implicit bias increased in popularity in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter riots and the rise of DEI, with the assertion that Whites were systemically racist even if they didn’t know it. The psychological research trying to establish implicit bias as a real construct, however, has received severe criticisms. Social emotional learning may be considered the child development version of implicit bias. It is promoted as a curriculum for teaching children how to access an emotion vocabulary and develop adaptive social behaviors, but teaches that these are tools for examining root causes of inequity. It has been criticized as a Trojan horse for introducing Critical Theory and a meta-analysis of 90 programs found no evidence of a beneficial effect six months after programs ended [1]. Why Is This Happening? The trauma-informed practices movement has made inroads with courts and local government policies, but it has found the greatest traction in local educational settings [here, here, and here]. This bill represents an attempt to expand a foothold into the federal educational level. The bill is written as an intention to improve child outcomes through science, but there are zero research studies showing that trauma-informed practices improve any outcomes for children. If implemented, the only thing the bill would ultimately achieve is embedding in federal law, with all the infrastructure and funding that entails, the permanent training of educational staff and students in an unproven ideology. REFERENCES [1] Cipriano C, Ha C, Wood M, Sehgal K, Ahmad E, McCarthy MF (2024). A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Universal School-Based SEL Programs in the United States: Considerations for Marginalized Students. Social and Emotional Learning: Research, Practice, and Policy, 100029, doi: 10.1016/j.sel.2024.100029 Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. CATEGORY: SCHOOLS Left: David Colley, PhD, Oxford Brookes University. Right: Laura Dennis, Education Outreach Lead, Mulberry Bush Source: Oxford Mail Read time: 2.2 minutes This Happened On June 20, 2024, the Mulberry Bush charity sponsored a one-day conference on ways to address childhood trauma in schools. Who Did This? Mulberry Bush, a 75-year-old charity based in Standlake, UK, conducts trainings and runs a residential school of about 20 students, ages 5 to 12, who have suffered some form of trauma. Laura Dennis, a former school teacher, is the Education Outreach Lead. The university co-host was Oxford Brookes University, led by David Colley, PhD, in the School of Education. Colley has published several papers supportive of nurture groups in schools. The Premise This Research Conference goal was to disseminate the findings from several projects that have attempted to embed trauma and attachment training in UK schools.
Analysis This conference is an example of how the trauma-informed approaches movement is not just popular in the US. It also has strong footholds in Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Australia, and perhaps other countries. The most well-developed of the programs in the conference is the nurture group model, which was developed in the 1970s and is now implemented in over 2,000 schools in the UK [1].
This model shares similarities with some American models of supporting troubled children, but there are no known nurture groups in the US. NurtureUK, a charity for promoting the nurture group model, released a report in 2019 stating that more than 100 studies have found positive effects from nurture groups. The model was hailed as a tremendously successful program that likely pays for itself after just two years. A literature review in 2014, however, found only twelve outcomes studies [2] which had multiple major limitations. None of the studies were randomized. As such, no studies had outcomes measured with blind raters. While some behaviors improved, no studies found improvements in academic tests. There is no known financial analysis that shows that nurture groups pay for themselves. Only one study had a follow-up that measured outcomes beyond the end of a school year. Researchers re-assessed children a mean of 2.7 years after the group ended, but they managed to follow only 12 of the 68 children who started the study. These children did not significantly improve on 16 of 20 domains that were tested [3]. The training for teachers in this model shares a common goal with the other trauma-informed approaches of instilling a culture in the belief of a misleading narrative of neuroscience that has been debunked. They embrace the toxic stress narrative that prolonged stress becomes toxic, and high levels of cortisol “can impact the developing brain and alter the structure and function of key brain areas” [1]. REFERENCES [1] Nurture Groups (booklet) (2019). Published by NurtureUK, https://www.nurtureuk.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Nurture-Groups-Booklet-Dec-2019.pdf [2] Naomi Katherine Hughes & Annette Schlösser (2014) The effectiveness of nurture groups: a systematic review, Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties, 19:4, 386-409, DOI: 10.1080/13632752.2014.883729 [3] O’Connor, T., and J. Colwell. 2002. The Effectiveness and Rationale of the ‘Nurture Group’ Approach to Helping Children with Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties Remain Within Mainstream Education. British Journal of Special Education 29 (2): 96–100. Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. CATEGORY: SCHOOLS Sarah Lindstrom Johnson, PhD Source: Arizona State University News Read time: 2.0 minutes This Happened On June 4, Arizona State University held a virtual, all-day conference for educators called the Trauma-Sensitive School Symposium. Who Did This? The organizer was Sarah Lindstrom Johnson, associate professor in the School of Social and Family Dynamics. She holds a PhD in public health. Johnson has been first or secondary author on over 80 peer-reviewed publications that focused on school climate, trauma-informed practices, and bullying. The Premise The trauma-informed movement advocates a wide range of loosely-defined concepts. The goals for this conference included recognizing the signs of trauma, implementing culturally responsive interventions, and creating compassionate spaces for student well-being. Common to all efforts in the movement is a framework that there is almost always a reason for a person’s behavior—there are no inherent traits of dysfunction—and the reason is usually trauma. This was the eighth conference in the Arizona State series. In 2023, the conference was attended by over 700 educators. Lindstrom Johnson is one of many scientist advocates supported by their universities who are aggressively promoting the trauma-informed ideology. Analysis Because the trauma-informed concept is a list of practices that cover so many different and loosely-defined things, it does not represent a standardized or coherent technique, which makes it nearly impossible to study. The key underlying premise of trauma-informed trainings is always to install an intellectual framework more than it is to recommend specific tasks. The framework is to convince participants that trauma has impacts on everyone—children, families, teachers–and the impacts are wide-ranging across physical health, mental health, and ability to function in daily life. If you remove evidence-based psychotherapy treatment for PTSD, which was supported by research well before the trauma-informed movement started, from the list of practices, there are no research studies that show trauma-informed practices can improve any outcomes of substance. Even reviews that are sympathetic to the movement acknowledge the absence of evidence. For example, a recent review of trauma-informed practices in healthcare concluded, “Our first important finding is that the empirical evidence base for the effectiveness of trauma-informed organisational change interventions in primary care and community mental healthcare is very limited” [1]. Why Is This Happening? Postmodern activists' attempts to leverage the concept of trauma as an oppressive force that determines all the disadvantaged groups in society has been operational for nearly thirty years. This trauma paradigm arose from psychologist- and psychiatrist-activists and then found traction in social work and counselor training programs that are focused on social justice. This trauma ideology expanded outside of psychology at the same time as popularity rose for other progressive movements such as critical race theory, DEI, and transgenderism. They all share an underlying reframing of human nature as fragile and highly malleable. Attendees at these types of conferences tend to be a subgroup of progressive educators who wish to redefine the traditional role of teachers. They believe children are fragile and need to be protected from every life challenge by teachers who take on mental health and auxiliary parenting duties. Greg Lukianoff and Johnathan Haidt described this phenomenon at the university level in their 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind. Abigail Shrier described this at the elementary and high school level in her 2024 book Bad Therapy. Conservative activists like Christopher Rufo have taken action against progressive schools and have been at the forefront of dismantling woke policies in educational settings [2]. REFERENCES [1] Natalia V. Lewis, Angel Bierce, Gene S. Feder, John Macleod, Katrina M. Turner, Stan Zammit, Shoba Dawson, "Trauma-Informed Approaches in Primary Healthcare and Community Mental Healthcare: A Mixed Methods Systematic Review of Organizational Change Interventions", Health & Social Care in the Community, vol. 2023, Article ID 4475114, 18 pages, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1155/2023/4475114 [2] Christopher F. Rufo (November 28, 2023). The Fight for New College. A short documentary on the counterrevolution in higher education. Substack. https://christopherrufo.com/p/the-fight-for-new-college Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. CATEGORY: SCHOOLS Melanie Geddings-Hayes, LCSW, Director of Clinical Services, Paths for Families Source: Paths for Families press release Read time: 2.5 minutes This Happened. Paths for Families, a nonprofit organization in Maryland, announced April 8, 2024 that it was awarded $770,000 by the state to implement trauma-informed services in Prince George’s County high schools. Who Did This? The funding comes from the Maryland General Assembly under the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future. The Blueprint was a major piece of legislation passed in 2021 that made comprehensive changes to Maryland’s public education system that spans pre-K to high school, with a priority on diversity and equity of outcomes. Among other changes, it mandated access to mental health practitioners for students and professional development for school staff on how to provide trauma–informed interventions. Melanie Geddings-Hayes, LCSW, director of clinical services at Paths for Families, said “Our team has worked with populations in need of trauma-responsive care for more than three decades, so we're uniquely qualified to serve this critical community need.” The Premise In 2021, Maryland embarked on a massive plan for investing $3.8 billion over ten years to raise the quality of public education because various metrics showed mediocre performance, including large academic achievement gaps based on race and income [1]. One of the recommendations to elevate under-performing students was to institute “broad and sustained new academic, social service, and health supports for students and schools that need them the most,” which, to a large degree, meant trauma-informed care. The premise of this strategy is based on the belief that trauma is a source, perhaps the main source, of a vast array of mental and physical problems for dysfunctional individuals in society. The $770,000 funding to Paths for Families was for only one of Maryland’s twenty-three counties for just a 16-month period. Prince