Although education itself encourages detailed and nuanced understandings of complex ideas, the field of education often rushes to extremes.
According to the loudest voices:
- Artificial intelligence will either transform education for the better, or make us all dumber.
- Memorization is either an essential foundation for all learning, or “drill and kill.”
- A growth mindset will either motivate students to new successes, or delude teachers into this out-dated fad (“yet” schmet).
And so forth.
This tendency to extremes seems especially powerful at the intersection of education and trauma.
Depending on your source and your decade, trauma is
- Either a problem so rare that it doesn’t merit discussion, or a problem so pervasive and debilitating that we need to redesign education.
How can we find a steady, helpful, realistic path without rushing to extremes?
A Useful Start
If we’re going to think about trauma, we should start with a definition of it.
A thousand-word blog post can’t get into the subtleties, but here’s a useful starting place:
“Trauma is a response to an event or series of events that overwhelms an individual’s capacity to cope.”
In that sentence, “overwhelmed” means a serious and ongoing response — not short-term unhappiness (even if intense).
Symptoms of being “overwhelmed” might include dissociation, flashbacks, night terrors, drug addiction, or major depression.
Note: unlike trauma, stress puts pressure on — but does not inherently overwhelm — coping capacity.
Thoughtful people might not agree with the sentences above, but I think most people will agree that they’re an honest attempt to describe a complex mental state.
The First Pendulum
Discussions of trauma — especially the extreme versions — begin with its sources.
When I started teaching, in the 1980s, our school — quite literally — NEVER discussed trauma. (To be fair, I should say: “I have don’t remember ever discussing trauma.”)
The implied message: “trauma probably happens somewhere to some people. But it’s so rare, and so unlikely to be a part of our students’ lives, we’re not going to use precious faculty time to focus on it.”
In brief: “the causes of trauma aren’t relevant to teachers.”
Since those days, our profession has rightly recognized that trauma DOES happen. It does happen to our students and in their families and communities. The causes of trauma are absolutely relevant to teachers.
And yet, because our profession tends to extremes, I now hear the flipside of that earlier casual dismissal. Instead of being rare and almost irrelevant, trauma is common and pervasive.
One sign of this trend: a lengthening list of common occurances that cause trauma. Perfectly typical stressors — being cut from a sports team, getting a bad grade — are reframed as traumatic.
I’ve even seen the claim that “things that we don’t get to experience can be traumatic.” While missed chances can be disappointing, even stressful, it’s just hard to see how they fit the definition of trauma.
The list of symptoms has also grown. E.g.: “procrastination is a sign of trauma.”
Now, I don’t doubt that some people who have experienced trauma procrastinate; I also don’t doubt that almost everyone procrastinates. Traumatized people might procrastinate, but not all people who procrastinate have experienced trauma.
To avoid being caught up in this race to the extremes, I think it helps to keep the definition in mind: a response to an event or series of events that overwhelms an individual’s capacity to cope.
Such events do happen to our students — but not frequently, and not to all of them.
The Second Pendulum
While we negotiate this first pendulum (“trauma doesn’t happen/is universal”), we also watch a second one swing back and forth.
Old school: “least said, soonest mended. On those infrequent occasions when trauma really happnes, we should all just keep going and not make a big deal about it.”
Pendulum swing: “a traumatized student is literally incapable of paying attention or learning. Schooling as we know it should come to a halt.”
This second statement is usually accompanied by neuroscience terminology, starting with “amygdala.”
I was reminded of this pendulum swing at the most recent Learning and the Brain conference in Boston — specifically in a keynote address by George A. Bonanno.
Dr. Bonanno has been studying trauma for decades; in his talk, he focused on the symptoms that follow trauma.
He and his team have been running studies and aggregating data, and he showed graphs representing conclusions based on more than 60 trajectory analyses.
To present his complex findings as simply as possible:
- Roughly 10% of people who experience trauma have enduring symptoms;
- Less than 10% start without symptoms, but symptoms develop over time and persist;
- Roughly 20% initially experience symptoms, but recover over two years;
- The rest never repond with serious symptoms.
In other words: in Bonanno’s research, two years after trauma, roughly 80% of people do not experience troubling symptoms.
For this reason, by the way, Bonanno does not speak of “traumatic events” but of “potentially traumatic events.”
That is: an event has the potential to create trauma symptoms in a person. But something like two-thirds of people do not experience trauma in response to that potentially traumatic event. (And another 10% recover from those symptoms in a year or two.)
Towards a Balanced Framework
How then should teachers think about trauma in schools.
First: we can avoid the extremes.
Yes, trauma does happen.
No, it isn’t common. (Bad grades aren’t traumatic.)
Yes, schools and teachers should respond appropriately to the trauma that students experience.
No, not everyone responds to trauma the same way. Most people react to potentially traumatic events without trauma symptoms (or recover over time).
Second: within this nuanced perspective, we should acknowledge the importance of responding to trauma appropriately.
That is: events that potentially create trauma might be rare; most people might not respond to them with trauma symptoms.
And: our students who do experience trauma symtoms deserve informed and sympathetic response.
By way of analogy: something like 3% of K-12 students are on the autism spectrum. That’s a relatively small number. And: those students deserve the best education we can provide.
If 3% of our students experience trauma symptoms (I have no idea what the actual percentage is), they too deserve our professional best.
Attempting a Summary
In our profession, we have all too frequently overlooked and downplayed the trauma that some of our students experience. As we try to correct that serious error, we should not commit another error by seeing trauma everywhere, and by assuming it debilitates everyone.
A Final Note:
To keep this post a readable length, I have not discussed ACES scores. Depending on the response this post gets, I may return to that topic in a future post.
