Resilient Schools

A half or full-day in-person training and ten short lessons to help your teachers know what is most important when it comes to dealing with trauma.

Schedule a time to see if your school or district is Ready for Resilience

Resilient Schools Employ Resilient Principals Who Support Resilient Teachers Who Teach Resilient Students

Without the practical skills to implement resilient practices, it’s going to cost you:

* More Office referrals

* Lower staff morale

* More stress among staff

* Your teachers feel ineffective

* Kids don’t learn

* Kids and staff don’t feel safe

You don’t have to suffer in silence

Get the Resilient Schools training and get ten short lessons that you can show throughout the year to make sure you teachers

• Prioritize self-care

• Understand how the brain reacts to trauma

• Help kids regulate their emotions

• Provide effective referrals to professionals that can help

• Stay teachers, and don’t feel like they need to be therapists.

Let’s set up a time to get your school resilient Ready!

Add this course and get access to ten short lessons (all less than 15 minutes) that remind your staff about the training throughout the year, ensuring everyone doesn’t forget everything in the future.

Watch the trailer then get all the lessons (and all future updates!)

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I’m interested, here’s an email

Lesson Topics

• It starts With You: Self-Care Is The Goal

• What Is Trauma?

• How Trauma Affects The Carers.

• How Trauma Affects The Brain.

• Trauma Is A Multiplier.

• Trauma And Kids’ Actions

• The Difference Between Expectations And Reality

• Strategies For Dealing With Trauma On A Day-To-Day Basis

• Talking With Parents About Trauma

• Bringing It Back To You

Additional Resources

LESSON 1

• 72 Ideas for Self-Care- Want to implement self-care but don’t know where to start?  Here is a list of some ideas to get you started.

• 10 Self-Care Apps to Help get you Centered in 2019- If you’re looking for some more guidance and accountability to make a commitment to self-care, these 10 apps will help keep you on track.

• Choose Yourself- In this TedTalk, James Altucher, renowned author of Amazon Best-Sellers 

Choose Yourself and 

The Power Of No, reveals how at one point failure led him to consider suicide, and how he turned his life around by following five key practices of self-care.

• Self-Care for Educators-This Pinterest Board is dedicated to all things self-care and is specifically for educators.

• Shawn Achor: The Happy Secret to Better Work - We believe we should work hard in order to be happy, but could we be thinking about things backwards? In this fast-moving and very funny talk, psychologist Shawn Achor argues that, actually, happiness inspires us to be more productive.

LESSON 2

• Nadine Burke Harris TED talk about the ACE Study.

• Understanding Adverse Childhood Experiences- This two-page handout gives a nice overview about what ACEs is, how it affects our students, and ways to build resilience.

• The Truth about ACEs- This infographic provides some staggering fact and statistics about ACEs.

• Signs and Symptoms of Childhood Trauma- This table from the Center for Child Trauma and Assessment Services and Interventions outlines the signs and symptoms of childhood trauma based on age.

LESSON 3

• 15 Best Meditation and Mindfulness Apps- This site helps you find the best mindfulness and meditation apps for your specific needs

• 17 Top Meditation and Mindfulness Podcasts-It is important to actively reinforce the 

concept of mindfulness and refocus your attention on the present moment. This is a skill that can be learned with time, and there are several podcasts out there to help you practice.

• Yoga with Adriene YouTube Channel

• Wish vs. Can- It’s common for educators to feel a perpetual sense of failure when they aren’t able to fix all of the trauma their students are facing. One way to help build some healthy emotional boundaries is to identify what you 

wishyou could do versus what you can 

actually do. Take some time to jot down what you wish you could do to help your students vs. what you can actually do.

• The Administrators’ Guide to Preventing School-Wide Compassion Fatigue- While it is important to be able to recognize organizational and individual symptoms of Compassion Fatigue, it’s even more important to be able to prevent it.  Here are some great ideas to incorporate into your school to promote a happy, healthy work environment

• How to Keep from Reaching your Breaking Point-This article will teach you how to recognize stress and ways to deal with it

LESSON 4

• Learning brain vs. Survival Brain

• Storybrand podcast clip - Stating a fear or anxiety positively helps calm the person down. Giving a feeling a name is really powerful.

• How Stress Affects your Brain- This four-minute easy-to-follow video explains the effects of stress on the brain and how to reverse those effects.

• How Can Trauma Affect the Brain? - This easy-to-understand two-page handout describes three regions of the brain that are affected by trauma and the implications for those effects.  Since the damage to these regions doesn’t have to be permanent, this resource also provides tips for how to support your students’ brain development even after experiencing trauma.

• This is your Brain on C-PTSD- This visual demonstrates the thoughts that can cloud the mind of someone with complex post traumatic stress disorder.