George’s is the second most populated county in the state. According to the press release, Paths for Families will provide evidence-based counseling to high school students living in foster care or with an adoptive parent. They will also conduct trauma-informed care trainings for teachers and staff at all 33 high schools in the county. Analysis The strategy to provide evidence-based counseling to high school students sounds potentially helpful, but there are a number of problems with these types of programs. Uptake and effectiveness are notoriously poor with counseling for youths and families who are not seeking it. Providing counseling to youths does not provide the same guarantee of benefits as providing medical care such as vaccinations, medications, eye care, and dental care. In addition, the counseling is likely to be school-based, on the grounds that this makes access easier for youths. There is, however, little to no data that shows school-based produces better, or even equal, uptake or results than office-based. Plus, it has the disadvantages of minimizing parental involvement and problematic issues of maintaining confidentiality for students. Further, there is zero good scientific evidence that treating trauma leads to remediation of learning problems or school achievement on a public health scale. Details of the training for teachers to be provided by Paths for Families were not listed, but if it is like all other trauma-informed trainings it will be based on the doctrines of adverse childhood experiences (ACE) and toxic stress, which teach that stress and trauma permanently damage brains, cause a huge swath of physical diseases, and cause most of the problems of disadvantaged groups in society. Despite a consensus of a subgroup of medical and social sciences researchers who advocate for this ideology, none of the claims based on ACEs and toxic stress have been proven. The claims are based on poorly-designed cross-sectional studies and one-sided interpretations of data to fit their worldview. Why Is This Happening? Over the past decade, dozens of programs nearly identical to this have emerged over the country, mostly in counties and states controlled by progressive leftist legislators. They are based on an ideology that human nature is highly malleable from life experiences, which is the basis of a larger suite of progressive doctrines that attempt to explain disadvantages and minority groups as products of oppression which require government control and intervention. REFERENCES [1] Maryland Commission on Innovation & Excellence in Education (December 2020). Blueprint for Maryland’s Future. Final Report. Department of Legislative Services, Annapolis, MD. Accessed 5/10/2024. Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. CATEGORY: SCHOOLS Anita Faulkner, MS, Director of NCA-STAR Source: UNC Greensboro Read time: 1.8 minutes This Happened University of North Carolina at Greensboro launched an online training program for educators to become trauma-informed. The Trauma-Informed Professional Practice K-12 Educator Certificate Program was announced on their website February 5, 2024. Who Did This? The training program is a product of UNC Greensboro’s North Carolina Academy for Stress Trauma and Resilience (NCA-STAR), which is housed within the university’s Department of Counseling and Educational Development. NCA-STAR was created in 2019, and the inaugural director, Anita Faulkner, was appointed in 2021. The Premise The premise is that when teachers learn how trauma and stress impacts a wide range of children’s emotions, sense of self, learning, and aggression, then they can implement new skills in classrooms to make children and schools more successful. Analysis The fourteen-hour course provides educators with an understanding of trauma’s impact on the lives of students, teachers, staff, and families. The topics include:
The cost is $349. Why Is This Happening? The “trauma-informed” concept originated in the early 2000s but has always been vaguely defined, with no consensus on a definition. This vagueness may be seen as a strength by allowing many projects to fall under its umbrella. As a result, the number of training programs, such as this one, have grown tremendously over the past fifteen years. Should This Be Attempted? Despite many individuals claiming that one or another interaction with a trauma-informed approach greatly helped them, there are no known tests of the effectiveness of these approaches. Because of the way trauma-informed approaches are broadly defined, it is nearly impossible to test them. The studies that have been published relied mostly on trainees’ self-perceptions of whether they feel better educated. What’s Next? Proponents of trauma-informed approaches appear to be more interested in promoting the premise that trauma is the root cause of nearly all disadvantages than in gathering evidence. It seems likely that controversies at the school level may start to increase as more funds and time are invested in these approaches without an evidence base. Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. CATEGORY: SCHOOLS Nick Morio, trauma and resiliency coach (Credit WKBN 27 News) Source: WFMJ 21 news Read time: 2.5 minutes This Happened Akron Children’s School Health Services hired an individual to fill a new position called a “trauma and resiliency coach” who will work with local schools. Who Is Doing This? Akron Children’s is a hospital and outpatient clinics system that provides pediatric care in multiple counties in northeast Ohio. The system includes a School Health Services program to treat primarily medical problems in school-based clinics. Addressing trauma and stress in schools has not previously been a service they offer. Covelli Enterprises, one of the largest restaurant franchisees in the United States, provided the funding. Nick Morio, a former educator, will be the new trauma and resiliency coach. He does not appear to be a licensed counselor. It’s not clear what his training is for this position. The Premise The premise is