It often feels like the news is filled with tragic and traumatic event after event. Even if we aren’t direct witnesses to these events, awareness of them can create a heightened sense of fear and anxiety about the world around us. This heightened sense of anxiety, stress, and trauma impacts students’ mental health and overall academic performance. We must develop strategies addressing events and work to build a community of care for our students.

Because students spend so much time in school, educators must create a framework for helping students navigate traumatic experiences and to help them develop skills for talking about difficult subjects openly and respectfully.
Having difficult conversations with our students can feel intimidating at first; we worry about saying the wrong things or the conversation getting away from us, resulting in hurt feelings or worse. But by implementing specific strategies, we can help our students work through their thoughts and feelings.

In this session, we will discuss the neurobiological impact of trauma on the brain and how traumatic stress may show up in the classroom and provide tools for creating a classroom that can be a safe place for having hard conversations. We will examine ways to structure classrooms for optimal connection, discuss the importance of knowing our implicit biases and coping skills, and share activities and approaches designed to help develop students’ listening and speaking skills.

Objectives:

Participants will explore the ways that traumatic stress can show up in the classroom as well as the neuroscience around post-traumatic growth.

• Participants will learn how to create a classroom environment that fosters a sense of belonging and security.
• Participants will receive strategies for guiding students through difficult conversations in an open and respectful way.
• Participants will examine their own coping strategies and implicit biases.