• 10 Exercises for your Prefrontal Cortex- We know that trauma can affect the brain.  We also know that we can reverse the effects of that trauma.  This infographic provides ten exercises to help reverse the effects of trauma.

• Behavior Speaks for Itself with Barbara Sorrells - On this interview, I discuss with Barbara the way that behavior is a communication strategy. We talk about how it is difficult for a student to articulate what is happening inside their body as they are reacting to trauma.

• Flipping Your Lid - What flipping your lid looks like and how to visualize and explain it to kids.

LESSON 5

• How Labels Help: Tame Reactive Emotions by Naming Them. This article explains how naming your emotions can help you keep them under control.

• What Trauma Taught me about Resiliency- Charles Hunt, the founder of The Audacity Firm, LLC, uses his personal story of trauma to illustrate that resilience is one of the most important traits to have, is critical to happiness and success, and can be learned.

• 8 Ways to Support Students who Experience Trauma-The impacts of trauma can be far-reaching, long-lasting, and impact students’ ability to access their education. This article describes eight small ways to make classrooms more friendly and supportive to students managing the impacts of trauma.

• Resilience Guide for Parents and Teachers- The American Psychological Association has put together a guide to help our children manage stress and feelings of anxiety and uncertainty.  

LESSON 6

• Actions of Students in Schools who have Experienced Trauma- This infographic outlines 6 common ways that traumatic experiences may present themselves in the classroom.

• Reunion Video- Be prepared with some tissues as you watch this reunion between a student who experienced trauma and her mentor.  The bottom line is this: we need to be there and believe in ALL of our students.

• Trauma was Hiding in this School: How Teachers Found Out and what they’re Doing about It- This article introduces a school where trauma runs deep among its students. It discusses behavioral signs they look for and effective strategies used to help students be successful as a whole child.

• The Language of Children- This letter, written from the perspective of a child who has experienced trauma, decodes common misunderstandings about behaviors seen in children with these types of adverse experiences.

LESSON 7

• Respect Agreement Template- This simple template can help you get the conversation started about expectations for respect in the classroom and gives you a place to record the ideas

• Teacher-Student Interaction Tracker-Keeping track of positive-negative interactions can be as simple as just keeping a tally on a sticky note. However, if you’re looking for more specific information, this tracker could be a good tool to use during an observation.

• Easy Ways to Create Positive Interactions with your Students- While getting to a 5:1 positive-negative interaction ratio may seem daunting, it can be easy and natural. This poster gives you a multitude of ways to incorporate them into your every day with students.

• Asking vs. Telling Example- This video helps you assume the role of a child and explore what they are thinking, feeling, and deciding when they are told what to do vs. asked questions. Although this example is for parents, it is easily applicable to the school setting as well.

LESSON 8

• The Arousal Cycle - This video explains the four steps every time a cycle happens. Traumatized people have a distrust of the natural arousal cycle.

• Arousal and Reactivity in PTSD This lists many of the ways that those who experience PTSD deal with arousal and reactivity issues.

• Dos and Don’ts of a Trauma-Informed Classroom- This infographic provides six easy tips on how to create a classroom that is sensitive to all of your students’ needs.

• How Judges can show Respect- This Judge explains how utilizing simple principles of fairness and treating people with dignity has made an impact and changed lives.  If she can do it in the courtroom, we can do it in schools!

• 10 Things about Childhood Trauma Every Teacher Needs to Know-When things get tough and you’re finding it difficult to maintain your affect, these are good reminders of why you shouldn’t take challenging students behaviors personally.

• Talking to Teens about Stress - From the APA about talking with Teens about stress.

LESSON 9

• Avoiding the Savior Complex - In this podcast I riff for a bit about this topic. As educators, we are not the saviors of mankind! We are there to help parents educate their kids. It is not our sole responsibility.

• Talking with children about trauma - Tips for parents

• Parental responses to child experiences of trauma following presentation at emergency departments: a qualitative study - While a dense read, gives great advice about how to help parents talk with and deal with trauma their child has experienced.

• Parenting a Child who has Experienced Trauma Fact Sheet-This brochure gives parents a great starting point to educate them about what trauma is, what causes it, how to identify it, and how to help.

• Helping Children Cope with Trauma-Many times parents come to schools to notify them of a traumatic event that has happened in the family (a death, divorce, homelessness etc.).  This site will help you give parents advice on how to handle the traumatic event to lessen or prevent the potential impact it may have on their child.

• “When I was Your Age…” - This article addresses common pitfalls when talking with kids about challenges they are facing.

LESSON 10

• 7 Ways to Practice Emotional First Aid- Psychologist, Guy Winch, lays out seven useful ways to reboot your emotional health

• Guided Meditation for Taking Care of Yourself- Follow along with this guided meditation to develop a mindset for self care.

• Positive Affirmations for Teachers- Help your teachers maintain a healthy and positive mindset with these posters.