Teacher Training for Traumatized Students

The article by Costa (2017) explains how trauma sensitive schools can help traumatized students by being aware of triggers and preventing trauma from re-occurring again and again. The article explains how children have to develop cognitively, socially and emotionally just to be able to keep up with the demands of the classroom and the expectations of the teacher. Traumatized children cannot do this and teachers have to be aware of that lest they place undue burdens on their already negatively impacted minds. Costa identifies REWIRE as a practice framework that can be used to promote trauma sensitive instruction.
The article does a good job of explaining traumatized students’ situations and why teachers have to be better prepared to handle them. It explains how a proper and effective approach is needed and why REWIRE is such an approach. The one weakness of the article is that it does not provide any substantial or significant testing to prove its hypothesis. It simply presents the conclusion with arguments but offers no real world data to back up its argument—such as how effective REWIRE actually is based on this or that quantitative study. So I would change the research this way to include that aspect of it.
The importance of the research-based article to the field of education is that it does provide some new information that teachers and administrators should find helpful as they consider approaches to developing a strategic way to help traumatized students. The REWIRE approach may not be adequately defended in the article but it does at least serve as a foundation for further research. For that reason, the article is helpful to educators in that it sheds light on trauma sensitive approaches that might work.
Costa, D. A. (2017). Transforming Traumatised Children Within NSW Department of Education Schools: One School Counsellor's Model for Practise–REWIRE. Children Australia, 42(2), 113-126.
The study by Plumb, Bush and Kersevich (2016) looks at adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and places them into three categories: acute, chronic and complex. Complex trauma make up most of the cases of ACEs, and they are typically caused by abuse received from caregivers. Children, however, demonstrated adaptive strategies to overcome their trauma, and these strategies should be studied, the researchers argue, so that they can be integrated into trauma-sensitive approaches to instruction. The researchers also provide a logic model that can be used to create a support ecosystem in the school that will help with being trauma-sensitive.
The good parts of this study are that it bases its arguments on literature already published, which shows where the researchers obtained their information. The article overall is very well-researched and presents much trustworthy scholarly information on the topic. The study does not test a hypothesis, however; its data is all purely qualitative meant to help increase understanding—which is fine; I would just like to see more experiments in the real world to see how well these models actually work.
The importance of the research-based article to the field of education is that provides serious steps that a school can take to ensure better approaches to traumatized students. It calls for continuing ongoing education for teachers so that they always prepared and up to date on new findings. It also calls for support for teachers because not all of them are going to be able to handle these challenges alone.
Plumb, J. L., Bush, K. A., & Kersevich, S. E. (2016). Trauma-sensitive schools: An evidence-based approach. School Social Work Journal, 40(2), 37-60.
Statman-Weil (2015) provides an overview of how trauma impacts the brains and well-being of young children. She describes two particular case examples: 4 year old Alex and 7 year old Christina and uses them to show how trauma causes problems in the child’s ability to trust, self-regulate, socialize and cognitively and emotionally develop. The article concludes with useful tips and advice that educators could apply to help make their classrooms more trauma-sensitive.
The article is good at summing up the main points and problems with how trauma affects young students. The examples given are helpful in putting the effects to a real person and seeing it in real terms. By using Alex and Christina and their triggers as examples of how trauma continues to impact the child well after the event, the author gives good evidence of the problem, which in turn provides emphasis for the need to adopt the recommendations given at the end of the article. The recommendations moreover are practical and pragmatic and perfectly suited for the teacher who may not have a lot of time or resources available but does have the inclination to do something to help this target population.
The importance of the research-based article to the field of education is that it gives actual steps that teachers can take to create environments that are helpful for traumatized students. It specifically states that teachers should “create and maintain consistent daily routines for the classroom” as stability helps traumatized students feel safe (Statman-Weil, 2015, p. 76). Other tips include: prepare children ahead of time for when something out of the ordinary is going to occur; understand that young students need to reenact their experiences or play act with others to process them and make sense of them; and be nurturing, affectionate and sensitive to triggers so as to avoid setting them off whenever possible.
Statman-Weil, K. (2015). Creating trauma sensitive classrooms. Young Children, 70(2), 72-79.