Trauma-Informed Teaching

All of us – instructors and students – bring to the classroom our experiences and how they have shaped us up to that point. Those experiences influence how we interact with others, with our own perceptions, and how we learn. We as instructors often will not know about how our teaching and the course content will impact our students’ learning. How do we teach to ensure that our students’ trauma has little negative impact on their learning? Below are 5 beginning steps to teach in a trauma-informed way:

Establish Trust with your Students

The easiest and often overlooked method to teaching college students in a trauma-informed way is to ensure that you a have a clear and frequent line of communication with your students about what is going on in class, your intentions with your teaching methods, and what they should expect from you as the instructor. Establishing trust involves a lot of small, seemingly insignificant – but incredibly important – tweaks to your interactions and communications with students. Some examples of these changes can be encouraging students to come talk to you during your office hours if they are struggling, creating assignment guidelines that are clear and state how it connects to the course outcomes, and being open about your own teaching methods. By modeling an open dialogue for communicating with your students, you are creating an avenue for them to communicate when they are encountering difficulties in the course or completing course components.

Foster Relationship Building in your Course

What we need to realize is that establishing trust – being the bedrock of trauma-informed teaching – is not just a two-way stream of interactions. Other students in your classroom play a huge role in helping create that trusting environment that can help mediate trauma responses. Creating opportunities for students to build relationships with their fellow students is crucial in this process. Student relationships can help with trauma-induced behavior by providing mutual self-help networks in your classroom of students helping each other with the course content and when they have trauma responses. Group discussions, ice breakers, and group projects that are structured to build those working relationships are great ways to establish those networks in your student population.

Empower Your Students’ Voices

Often a key issue in a classroom where students are hindered in their learning is that they feel like their voices aren’t heard when issues arise. This can lead to a state of learned helplessness, and consign students to their fate because they feel like any issue they bring up with be unheard or dismissed. Creating a learning environment where students feel empowered in their learning goes a long way in ensuring that a student feel like their voice will be heard. An easy way to achieve this is creating avenues for students to voice their concerns in a low-cost way, such as an anonymous survey or discussion forum. The key with these is that you need to respond to the concern quickly and not dismissively. A more complex and egalitarian approach is to find places in your course where you can engage in power sharing with your students. Are there policies you can co-create with your students? What are the consequences for missing a deadline? Will you allow for a certain number of absences? By going through your course materials and asking students what they think will help hold them accountable can create a space where they feel like their personal learning journey is important and cared for by you.

Intersectionality, Your Students, and You

We all have different identities that we bring with us through life. Those identities ebb and flow in importance depending on the person and the stage in life they are in. These identities interact and overlap in many ways and can color how a student interacts with you as the instructor, how you interact with your students, and how they interact with their classmates and the course content. It is critical to be aware of your own identities and think about how they affect your interactions with the course, the content, and your students. Acknowledging those identities and how they might affect your teaching is a good way to let your students know that there are multiple ways to interact with the content, and that our own experiences can shape our responses.

Campus Networks for Help

We cannot be all things to all people. We are hired to teach. We cannot also play therapist, advocate, parent, sibling, and everything else as that goes beyond our training and our role in the classroom. What we can do is be sure to know where to send our students when they need help. Whether this is needing someone to talk to, needing help with nutrition insecurity, roommate trouble, or any issue they may face. There are a multitude of resources and networks on and off campus to help your students with issues they face, and it’s important to know about them. Recognizing your own limitations is key to supporting your students. Being every role to your students does them a disservice, and making sure they get the help they need makes all the difference.