[2] The goals of TIE are to improve student, teacher, and school-level outcomes including academic performance, psychological and socio-emotional well-being, school climate, and teacher-student relationships.
Students are given a safe space to process and communicate their trauma through structured writing exercises, which helps them develop coping skills, emotional stability, and self-awareness.
Plus, trauma-informed writing assignments foster critical thinking skills as students work through challenging themes and subjects, enabling them to thoroughly and perceptively assess, analyze, and synthesize their experiences.
[8] Teachers place a high priority on concepts like informed consent, confidentiality, and cultural sensitivity when students choose to write about their traumatic experiences.
[12] There is a big emphasis on the potential of language and communication as therapeutic tools by supporting interdisciplinary approaches that include rhetorical strategies, especially when discussing difficult themes like trauma.
They underline the importance of integrating expressive practices into patient treatment and the empowering character of expressive activities in helping people process and cope with trauma In their model for trauma-informed care, Harris and Fallot conceptualize organizational change for health service systems, incorporating an understanding of trauma and the conditions that enhance or interfere with healing, as an imperative response to supporting individuals with traumatic experiences and resisting their re-traumatization.
This is reflected in the widely accepted core principles of trauma-informed care, published by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).
These principles include: ensuring safety, trustworthiness and transparency, peer support, collaboration & mutuality, empowerment & choice, and attention to cultural, historical, and gender issues.
This includes revising or developing new policies and procedures related to areas such as school safety, student discipline; as well as the use of implementation strategies to facilitate the adoption and maintenance of trauma informed changes.
[15][23] In addition to introducing new knowledge, professional development opportunities teach school personnel how to implement trauma-sensitive strategies to respond to youth behavior, and trauma-related needs.
This may involve skills and strategies to regulate or de-escalate youth emotion, build trusting relationships, create safe and predictable classroom environments; as well as evidence-based interventions for trauma (such as Cognitive behavioral therapy, TF-CBT, and CBITS).
This can include trauma-informed teaching pedagogy or curriculum design; or trauma-specific clinical services such as trauma screening, mental health referrals, and multi-tiered intervention practices.
[2][15] Trauma-informed teaching pedagogies acknowledge the cognitive, and learning consequences of trauma exposure, not limited to difficulties with attention, information processing, memory, and behavior dysregulation.
[13] A review of existing trauma-informed teaching pedagogies have two primary focal points: repairing dysregulated responses to traumatic stress, and fostering strong student-teacher relationships to support healthy student attachment styles.
[29] Examples of practices used to support students in developing appropriate responses to stress, and building healthy attachment capacities include: establishment of clear and consistent classroom expectations, self-regulation strategies (e.g., mindfulness techniques), classroom regulation strategies (e.g., "brain breaks"), academic accommodations (e.g., extended assignment time or individualized academic supports), and encouraging student input for class structure, assignments, and course syllabus.
[24][15][31][32] Tier 1 Practices refer to whole school or classroom interventions that strengthen students emotional and social skills and aim to prevent development of clinically severe trauma.
[24][32][15] Tier 2 Practices are interventions or supports for students with demonstrated deficits in social/emotional/behavioral risk characteristics (e.g., elevated emotion dysregulation, attentional challenges, hyperactivity behaviors).