3 Tips for Using Trauma-Informed Practices as a School Leader

Many children experience potentially traumatic events (PTEs): Researchers report that nearly 60 percent of children and teens undergo at least one adverse childhood experience, such as the loss of a loved one, the deployment of a family member in the military, or abuse and neglect. As a result, these students may struggle with things like attendance, behavior, and academic achievement at school. 

School connectedness may help, and leaders are in a unique position to create a school culture in which students (and teachers) who have experienced adversity feel a sense of belonging, as Matthew Bowerman, assistant principal and expert in trauma-informed education, who recently authored the book Heartleader: A Trauma-Responsive Approach to Teaching, Leading, and Building Communities, told me recently.

“Heartleading is the idea of leading in and with love,” Bowerman explained. It’s “strategically operationalizing love to create intervention-based strategies and supports to prioritize academic and social-emotional, trauma-responsive success.” (It’s important to note that trauma can be school-based, so administrators need to promote an understanding among staff that school may not feel safe for all students.)

Bowerman described three starting places for leaders looking to implement this approach.

Strategy 1: Start With the Self

Many teachers and leaders write a personal philosophy when entering their profession to describe the “why” that leads them in their work. There’s value in returning to and revising that philosophy from time to time. But when it comes to trauma-informed leadership, Bowerman stresses that the first step is to consider not only one’s professional purpose but one’s life story and its impacts on how one shows up as a leader.

He models that work firsthand: “I deeply struggled with my own disabilities and trauma as a student and was drifting,” he shared. “The manifestation of that, the behaviors, were constant hypersensitivity and hyperreactivity. School became a disaster. Ultimately, the arts saved my life and guided me to better places, but embedded at the core was love. It’s the truest thing people will feel and remember 30 years after being in a classroom—either the things that broke and destroyed them, or the things that constructed a life for them and showed them that they were loved and valued.” 

There are many ways leaders might engage in self-work, from going to therapy to talking with a trusted colleague to practicing mindfulness journaling. Bowerman notes that this is an ongoing journey: “Anybody working on themselves knows it’s a recursive process of reflection and challenge and deep, deep work.”

Strategy 2: Foster a Sense of Safety

The second step for leaders looking to institute a trauma-informed approach, according to Bowerman, is to create “a safe, predictable environment.” Trauma not only involves a lack of perceived or literal safety, but typically occurs in unpredictable situations—an unexpected emergency, for example.

It makes sense, then, that students need routine to recalibrate. “Bottom line,” shared Bowerman, “psychosocial, social, educational, and psychological research has all proven that safe, predictable environments are crucial for kids in trauma, kids with social-emotional needs, kids with general anxiety, or just kids in general, in K–12 spaces—especially post-pandemic.”

Safety means “clear expectations, routines, and boundaries in the classroom and throughout your school,” he said. “The messaging needs to be clear around expectations, codes of conduct, and technology policies… because that consistency in structure will provide security and safety.”

Setting up expectations can occur in town hall–style discussions, virtual or in person, in which leaders “answer questions around the applications of behavioral interventions and disciplinary consequences, especially when working in restorative justice frameworks where the work of prevention, intervention, repairing harm, making amends, and reestablishing community may be new.” Or leaders might host “sessions where they discuss and reinforce policies through scenarios, gallery walks, restorative circles, and roundtables to examine how a disciplinary response is provided with unconditional positive regard.”

Leaders should also consider staff and student preferences: “Not unlike if you were to give someone that you care about a gift, you can’t control the way they accept or respond to it,” said Bowerman. “That wasn’t why you gave it. You chose to share it, to extend love to this person. In the school setting, we’re giving that gift, but we also need to understand, recognize, and evaluate impact.” 

Whether a staff member responds best to words of affirmation or collaborative problem-solving, or a student appreciates one-on-one meetings with the principal or prefers quiet time to make art, trauma-informed leaders can observe these preferences and tailor their approach, recognizing that there are many ways to show appreciation and create a sense of safety at school. In his own practice, Bowerman “makes it a point to create opportunities to have talks on common ground, in the neighborhoods and at the park and local places where families congregate,” he told me. “It brings you into their worlds and bridges the conversation between school and family, allowing additional levels of trust and respect to be created.” 

Strategy 3: Center Care in Relationships

Caring, responsive relationships are critical to preventing, intervening in, and aiding recovery from childhood trauma, which is central to creating the sense of safety outlined above. To avoid burnout and maintain adults’ mental health, leaders can serve as a nexus—fostering connections between and across communities. 

“Supportive, strong, empathetic, compassionate, loving relationships with parents, staff, and kids are a regulation strategy,” Bowerman told me. “Everyone needs them. The 20-year veteran teacher, the first-year teacher, the principal, the cafeteria worker.”

For a trauma-informed leader, this looks like “authentically listening to kids and adults; sharing validation of their stories and experiences; expressing genuine care and connectivity; engaging with them around their interests; connecting around their cultures, languages, and racial experiences; and finding ways to elevate that work in your school communities,” Bowerman told me.

At the start of the pandemic, Bowerman did that work by “building focus groups [that] looked at policies and procedures for supporting students who were struggling as they returned to school; the goal was to involve stakeholders. We also organized bimonthly focus groups, in their native languages, with feedback sessions to gather input and ensure policies were relevant, adaptable, and respectful of all perspectives,” he said. “We used the feedback to create systemwide messaging and reports to provide to the central office around the needs of the broader community.”

By offering plenty of choices—to teachers regarding the types of trauma-responsive professional development they engage in, to parents and guardians about where to meet to discuss their concerns, or to students in how they work together to resolve conflicts—Bowerman highlights that when leaders offer others autonomy, they strengthen meaningful connections at school, especially in times of challenge. 

These three strategies are just a starting point. True trauma-informed leadership pervades one’s way of being in all aspects of a learning environment. “It’s an overarching, full-arms, wraparound approach,” Bowerman told me. “You as the administrator share that message of care with your stakeholders, on billboards, on the walls of the school, in newsletters, and in all the other things administrators have to carry in terms of school operations and management and instructional coaching.”