that when teachers learn how trauma and stress impacts a wide range of children’s emotions, sense of self, learning, aggression (and much more) then they can implement new skills in classrooms to make children and schools more successful. Why is the coach needed? The justification for this new position, according to Missy McClain, Community Outreach Coordinator for Akron Children’s, is that trauma has a wide and enduring impact on everything. In an interview, she stated, Trauma “is more than just about experiencing sad or scary things. . . . And it can impact us throughout our lives. And it can impact the ways we’re able to behave at school, the ways we’re able to learn in school, the ways we’re able to communicate about our feelings, our physical health as we grow older. Trauma is something that can color everything that we do in our lives.” (emphasis added). What will the coach do? He will go into schools to help teachers and other school staff understand what children are going through after experiencing trauma and stress. He will provide professional development for teachers and tips on classroom planning to help keep troubled children in classrooms. McClain stated that she thinks of the coaching job as “building a culture of wellness for all of the students who are there but especially for our students who might be having a tougher time at home or in their communities.” McClain explained that the coach will educate teachers on how to help students handle stress “through positive communication,” and “coping mechanisms like taking deep breaths, and counting to ten, and, you know, even doing things like mindfulness can really help.” Analysis The theory that trauma and stress have enduring impacts on every aspect of our lives is the identical theory behind the unproven adverse childhood experiences (ACE) theory, the toxic stress myth, and the debunked theory of the best-selling book The Body Keeps the Score. Many schools have implemented various types of these programs across the country over the past ten years. There is little good or consistent evidence that the programs have positive impacts on school attendance, learning, disruptive behavior, or mental health. It is unlikely that this program will truly help many children who are struggling with these issues. Given recent publicity about teachers across the nation providing controversial gender and race communications without parental awareness, it was notable that McClain's description of the job did not include how parents would be informed of or give consent for interventions with students. Why Is This Happening? These types of programs keep expanding across the country because they are seamless with the ideological beliefs of many educators that human nature is highly malleable by life experiences and a more ideal society can be reached someday if we invest more. These types of interventions are in line philosophically with other controversial efforts by schools to teach progressive interpretations of race and gender. What’s Next? How will they know if it works? No plan for program evaluation was announced. It is impossible to gather conclusive evidence on the effectiveness of uncontrolled, unsystematic, and unstandardized interventions like this one. At best, the program ought to document case reports of how individual teachers and students were helped. Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. CATEGORY: SCHOOLS Josh Carlson, LCSW, Executive Director of The Knowledge Center at Chaddock Source: KHQA Staff Read time: 2.4 minutes This is Happening The Knowledge Center at Chaddock, a non-profit organization in Quincy, IL, will hold its third-annual conference to train teachers in trauma-informed approaches. The two-day event will be March 6 & 7, 2024. Who Is Doing This? The Center offers trainings, supervision, and publications, with much of its work based on their trademarked Developmental Trauma and Attachment Program® model. The Premise The premise is that when teachers learn how trauma impacts a wide range of children’s emotions, neurobiology, sense of self, learning, aggression (and much more) then they can implement new skills in classrooms to make children and schools more successful. Analysis Among the fifteen presentations, teachers will learn how to prevent burn out, use circles to transform classroom culture, connect with the whole child as a person, build a vocabulary to become truly trauma-informed on six core principles, play the Brain Architecture Game to learn how trauma and ACEs change children’s brains, use reflection to understand emotional responses, engage families, identify why kids misbehave, learn the Nurtured Heart Approach® to reduce aggression, use writing to help students turn pain into power, and hear from a keynote speaker who believes that “Every child faces a moment in life that determines their future self.” There is, however, no good evidence that implementation of a trauma-informed culture enhances well-being, reduces disruptive behaviors, or helps children learn better. The slogan “trauma-informed” was invented in the early 2000s for the purpose of trying to popularize a narrative, and is not a scientific term. There is no consensus on what it means to be trauma-informed. Trainings teach that becoming trauma-informed is a never-ending process rather than a specific outcome. Central to the narrative is that nearly all aspects of humans are molded by life experiences nearly to the exclusion of inherited genetic predispositions, which is captured in the catchphrase “What happened to you?”, as opposed to “What is wrong with you?” Why Is This Happening? Empowering teachers to replace the rightful roles of parents as being responsible for childrens’ social and emotional education is in line with other controversial efforts by schools such as teaching progressive revisions of race (diversity, equity, and inclusion; critical race theory) and gender identity. Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts here. Send comments and questions to (pending). |
TRAUMA DISPATCH
|