Trauma-Informed Approach

Background Information/Introduction
Trauma-informed teaching commences with a recognition that trauma can significantly influence student learning, behavior, and ability to make progress academically. Educators must strive to conceptualize the meaning of different student behaviors to develop more inclusive classrooms in this context. Teachers can reflect on their instructional pathways to establish ways to better support learners who could be struggling with trauma. Accordingly, the social discipline window constitutes a vital concept within the restorative practice, and it is employed in many diverse settings. It offers an approach for teachers to think about how they interact and communicate with others and students. Traditional discipline practices are infeasible in the contemporary classroom setting. Traditional practices were increasingly routine and entrenched into the learning environment partially because the capacity to employ an instant consequence was relatively less time-consuming for the individual doling out the punishment. However, today’s schools embrace restorative practices since they draw their validity within their capacity to empower learners to study from unacceptable decisions, comprehend their impact, and develop personally within their capacity to make better decisions and solve issues. This report considers and reflects on trauma-informed pedagogy and restorative initiatives, makes observations from a case scenario video and discusses key takeaways from a podcast, including reviewing the Edutopia.
Question 1: Trauma-Informed Approach
According to McInerney and McKlindon (2014), childhood trauma has several potentially overwhelming, direct, and immediate effects on the growth of the body and brain activity of a child. This ultimately affects their ability to learn. The authors suggest that the education system has greatly ignored the issue (McInerney & McKlindon, 2014). In this vein, children and adolescents experience positive and negative life experiences in their development stages. Psychological changes to the child’s brain and emotional or behavioral responses to traumatic events could interfere with their school engagement, learning, physical growth, and academic success. In order to cement this claim, the authors add that children are prone to these effects since their brain development is highly active. Based on neurological imaging, the size of the brain may reduce and end up developing physical challenges such as sensory processing difficulties that ultimately lead to problems in reading and writing (McInerney & McKlindon, 2014). Moreover, these learners experience interaction difficulties in adult life due to challenges building positive relationships. In addition, they do not easily respond to social cues due to their aggressiveness.
In this article, the authors categorize two specific evidence-based practices to address trauma prevalence in the classroom. The two broad categories include trauma-informed systems and trauma-specific treatment interventions. These approaches are collaboratively used in a school setting to address the trauma issue (McInerney & McKlindon, 2014). Trauma-informed approaches are the primary practice that schools and educators adopt to ad...