Trauma Informed Teaching - Research and Resources

Trauma informed teaching, another component of social emotional learning (SEL), encompasses how you as an educator can cultivate a safe environment where students (and faculty) can thrive. It requires the ability to create strong relationships while maintaining professional boundaries.

Trauma-informed pedagogy is pedagogical practice that keeps trauma, its prevalence, and how it affects an individual, in mind. These practices are very similar to Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and include practices such as:

• Providing content information in advance
• Using content descriptions, especially for potentially triggering media
• Creating a safe and inclusive framework for discussions
• Checking in on students
• Encouraging community building and sense of belonging
• Allowing for multiple ways to engage with course content
• Building flexibility into assessment and absence policies
• Valuing student input and feedback

"Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) can have a tremendous impact on future violence victimization and perpetration, and lifelong health and opportunity. CDC works to understand ACEs and prevent them." 

“ACEs” comes from the CDC-Kaiser Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, a groundbreaking public health study that discovered that childhood trauma leads to the adult onset of chronic diseases, depression and other mental illness, violence and being a victim of violence, as well as financial and social problems. The ACE Study has published about 70 research papers since 1998. Hundreds of additional research papers based on the ACE Study have also been published.

• CDC: Center for Disease Control and Prevention: Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)

• Aces Too High