According to Distinguished Professor Pamela Snow from La Trobe University, ensuring that children feel calm, safe and secure in the classroom is “a means to an end, it’s not an end in itself”.  

She says too often trauma-informed teaching approaches fall short of addressing the learning needs of all students, regardless of their trauma, neurodiversity or other factors that children might contend with throughout the average school day.

“We’re still responsible for their learning, and the adults in a classroom are educators, not social workers,” Snow tells EducationHQ.

It’s unfortunate that in some Australian schools, student wellbeing and academic learning are seen as being entirely distinct from each other, the expert adds.

“[They] don’t see them … as being intimately connected, that they are two sides of the one coin, and that it’s good for wellbeing to be succeeding academically.

“When children succeed academically, they feel a stronger sense of self-efficacy as learners. So, that makes mastery of new knowledge and skills rewarding, and it reduces the likelihood of off-task behaviour.

“I think in some settings, wellbeing and academic achievement are almost pitted against each other, and they’re polarised, and there’s a sense that schools have to pick one – it should be a given that we’re promoting both…” Snow argues.

As a term, ‘trauma’ has become somewhat overused in education, Snow says, and not in a helpful way.

“The term does have somewhat elastic boundaries, there’s been some concept creep in how that term is used, which is unfortunate.

“It tends to be used almost a little bit in the vernacular, like, ‘oh, that was such a traumatic experience’, but it was actually an ‘everyday part of life’ experience.

“… I think [this is] an important caution for everybody in education.”

Professor Nick Haslam from The University of Melbourne, whose work charting trauma’s ‘concept creep’ Snow points to, recently highlighted the nuance that comes with discussion around our collective idea of trauma, including its official definition and common vernacular use.

“People who question the concept creep of ‘trauma’ are sometimes accused of lacking compassion, glossing over adversity and policing language. If someone wants to describe their experience as traumatic, who are you to invalidate them?” he writes for The Conversation.

“However, some objections to the inflation of ‘trauma’ are legitimate and grounded in compassionate concern. Holding a broad definition may harm people.”

The fact remains, Snow says, that teachers can never assume that they know which children in their class are impacted by trauma and stress of various forms, and nor the degree.

“They may know about the tip of the iceberg; the children who are the subject of substantiated child protection notifications.

“But on any given day, there’s going to be an unknown number of children who feel anxious, distracted, dysregulated, all of the above, and are not in a state of readiness to learn.”

It’s precisely for this reason that high quality explicit instruction at the Tier 1 level that’s informed by cognitive load theory should be the starting point for addressing trauma in the classroom, Snow asserts.

In fact, there is a clear alignment between cognitive load theory and the principles of trauma-informed practice, the expert says.

For example, considering that students impacted by trauma deserve optimal and ethical use of their learning time, Snow says that teachers’ instruction informed by the science of learning addresses this by ensuring that:

Crucially, strong classroom routines (that include teachers using consistent and known signals for attention) give all students a sense of safety and trust that the adults in the room are in control of learning and behaviour, Snow adds.

The expert says it pays to remember that while focusing attention is indeed difficult for trauma-affected children, it is firstly difficult for all children. Trauma and/or neurodivergence just make it worse, she notes.

This is where teacher-led practice, with academic scaffolding and rehearsal, serve as the ‘fix’ for the fact that children’s developing brains cannot do this complex work on their own, she explains.

“…all children have immature executive function skills, such as attention, concentration, planning, organisation, thinking consequentially, self-monitoring, and so on.

“These are under construction until early adulthood for all children. So, so-called ‘difficulties’ in those skills are not in and of themselves signs of disorder or signs of trauma – we should actually expect children and adolescents to need a lot of adult support in those domains, reflecting the later maturation of the prefrontal regions of the human brain.

“And I think we need to be careful not to, if you like, pathologise the difficulties that all children have with executive functions because they are, by their very nature, a work in progress,” Snow says.

Less effective instructional approaches, such as project-based or discovery learning, along with noisy open plan classrooms and busy group activities that are all about getting students ‘engaged’, do not help children in the quest to acquire new knowledge and then to shift it into their long-term memory, the expert says.

“There are conditions that we can create that will optimise learning.

“This is not a perfect fix for every child, every time, but there are conditions that … make it easier for everybody, while also reducing the mental load and the unpredictability for teachers.”

Professor Snow has further outlined the alignment between cognitive load theory and teachers' trauma-informed practice via her blog.