Dess Wood: So you know one of the trends that you first shared with me that you’ve noticed in the last, you know, period of time is that there’s a lot of challenging behaviours on the rise and that’s really required an increase in trauma-informed practices. Can you tell me a little bit about the trend you’re seeing and specifically what kind of trauma-informed practices you’re seeing in the space of education?

Dr. Will Henson: Yeah so let’s start with the trend that is showing and this is pre-pandemic a multiyear uptick in behavioural issues in schools. So starting in the mid-2000s teachers that have been teaching more than five years are saying, “Hey we’re seeing more kids that are coming to school not ready to learn” and I’m not just talking, you know, they’re doing something they shouldn’t. I’m talking about they’re coming to school dysregulated. They are having big reactions to small problems. They’re not ready to learn. We’re losing in the United States. I don’t have data on Canada but we’re losing in the United States 14 and a half days per classroom of instruction, you know, in small increments because kids are, teachers are having to stop and deal with behaviour. 

82% of teachers say the classroom management is essential. 99% say they deal regularly with behaviour issues and we’re seeing this trend spike up starting in about 2005/2007. And it’s really causing this enormous impact throughout the school, we’ve lost instructional time. So that’s first thing. So the one of the questions you’ve got to ask is like OK so why is this going on? And there’s a couple different things feeding into it. And Dess do you want to ask me questions or do you want me to just – 

Dess Wood: Yeah what, you know.

Dr. Will Henson: – because I can go, like I can just talk, OK, so –

Dess Wood: Well you know the thing that’s –

Dr. Will Henson: – butt in at any time.

Dess Wood: – the thing that’s popped into my mind right is now there’s been so much attention paid on the pandemic and the last, you know, 17 months and the one of the things you find is like this has been on the rise since, you know, 2008/2009, so this is an interesting one. You know I guess my question is do you see an increase even more, has it gone even faster in the last year or so or are you seeing this as being somewhat not related to the pandemic but related to larger societal issues?

Dr. Will Henson: Both. Let me tell you about the impact of the pandemic because this is the space I’ve been working in lately and trying to get districts ready to understand the scope of what’s going on. So you know when the pandemic came a lot of our metrics disappeared, you know. We don’t have a lot of behavioural issues, kids are at home. Nobody calls the district office when a kid turns off their camera, right, or you know. But what we’re seeing is – OK so first of all when you have a pandemic, when you have stressful conditions in society you have an increase in mental health issues especially anxiety and depression go up at times of stress. 

And the pandemic has created a lot of different kind of stressors, so there’s, you know, the feel of getting sick, there’s the financial losses some people are encountering, there’s the loss of people who have extended family like grandparents taking care of the kids, they might not have had that support. And you know Harvard came out with a study recently about the two most, the two biggest modifiable factors of depression are isolation and inactivity. And what do we have with the pandemic but isolation and sitting all day in front of a screen as many of you are quite familiar with. And we also know that alcohol sales went up 243% at the start of the pandemic in the United States. Alcohol use is a major driver of interpersonal violence, and we also know that when people spend a lot of time together interpersonal violence rates go up. 

Trauma reporting rates are down because people are not in contact or have not been in contact, you know, we’re starting to go back now with their, with [unintelligible 00:04:16] reporters. So what we’re expecting is as people come back and things start to normalize that, you know, we’ve lost a lot of routine, we’ve lost a lot of relationships, people have had more negative experiences. And doesn’t even count all the other things that have happened in 2020 which is, you know, the political and social divisions and the things that have happened around that. And we also know that as those things happen in larger society our schools become a microcosm, kids come in, you know, with [pause] we’re trying to work through those issues as well. So we’ve had this pandemic and we’ve lost a lot during the pandemic that we’re going to have to work to get back in very specific ways.

Dess Wood: So I see your visual here right now which is problems have been on the rise and then we’ve lost ground, so it’s like now there’s like even a steeper incline. What’s an example of a trauma-informed practice?

Dr. Will Henson: Well so I could talk a long time about. So –

Dess Wood: If you just have one.

Dr. Will Henson: – when we talk about trauma-informed practice. So let me just start by saying as a consult for districts I can use whatever I want. Nobody told me, “Yeah you’ve got to use this.” I went to trauma-informed practices a few years ago because it explains behaviour better than anything and the interventions that I am able to use are what work, OK. So this isn’t something that anybody said, “Hey you’ve got to use this.” Now we’re talking about trauma-informed practices. These are practices that would work with absolutely anybody. There’s no part of trauma-informed practices where we identify the kid that has the trauma and we treat them differently than the other children, or we might not even know because a lot of times you don’t know who has trauma. 

So if I could give a little primer for trauma before I give your example Dess, you know, is that the trauma-informed literature really comes out of the idea of the Aces literature which is that when kids encounter chronic stressors in childhood, now that could be abuse that could be neglect, they could be living with somebody who’s using substances, there could be all kind of disruptions, their ability to regulate their internal self doesn’t develop in the same way. And this is one of the reasons that kids are coming to school dysregulated. But one of the things that go on Dess is that the traditional interventions that we have don’t work with these kids. They don’t work with kids that have encountered trauma. And you know we’ve all seen this as, you know you have a kid and you apply the traditional intervention which is “Hey we’re going to reward you if you do good and we’re gonna punish if you do bad” and it doesn’t work. 

OK that idea is gone because what we’re not dealing with is kids that are thinking cognitively enough to orient their behaviour for reward or encountering people who are more and more reactive and their autonomic nervous system is triggers. So for example let’s do an example of a trauma-informed intervention is the idea of knowing that OK here’s a kid who’s super-reactive what’s going to happen when they do something wrong and there’s an angry adult in their face, right, going “Hey you better stop that.” Well what happens is the autonomic nervous systems goes up to here before the thinking brain catches up and he kids starts yelling and screaming and doing all kinds of things. And the idea that I can get mad at you and you’re going to downregulate is out the window. That doesn’t happen. 

So the idea is educators really thinking about co-regulation, the idea of hey I’m going to orient my intervention to you to get what I want out of you instead of trying to force something out of you because you’re thinking. You’re not using – I mean if you really thought about it you’d be like yeah I better stop doing that. That doesn’t happen OK. The other thing we like to do is talk. We like to talk, talk, talk, talk, and we’re still targeting that forebrain, right. We’re still teaching and talking and working through problems. But you have to have a regulated person, a person who’s calm in order to benefit from that. And so really a lot of the trauma-informed practice is being able to go where’s this kid at and do I need to work through some co-regulation with this kid first and get them to a place where I can work with them instead of my traditional intervention. 

And when educators really focus on that they’re getting somewhere. We put in some wellness rooms for kids to go regulate, you know, on a regular basis and now when they’re upset. In six months in six schools we had 215 fewer teacher absence days. We saved money because the whole tenor of the school changed.

Dess Wood: It’s interesting. That moves into our second topic we’re going to talk about which is self-regulation and the amount of dysregulation you’re seeing, and I can really understand why you’re passionate about that because of this idea that, you know, you can’t apply traditional methods to people who are, you know, in emotional hijack and especially if you become a hijacked person yourself, so typically when somebody – 

Dr. Will Henson: Totally

Dess Wood: – is doing that behaviour you’re triggering and they’re triggering and basically, you know, the two triggered brains are meeting together and they’re making some bad decisions. And I love this idea, this meditation or, you know, space you’re putting children in which is a sort of flip on the traditional time-out which had punishment feel to it which is more of that we’re going to give you a space in order to, you know, allow all of that adrenaline to leave your body before we deal with the issue. So tell me a little bit about, you know this idea of dysregulation and, you know, how that has been impacting the overall wellness of students and teachers?

Dr. Will Henson: Well you know when you have trauma and adversity, you know, a couple of things happen, you know, one of the things is your fight or flight system doesn’t develop normally. So your fight or flight system is very used to use-dependent in the way it develops. So if you’re encountering lot of trauma or you just don’t have a stable adult to help you learn to regulate when you encounter a problem you from zero to 100 really quickly because you haven’t figured out how to deal with issues. And so there’s a couple of things about that that I think are important to mention, you know, why this is trending now. One of the things is trauma. So we know that in the United States if you have three or more different types of adverse experiences when you’re young that you are six times more like to have a behavioural issue. 

We have 45% of kids in school today with three or more. So we’re not talking about, you know, 5%/6% if kids, you know, this small population of kids with trauma. We’re talking about 45% have the adversity level that they’re not coming to school regulated; and so that’s a huge driver. And then the second part is electronics, OK. So when you learn as a kid how to regulate your internal state you learn it in two ways (1) is by having an adult come over and, you know, you’re crying you’re a little kid and interact with you. That’s how human beings are designed to regulate is within the presence of another person which is why our own staff being regulated is important. But what do parents do starting when you’re three, you know, “Are you crying, here take the cell phone, no please god take it, you know, and go in the corner and regulate.” 

Phones are not regulating. They’re distracting but they’re not regulating. Human beings are regulating. And even in school I see people go, “Hey take the iPad please take the Chromebook and go.” It’s easy. And what do we have in our pocket today as human beings if we feel a feeling because the second way you learn is by dealing with your feelings by being alone, right. We’re never alone anymore because we have a feeling and what do we do, I’m going to pull out my phone and distract myself from the feeling. So the iPhone came out in 2007, is it a coincidence that the behaviour dysregulation started to go up around then? I can’t prove it.

Dess Wood: Yeah I love what you’re saying about the idea that we use distraction as a way to de-escalate our own emotions and our children’s emotions. You know as a parent I can see myself if what you were saying of the temptation to just shut a situation down versus really address the root cause and –

Dr. Will Henson: The blue light –

Dess Wood: – you can see by the classroom full of people, you know, how tempting.

Dr. Will Henson: – and the narrow focus on the screen are not regulating. They do not regulate people. So you asked me a question about self-regulation.

Dess Wood: Yeah so, you know here we’re talking about where you see less self-regulation what can we do in order, you know as people in this space helping others including teachers and students regularly?

Dr. Will Henson: So regulation is a shared process between two people. And if you want to get a kid in a learning space you have to have, you have to understand regulation. And that starts with yourself because we have to move from reactivity to intentionality in order to get a handle on this problem. So if a kid comes up to me and goes, “Hey Dr. Henson screw you I’m not doing my work” and that triggers me and I’m reactive and I go, “Oh yeah you are” and all of a sudden we’re having – I’m not going to get that kid regulated, right. It’s not going to happen especially if this kid has any degree of trauma because they’re going to go up here or they’re going to shut down and we’re not going to get anywhere. So it’s not just – you know I used to think that self-care as something you did on your time off but really you have to come to school on you’re A game because if you don’t you are not going to be as effective as an educator. 

So we have to teach people how trauma operates and why they’ve got to come to school, being able to focus on, you know, coming across intentionally. And this is a soft skill that, you know is not taught very often. When I teach this to education staff they love it. They eat it up because I’m not talking about the kind of self-care and wellness where like, “Hey everybody go and take a bath and drink six glasses of water.” I’m talking about the intentionality that you have to bring to a student interaction.

Pam Horton: [Unintelligible 00:15:18]

Dess Wood: I think, you know, hearing you talking about this is a lot like, you know, leadership at work which is that you’re supposed to diagnose what a person needs and then, you know, use your own ability to, you know, you morph into what’s needed for the situation versus staying fixed in what you want to say and do.

Pam Horton: Out of necessity

Dess Wood: And again that’s this idea of sort of servant leadership and doing that with your students and even with children. 

Pam Horton: [Unintelligible 00:15:43]

Dess Wood: I think we –

Dr. Will Henson: Let me say something else Dess is that, you know, people get worried when we start talking about trauma and we starting talking about self-care is that we’re going to drop our expectations. And there’s no part of trauma-informed care. There’s no part of self-care where we stop having high expectations for kids, where we stop wanting performance. Like this is way to get more performance, you have to high expectations with high support. If you don’t have one you’re not going to have the other. So this is in order to get to the academics, get to what we want. We’re not dropping any expectations here for kids.

Dess Wood: Well I think there’s again this perception that by, you know doing this kind of work means that you’re sort of, you’re not building resiliency, they need to get tougher. And really the whole thing is you’re creating that resiliency by adjusting to what they need. 

Dr. Will Henson: Yes resiliency requires relationships it’s not a pick yourself by the bootstraps kind of thing. And resiliency is built in relationships and this kind of stuff is about making people tougher, I mean the way I teach it. You know I said self-care isn’t “Go home and take a bath.” For me it’s how do you deal with adversity, how do you get tougher, how do you get stronger. So we go over – you know when I teach this to staff I’m teaching a whole part of it on what resilient people do and how resilience is learned in people because I want them to be resilient and the kids.

Dess Wood: Look I want to go to our exchange but I want to ask you one quick soundbite first and then we’ll hit our exchange which is you’ve dropped the word wellness a bunch of times saying it’s not a bath and six glasses of wine maybe not water [laughs] but yes whatever your version is.

Dr. Will Henson: [Laughs] [Unintelligible 00:17:19]

Dess Wood: Sorry I can’t help it when you said, I thought you were going to say wine and you said water I was like ah I’d be disappointed, but you talked about wellness and so, you know, when we’re talking about educator wellness specifically what kind of wellness are you talking about if it’s not the water wine bath? 

Dr. Will Henson: Yeah well so wellness is about intentionality, it’s about coming from a place where you’re not reactive to what’s inside you. And you think about, you know, so many of the things that people do that are bad for them whether it’s drink too much, eat too much, scream at somebody. It comes from a place of defensiveness. It comes from a place from reactivity instead of being able to stop and use the components of, you know, wellness which starts with self-awareness and self-regulation. And if you can do those then you can act intentionally in any situation, out of values, out of and attention to get what you want. But if you don’t come to work calm, centred, confident and grounded you are going to, you are not ready to face what we’re dealing with in education. So you’ve got to get yourself ready, you’ve got to be strong and come in able to do that. And that’s that reactivity to intentionality spectrum.

Dess Wood: Well as I pull this up because this was an amazing chat and want to make sure that we have time for questions and thoughts and comments, so I’m just going to put the link in the Chat right here. So what I’m going to do here is I’m just going to ask you one question here and then I’m going to jump into the themes Will to see if there’s anything there we can look at. But this top question, you know, very highly rated 4.3, very consistent, is how do you help staff learn to self-regulate and move from reactivity to intentionally if they themselves are also trauma-impacted? So they’ve got it going on too.

Dr. Will Henson: Great question and you know I think as many students have trauma so do many people and many staff and I’m sure that many of us today listening have that as well. The first thing, you know, you want to do is train all your people on trauma-informed practices and get them onboard. But anytime I do that with people I go, “Hey listen, you know, we have our own trauma too, OK, and trauma doesn’t make you fragile necessarily but you do have to realize like that it can have this impact on you and here are some of the impacts” and I always give some resources when I do it an in-person training of like, you know, “If you feel like you have some trauma here are some resources you can go to, but I’m also teaching them, you know the same skills that I’m teaching you to work with students you can work with yourself.” 

So that idea of self-awareness which is, you know, the first competency of SEL being aware of what’s going on inside of you not your emotions but your thoughts, your attention, your physical sensations. And there are some strategies that you can teach people, you know, for kids and adults on how to manage that and tolerate that and not react to it.

Dess Wood: I think it’s a really interesting point you’re making which is that, you know, to ensure that the people who have handle it are they, you know, themselves have the right skills and are able to regulate and not to assume because you’re the adult in the room that you don’t have the same emotions playing. And I’m just going to maybe do two quick questions and then we’ll go into –

Dr. Will Henson: Yeah and Dess we have to normalize trauma. We have to normalize and not make it a bad thing. We all have stuff that’s happened to us and we still have that choice on how we’re going to act in any given moment. 

Dess Wood: We certainly do. How can I support my community of students maybe experiencing heightened anxiety, self-esteem, poor self-confidence especially in the face of racism? So much about race, how do you help students?

Dr. Will Henson: You know I think there’s a lot of impacts of racism and one of the big ones is when people internalize it and when people stop believing that people that look like that can be successful, people can look like them can do the hard work in the academics, people that look like them, you know, are going to graduate school. And so really believing in people and sending that message to people that like I really believe in you. And it might take, you know, with kids a lot more repetitions of that and a lot more signals of that especially depending on what their life circumstances are. But we have to maintain that expectation that we believe and help that belief transfer to kids who have been marginalized.

Note: The following text is transcribed from the event audio. It’s largely accurate, but in some cases it may be a bit off due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It’s intended as an aid to understanding the event, but it shouldn’t be treated as an authoritative record.