26 Apr Trauma follows children into the classroom. A new teaching model is changing that.
Traumatic experiences can have ripple effects that permeate across many aspects of people’s lives, reports Tom Brunzell
For students, adverse childhood experiences have been shown to impact attention, memory, language development and relational functioning – the exact skills learning relies on.
Classrooms, however, are also one of the most stable places many young people encounter. This is truest when teachers are equipped with developmentally informed strategies.
In classrooms around the world, teachers are confronting the profound effects of chronic stress and childhood adversity on learning.
They have the opportunity to readily recognise these concerns each day in their classrooms.
The Trauma-Informed Positive Education (TIPE) model has already helped more than 100,000 Australian teachers, as well as many more overseas, to move from a reactive stance to a more instructional, proactive approach to holistic education.
Understanding the student’s perspective
Often, students who have experienced childhood adversity act out when at school – some turn inwards and disengage, some simply give up.
What looks like defiance is a message they are trying to share, and it’s important that teachers are equipped with the skills to listen and respond appropriately.
Teachers can often interpret student resistance as a deliberate choice they are making to disrupt classroom learning for attention or control.
For instance, consider a student that can’t stop moving their body to the point where they are disrupting their peers; or a student who escalates and yells at others when they don’t get what they want immediately.
Through a trauma-informed education approach, teachers can create classroom communities that serve as co-regulatory and relational environments to support all students to proactively communicate and engage with learning.
There is so much more we can do to support students with complex, unmet needs for learning.
Effective support requires creating opportunities for both healing and growth throughout the learning process.
By intentionally building students’ strengths – like kindness, curiosity, persistence – students can then flourish in the classroom.
This dual-purpose teaching and learning approach integrates neurodevelopmental and attachment sciences with wellbeing sciences, enabling classrooms to become stable environments where students can regulate, reconnect and re‑engage academically.
The TIPE approach
Trauma-Informed Positive Education is broken down into three domains.
- Repairing regulatory capacity through sensory needs, rhythmic routines, mindfulness and co‑regulation
- Repairing ruptured relationships by cultivating healthy educator–student relationships, emotional literacy and a sense of belonging
- Increasing psychological resources using evidence‑based wellbeing practices to build student’s positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment
Each of these elements interact and compound gains in a student’s readiness to learn and their classroom engagement.
These practices are deliberately teachable, observable and coachable, giving teachers a shared language for improving learning capabilities.
TIPE’s alignment with neuroscience and neurobiological indications explain why it’s gaining traction with educators who are eager for approaches that are both compassionate and academically rigorous.
From single classrooms to system change
Our priority this year is to embed trauma‑informed education strategies into the University of Melbourne’s teacher preparation courses.
In addition to upskilling teachers once they are employed, we need to ensure these valuable skills are developed and taught before graduate teachers set foot in a classroom.
The throughline across all these projects is a systemic theory of change.
If we prepare teachers before they enter the workforce and coach community leaders, we can generate further evidence of the model’s efficacy and use these to build policy levers with scalability.
In time, we will find ourselves on the path towards a truly transformative educational experience in Australia.
Leading the way forward
This process has already begun at the University of Melbourne.
Embodying our distinctive research-to-practice ethos, we are generating new understandings of what it means to be a trauma-informed education leader and ensuring these lessons are translated into real-world changes in education.
Our work has been used to develop the Berry Street Education Model (BSEM), now widely implemented across Australia and increasingly abroad.
The broader aim is a push for national guidelines on trauma-informed teaching and meaningful cross-sector alignment to ensure we pave the way for the future, informed by the insights available to us right now.
This approach is universally applied for the proactive benefit of all students, with special focus on those who need support the most.
It begins with trauma-informed planning in initial teacher education, flows through to fostering leadership models that support calm and orderly learning at scale and extends to growing research capabilities that keep classroom voices, especially those of young people, at the centre.
In following this narrative, we can show how trauma‑informed education can move from well‑intentioned to well‑implemented, so that every student, in every classroom, can learn.
Tom Brunzell is Associate Professor, Teacher Education Group, Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne
