- And I will only make one poor attempt
at an Irish accent.
So, top o' the mornin' to all of ya.
It's good to see ya.
That's all I got.
All right, so I am Kym Asam,
as Cassandra said.
And in addition to working for the BEST Project,
I think now for about 10 years,
I also used to work for NFI
up until very recently
where I oversaw our day treatment schools.
Our trauma-informed day treatment schools.
And prior to that, I was in the public school system
through a mental health agency providing services.
So I have lots of experience in schools
and knowledge about the difficulties and challenges
of trying to support kids
who've experienced developmental trauma
in your schools.
I see a lot of familiar names and faces.
For those of you who have your video on,
so happy to see those people that I know
and for the people I don't know,
welcome and it's good to see you as well.
I'm gonna share my screen.
This webinar is two hours long.
We'll build in one break so you can take a stretch,
brain breaks, screen vacation.
Just the format for today.
Feel free to ask any questions.
You can either unmute or put 'em in the chat.
I think, Cassandra, you'll monitor the chat for us,
and we'll get through as much of this material that we can.
So I'm going to share my screen.
I'm just gonna ask one person, maybe Cassandra.
You can unmute and let me know
if you can see what I'm sharing?
- [Cassandra] Absolutely.
Yeah, we can see your screen.
- Okay, and I'm just gonna put it in slideshow.
- Perfect.
That's great, thanks Kym.
- [Kym] Yeah.
Oops, wrong one.
Okay, here we go.
Great.
- Great.
- [Kym] So I guess the place
that I really wanna start today
is I wanna name something that all of you know,
that it's important to remember
that when you're working with kids
who have traumatic content.
And by that, I mean, kids who have been exposed
to unrelenting trauma, developmental trauma.
It's hard.
It's really, really hard.
I just wanna embrace that with all of you right now,
and the fact that you're on this call today
is indicative of your desire
to either enhance your learning
or validate what you already know
or remind you of things
that maybe you've forgotten over the years to do.
So I'm cognizant as well,
as I look amongst all of the participants today,
that there's different levels of understanding
about this topic.
There's some of you who I've seen in trainings before,
who may have had multiple, multiple trainings on this topic
and others who've had maybe just a few
or maybe none at all.
Regardless of your knowledge, your experience,
I'm hoping that you'll pay attention to the content
and think about what resonates with you.
What is something you already do,
really, really well?
What are some elements, as I said earlier,
that maybe you've forgotten?
And a really important question to ask
as we talk today about building our own resiliences,
do you find at times you're inured to your suffering?
Your own suffering?
Like, are you jaded?
Are you habituated to your own suffering?
Are you inured to the suffering
of the kids at times or to your colleagues?
Hold that in the forefront of your thinking
as we go through this content today,
and really think about reflective practices
and building resilience and intervention strategies,
and also how can you take the content today
and really validate your work.
I mean, my appreciation
has no bounds really
for all of the work that you do,
whether you're a paraeducator
or a classroom teacher or an administrator
or whatever your role is in the school.
It's just remarkable what you do,
particularly as we think of the last couple of years
of unprecedented times.
You know, just use this to validate your work,
to revitalize the strategies that you use
and revitalize your mindset.
And let's just name too, that we really gotta allow
for vulnerability when reflecting on your practices
and your experiences, right.
You gotta think about your physical
and your emotional vulnerability.
And I really hope today,
we can also focus on reflective practice.
Reflecting on our work,
as well as the experiences
of the families and the students.
And we wanna continue to bring all of this information,
our knowledge, our experience, our passion,
back to conversation.
So we're not only elevating your voices and your practices,
but also elevating the voices
of those that you support every single day.
Your students.
The families.
This is a way that we build resilience.
And just as a quick reminder,
you all are in the educational field
so you know the value of multimodal learning.
So if you wanna take notes
as a way to have a kinesthetic experience.
You'll have a visual experience.
You'll have an auditory experience.
So just multiple senses being activated
to help with the learning today.
So what are we gonna do today?
Throughout this time together,
I'm really gonna emphasize the need
for wellness and reflective practice
as a method of workforce development.
We're gonna take a look at the multi-dimensions of trauma,
very quickly.
We wanna discuss the four premises
of trauma-responsive/informed schools.
Gonna lay some foundational intervention considerations
for all of you.
Lay out, lay down.
And again, throughout this,
increase that understanding of the alignment
between trauma-informed schools
and a multi-tiered system of support
or the PBIS framework.
Really look at the difference
between post-traumatic stress disorder
and developmental trauma.
We'll examine the domains of functioning,
and some intervention strategies
that could be utilized at all three tiers of support
to help kids be more successful
in accessing their academics.
As I said very early on, one of the first things I said,
that this is really hard and sometimes this topic
can activate things in us, right,
that makes us feel distressed or sad
or worried or concerned or even angry.
So I wanna make sure that people
have opportunities to take care of themselves
and notice those experiences.
Pay attention to those experiences and honor them,
and take what you need to take
in order to be well throughout this presentation.
It's also important to think about
when we think about kids
who've experienced developmental trauma
as air quote, "them."
We further marginalize them as a group
that has something that's happened to them,
that is unique.
When I think about all the people
that are participating today, I have no doubt
that you know someone in your intimate circle,
or perhaps yourself,
that's experienced some interpersonal violence.
We have to tap into that distress and suffering in ourselves
if we're gonna really enhance our empathic response to kids,
because when we join in their experience
by understanding we all experienced stressful experiences,
we've all experienced suffering.
It increases our capacity to be,
as I said, empathic,
and it strengthens our adult assets
to be able to intervene
which includes our wellness and our resilience.
So it really is all of us.
So just spend a couple of minutes here
about taking care of ourselves and each other.
So we had a coordinator's meeting in January
and our wonderful colleague, Rebecca Lauer,
introduced to us self-compassion breaks.
And I'm not gonna go through a self-compassion break
but what I love about this slide,
and you'll see at the bottom there are some links
that you can click onto, if you so desire,
for self-guided compassion breaks
by a couple of different presenters.
But it's just so important
as we think about building our own resilience,
that we are paying attention to taking care of ourselves
and in designing systems to take care of ourselves as well.
That it's okay to say, "ouch," or "this sucks,"
or "this hurts," or "this is stressful," or "I'm in pain,"
and it's okay to know that you're not alone.
We can let go of our bootstrap philosophy
that infiltrates many of the ways
that we are with one another
and we are with ourselves.
To allow ourselves to say,
"This is hard and it's okay to be nice to myself.
It's okay to be forgiving to myself."
And we wanna pay attention
to when we're really focusing on self-compassion.
You know, are we motivated?
Are we intrigued?
Are we annoyed?
Are we triggered?
Are we excited?
If we understand our own suffering
and we're self-compassionate to ourselves,
we're gonna be much better able to be self-compassionate
to the students and the families
that we support in our educational journeys.
And we also wanna have moments where we're joining
with our colleagues in their own distress.
I like to think about,
when I think of self-compassion,
relative deprivation.
So what may be really stressful to me,
may not be stressful to Cassandra, right.
But that doesn't in any way invalidate my experience.
So let's say on the way to work today,
although I'm in my basement,
but let's pretend I was driving to work today
and on the side of the road,
I saw a raccoon and I was just really worried
about that raccoon's safety, right.
And I came to work and I said,
"Cassandra, I just saw a raccoon on the side of the road.
I'm so worried."
And Cassandra thinks, "Oh my God, really?
I got up, I had two kids I had to get to school.
The coffee maker didn't work.
My husband's out of town,
and you're worried about a frickin' raccoon?
Come on, Kym!"
But if we're really gonna be self-compassionate
with one another?
We're gonna join in that experience.
Tap into our own compassion
for the other person's experience,
and not dismiss it because it's not something
that would be causing us distress, right.
We don't wanna reduce that experience with each other
nor do we wanna reduce the experience that our kids feel.
So self-compassion is the ticket.
One of the tickets to building our own resilience.
Another wonderful graphic that our colleague,
Rebecca Lauer, shared with us.
And what I love about this graphic
is for far too long we have focused
on the importance of wellness
as an individual responsibility.
I can tell you that if I had a nickel
for every time in an interview, I asked someone,
"Can you tell me what you do to take care of yourself?"
I'd have a real, really, really big pile of nickels.
I don't ask that question much anymore
because I recognize,
and we all should recognize,
that the universal intervention for wellness
is at the organizational level.
Finally, as a community of providers,
educators, as caregivers,
we're shifting our language to co-care.
Excuse me, or community care.
And we wanna think about like,
how can we enhance building our communities
to shift the focus from
what do you need to do as an individual,
to what do we need to do?
It's sort of analogous to that phrase that we hear a lot
in trauma-informed/trauma-responsive care
where we shift our framework
from why did you do that,
or what's wrong with you,
to what happened to you?
We want our administrators and our buildings
to instill these micro-moments of wellness
in our days, every day,
as well as micro-moments of reflection.
We have to address it organizationally
or we're gonna be feeling like we are not able
to engage in self-compassion.
We're gonna feel very alone
in our journey to wellness.
And we also wanna think about like,
who needs to be in the room with you to achieve wellness?
In your buildings?
Is it a colleague?
Do you have a therapy dog?
Is there someone that has a fish tank?
Does that help enhance your wellness?
And on your personal life,
who needs to be a part of your wellness team as well?
So for example, I know part of my wellness team
is my cat and my puppy.
Although sometimes my puppy does not help my wellness
'cause she's very excitable,
but I also have my husband.
I do a lot of exercise and workouts.
You wanna really be thinking
about wellness is not an individual responsibility,
it is a collective community responsibility.
So how are we going to make sure that we're doing that?
And I wanna put in the chat,
just bear with me a minute.
Or maybe Anne or Cassandra, you can do it.
The resources that we have from the website for educators.
The link to that resource on our Vermont PBIS website.
Cassandra, is that something you can do?
- Yeah, I'll go ahead and post that.
- [Kym] Thanks.
So we worked very hard at the BEST Institute
on developing a plethora of resources
for all of you to access
that can be short-term and long-term.
And so, Cassandra will put that in the chat
and that's another way for us to help build resilience.
Also wanna really take a moment
to focus on our stress continuum,
and emphasize that stress is community property, right,
and we all have responsibility for the success of others
because we know that our connections moderate stress.
So again, it's not an individual responsibility
to build resilience.
It's not an individual responsibility
to enhance and experience wellness,
and it's not an individual responsibility
to be able to engage in self-compassion.
If I were to ask you to raise your virtual hands
or just put in the chat.
Maybe I'll ask you to put in the chat.
Could anyone on the call today,
tell me if you have ever experienced stress?
Just yes or no, in the chat.
What are we seeing, Cassandra?
- We're seeing lots of yeses.
- [Kym] Okay. - All, yeses in fact.
- [Kym] Laughing out loud, yes.
- Yeah, of course. - Yes, exclamation points.
- Yes. - [Kym] Okay.
Kind of a silly question.
I always keep hoping I'll see a no in the chat
because I'm gonna find that person.
I'm gonna have them do a workshop
on like, how do you do that?
How do you have a world
where you're not experiencing stress?
And you know, what we know about stress
is it really reveals unique attributes about ourselves,
and sometimes they're positive
and sometimes they're negative.
Certainly in the times of COVID,
we've learned a lot about ourselves.
Things that we didn't necessarily know
about ourselves before.
But we also know that stress
can increase or activate our implicit bias.
You know, kind of what we don't think we think.
We also think of this as implicit cognition.
That's, you know, the attributes or the stereotypes
that effect our understanding,
effects our actions,
effects our decisions,
sort of in this unconscious manner.
An example that I like to think about,
about my own implicit biases.
I grew up in a family
where being on time meant you were early
and so if someone was late,
that was interpreted by my family
as someone being irresponsible.
Then I spent many, many years,
about a decade and a half,
in a culture where being on time
was not a valued attribute.
And for years, I struggled with people not being on time
and I assigned to them, because of my implicit bias,
that they were irresponsible.
Until I became more acculturated,
and frankly, more compassionate
about different perspectives on time, right.
So when we're under stress,
it activates our implicit bias.
We need to pay attention to that.
But if we think about a co-community of care
when we think about co-care
and building resilience and wellness?
If we're all taking responsibility
for our community stress
then we can help one another in naming and noticing
when we're experiencing some of our biases
or when we're struggling with managing our stress,
and this is where reflection on our own part
and reflection from our colleagues comes into place.
So we have a choice here.
We can get really stuck and frustrated and blame.
This is this person's fault,
or it's that system's fault.
Or we can join in the knowledge
that our connections do actually moderate stress,
and we don't hold it unilaterally,
and that we can work together
to reduce the amount of stress that is causing us
to not function at our best level.
- Kym, we have a question from Ashley.
"If our organization does not prioritize wellness
and the work does fall to the individuals,
do you have recommendations or other resources?"
- Yeah, thanks Ashley,
that's a really great question.
I'm just gonna un-share for a second,
and I would welcome other people's ideas about this.
This is not the first time that I've heard that.
There are other groupings
that you can take advantage of.
For example, if you have professional learning communities,
you can take advantage of those.
If you have any kind of committees in the school.
You know, wellness committees or something like that.
Asking them if they can find ways to,
I was gonna use the word infiltrate
but that sounds a little bit aggressive,
but can they find ways to be more a part
of staff meetings, for example,
to initiate some sort of wellness activities for them.
Accessing, are there some community resources
that you can use that can come into the school?
And then, you know, I don't know enough about school unions
to wonder if they can provide any support in this.
But I can't emphasize enough Ashley,
how important it is that it is incorporated
into your daily practices.
I guess I would also suggest
that if you have colleagues in your buildings
or in your district or supervisory union,
that share in this knowledge of the importance,
that they're also tapping
into their own resilience and wellness
to support you in your resilience and wellness journey.
And I really would love to hear
from other people on the call
if you're in a district or SU or building
where that hasn't been prioritized yet,
what types of strategies are you using?
If people can either unmute
or put in the chat their ideas?
- I'll just throw this out there.
So I worked down in WNESU- - Thanks, Keri.
and in one of the little smaller elementary schools.
Every other week, they don't have a staff meeting.
So just within the last three weeks,
they've taken on this idea of community care.
And it's optional, but after school
instead of the staff meeting every other week,
they're engaging in different activities
like tonight's "Brews and Burgers."
They're going to a local restaurant.
Sometimes it's basket weaving.
Junk journal making.
They're gonna make meals and then disperse them
and send them home with each other,
so then everybody has a week full of meals.
- So it's happening- - [Kym] Nice.
- you know, after school every other week, one day a week.
And it's all optional, but it's out there
for them to come together.
- What a great idea, Keri.
Thank you for sharing those.
Anybody else have any ideas that they
would like to share with this group?
I also wanna refer back to the link that...
Oh, I'm sorry.
I'm looking at the chat.
Oops.
Oh, great ideas in the chat.
The link that Cassandra put in the chat too,
of the ideas for staff wellness and staff resources,
are also a resource that you can use.
So Pam writes, "I'm a part of a school district
that does prioritize wellness.
However, it did not always.
I have worked with coworkers
to advocate for more professional development
around the topic of importance of wellness.
Hopefully it will be an eye-opener
to those who do not know."
Thanks, Pam.
And then, L. Peterson.
So I don't know if that's Lisa or Linda or Luann,
but anyway, L. Peterson.
Or Larry, it could be.
"Our district provided free weekly yoga for all staff."
Yeah, so you can start small.
And if it's not, again, a large priority
for your building or your district,
I highly encourage you to take advantage
of small groups of colleagues.
Robin talks about having
"weekly mindfulness once a week in our district."
Yeah, and those are after school events.
It's great too, to incorporate
into your daily interactions
with your students' wellness opportunities, right.
There's contagion to our wellness.
So if we're practicing it with students,
we're also practicing it for ourselves.
Thanks for those great ideas.
Okay.
So I wanna talk about...
I wanna say this final point.
Stress is contagious,
but so is calm, right.
So again, when we think about joining
with our colleagues in a community of co-care,
that helps us moderate the stress as well.
Reflective practice and relationships.
You can see on the right-hand side of this slide,
I talk about self-interrogation,
curiosity, and relational muscle.
This isn't a training on reflective practice,
but I do wanna touch on it briefly,
and the MTSS fieldguide also notes
that self-reflection sets the stage
for building a culture of systemic improvement.
So reflective practices
are when we intentionally engage in relationships
to better understand ourselves, right.
To understand our physiological,
our emotional, our behavioral,
and our cognitive responses to the work,
and how these relationships
help us better understand how to do the work
and to be vulnerable by noticing for us
when we cannot or simply are not noticing.
So if I'm particularly stressed,
I might rely on Cassandra
to help me notice my stress level.
She might be my co-regulator, right.
She might help me reflect on my interaction
with a student or a colleague.
Whether it was a really good, positive interaction
or whether it was a challenging, stressful interaction.
And I really wanna emphasize
that when we think about reflective practice,
it invites vulnerability,
but vulnerability isn't weakness
and it's not self-indulgent.
It's a way to sit with our experiences
and grow from them,
and we grow from them by getting feedback
from our colleagues and that reflection.
Really quickly, we don't come to this field fully examined.
We have significant blinders in the work we do,
and those blinders might be lack of training.
They might be our threshold of tolerance
in a particular moment, or you know that phrase,
"I've always done it this way."
We open those blinders.
We eliminate those blinders through our reflection.
And the reason we're not fully examined
is 'cause we're always changing, right.
We have various variables in our lives.
Whether it's our families, our partners,
our jobs, our children, whatever it is.
It's gonna influence how we see ourselves
and how others see us.
So reflective practice offers us both a gift
and it's a risk,
and the gift is in the risk as well, right.
We need one another to be fully examined.
We need one another to experience those risks and gifts.
People know things about me
that I don't know about myself
and as hard as I work to understand
what my beliefs and biases are,
I'm not always gonna know the nuances of those.
So I need you, all of you, or my colleagues
to talk to me about what they're seeing in me.
So I can constantly grow and strengthen my resilience
and strengthen my wellness.
Excuse me.
It improves our interactions with clients.
Excuse me, students.
Sometimes I'm in the mental health field, right.
When we are self-reflective
and when we rely on our colleagues
to help us be reflective,
and by being reflective and taking those risks
and accepting the gifts of those risks
and the knowledge of the things that I do well,
that strengthens my resilience.
And I just want you all right now,
just to take a moment.
Just to take a moment.
Close your eyes if you want to.
Just marvel at your resilience.
Marvel and celebrate about what you've endured
over the last couple of years,
and here you are today taking advantage
of professional development opportunity.
You're going into your buildings every day.
Just marvel at it.
Congratulate yourself.
Pat yourself on the back.
Do a butterfly hug.
Do something.
Celebrate it, because that
is your resilient shining through,
and it's just something that I think is extraordinary.
And the final thing I'll say about reflective practice,
and I know that we have offered an opportunity
through the BEST Project for some self-reflective...
Excuse me, reflective practice groups,
is that when you start doing it...
If you're not doing it already,
I would encourage you to do it
in a small, more intimate group
and people with whom you feel the most safe
to take those risks.
So when we think about inviting humanity into the work.
When we think about our reflective practice
and how we interact with our colleagues,
I love this visual and I wanna walk through it.
When we think about how we're going to respond
to a colleague who might be experiencing distress
or we wanna give them feedback, constructive or positive.
The first thing we have to do is observe.
Observe where we are in our body
and observe their non-verbal communication.
Listen without interruption.
Contain your desire to solve the problem.
Contain your desire to start formulating an answer
to a problem when you haven't heard the whole story.
Wonder about what that experience is like for that person.
Tap into your own distress
so that you can help join in theirs.
And then, when you've gone through those processes,
respond.
I'm curious from all of you,
if you've ever begun to respond to someone
before you've heard the whole story?
Just think about that for a moment.
Or to a student, have you begun to respond to a student
before you've heard the whole story?
Or, here's something that I'm great at doing.
Someone starts telling me a story
and I start telling them something that's similar
that I've experienced, right.
So I completely invalidate their story.
I don't contain my desire to start talking to them.
So this is a universal intervention.
It's where we wanna move
from a hierarchical, evaluative, supervision model
to more of a supportive and reflective model.
And similar to the work that we do with students
who have experienced trauma,
we really have to slow the process down
so we can really understand what's going on.
Not making an assumption that we know the whole story
from just a very small piece of the story that's being told.
And sometimes the response,
the very bottom of this graphic,
the response can be something as simple as,
"I'm not sure what I can do right now.
I'm wondering if you can help me?
Do you need me to hear more about your story?
Do you want me to share some thoughts
that I have about your story?"
And just really slowing the process down
and not feeling rushed to find a solution to a problem
that may not have been fully articulated or realized.
So our resilience is tied into our safety and security.
And I love this umbrella because it reminds me
that for all of you to feel safe,
you need this umbrella of safety
from your organization's organizational wellness
and this is necessary for kids to feel safe, right.
We know that it's contagious.
That stress is contagious.
And our safety and security
is derived from our wellness,
and it's derived from our resilience.
And I wanna show a graphic here.
This is from the trauma-transformed work
that's done at the Department of Health in San Francisco.
But notice the three different descriptions
of potential responses to trauma.
So trauma-organized is really being reactive, right.
It's fragmented.
It's authoritarian leadership.
When we think about trauma-informed or responsive,
we're really integrating knowledge about trauma
into our policies, into our practices,
and into our procedures, right.
So we're having a shared language.
We're understanding the nature and the impact of trauma,
and the importance of recovery.
When we move to the healing organization,
we're really making meaning out of things.
We're growth-oriented.
We're thinking about equity and inclusion.
We're thinking about accountability
and we're focusing more on relational leadership
rather than authoritarian or hierarchical leadership.
So I'm gonna ask you right now...
I'm gonna stop sharing my screen.
So think about those three different components.
Being trauma-organized.
Being reactive.
Trauma-informed.
Integrating practices into your day-to-day interactions.
And healing,
really moving towards being reflective and relational.
And I'm gonna put in the chat,
bear with me one second,
a link to an ideas board
and what I'd like you to do,
as I do this.
I can do this.
I want you to click on the link in the chat.
It's gonna take you to an ideas board
and what I'd like you to do is in the ideas board,
you'll see a little plus sign
that plus sign will put a sticky on the board
and you can type on that sticky your thoughts
about where do you find yourself in that trauma continuum.
Are you being reactive
or are you feeling more trauma-informed/responsive,
or do you feel like you're a part of a healing organization,
and/or what causes you to move back and forth
across that continuum?
What do you need from your colleagues,
from each other, to stay in
that more trauma-responsive/informed place,
moving towards a healing organization?
So go ahead and click on the link, if you will,
and talk to us about where you are
on the trauma continuum.
- Kym, are you able
to put the trauma continuum slide back up
for presentation, thank you. - [Kym] Yes, yes.
Yeah, thank you for that feedback.
I think,
hindsight is wonderful, right.
I'm working on it.
Here we go.
Oh shoot, sorry.
Here we go.
So while I keep that slide up, Cassandra,
I wonder, can you see the ideas board?
Can you possibly tell us some of the things you're seeing?
- Yeah, absolutely.
So it looks like a lot of folks are saying...
I'll just read off some of the examples
in terms of where they're landing on the continuum.
So, "trauma-responsive.
Trauma-responsive, moving about the three categories.
Trauma-informed, definitely,
and moving to towards healing organization.
- [Kym] Great. - Reactive and informed.
In between trauma-informed
and moving more to the healing.
Need support from colleagues
as well as feedback to stay centered.
I move between the three,
but really consider myself to lean towards healing.
Trauma-informed, moving between the three for sure,
but more informed.
We are often reactive
but have many proactive things in place.
We have had a lot of training
and get a lot of practice every day, more to do.
I recently moved from central New York
and experienced very much a trauma-organized organization,
very competitive and reactive.
I need my organization to prioritize trauma-informed work
and actually use it in practice between admin and staff,
and admin and students."
- Thank you, Cassandra.
- You're welcome.
- Great, thanks.
So I would encourage you all.
You know, I think this graphic
is a really important graphic.
I think it's a great graphic to use
in staff or faculty meeting, if possible,
just to be able to reflect on this.
Again, this is part of reflective practice.
And I can tell you, you know,
I worked for NFI for quite a long time
and I cannot extol the virtues of that organization enough,
and I would say we were definitely
on the path to healing organization
but we moved back and forth
along this continuum, for sure.
I can tell you during COVID, things were hard
and there were times where we felt
like we were more trauma-organized than trauma-informed.
So this is about self-compassion too, right.
This is about saying, "Ah! Right now I'm trauma-organized.
I don't wanna be there.
I need my colleagues to help me move away from that,
to notice that for me,
to reflect with me,
so I can get back on the path of being trauma-informed
or a healing organization."
And to be compassionate enough to yourself to say,
"Ah, okay. I was there for a while
but I'm moving away from that now," right.
So that self-compassion and forgiveness, right.
Okay, so trauma is multi-dimensional.
I'm gonna just spend a couple minutes on this,
but I think it's important as well.
You know, when I think of developmental trauma,
I think of insidious trauma
and I love this metaphor,
it's kind of like drops of acid on a rock, right.
So one drop of acid isn't gonna really cause a lot of harm,
but eventually a lot of drops of acid will create a fissure
and too many fissures will cause the stone to crack, right.
So I know that I've been very, very fortunate
in my work with NFI and my work with the BEST Project
to really be elevating my awareness, our awareness,
about equity and inclusion.
And I'm also aware that I'm a white,
middle class, middle-aged woman
and that, that influences how I talk about trauma,
that influences how I interact with kids
who have experienced developmental trauma,
and also influences how I respond and interact
to children of color, to people of color,
to marginalized groups of people,
and so I have to keep that in the forefront of my thinking.
I have to keep that in my reflective practice as well,
and I have to get feedback from my colleagues
so I can heighten my awareness about my biases
and build my resilience in this level of my work as well.
You know, insidious trauma.
Let's see, what's the best way to just describe it.
It's like this looming,
sometimes concrete threat that one person's safety
isn't as important as another's.
Dr. Ken Hardy,
who is an internationally-renowned speaker
on issues of racial equity and inclusion,
says that we have this theoretical myth of sameness, right.
That we have this belief
that our experiences are all the same.
So again, if Cassandra and I were to stand
on a street corner and see a car accident?
The theoretical myth of sameness
would assume that we saw the same thing
but because we're different people
and we've had different experiences,
we walk out of that with a different experience, right.
So this insidious trauma
is caused by these chronic microaggressions often.
And like I said, one microaggression is an ouch,
but multiple, multiple microaggressions
can cause this fissure and eventually a crack.
And we might see what seems
to be like a really big reaction
to something somewhat benign.
But again, these microaggressions for example...
An example of micro?
I don't see color,
or we're all the same race, the human race.
Or waiting for another elevator
if a person of color gets on that elevator
if I'm a white person.
Those are microaggressions
and when they happen over and over again
and you see someone have what seems to be a big reaction,
it's important for you to engage
in wonder and curiosity and think to yourself,
"Perhaps for the umpteenth time today,
I've caused this person to feel marginalized.
I've caused this feeling to feel
as if he, she, they don't belong."
And we wanna be thinking also about
when we see a big reaction to something
that seems somewhat benign,
that we're asking our question,
"What happened to you?"
versus "What's wrong with you?"
or "Why did you do that?"
I also want to make sure that we're talking
about the legacy of historical trauma
and how that impacts our ability to function.
We know that trauma is rooted in oppression.
Whether it's socioeconomic oppression,
racial oppression, ethnic oppression.
It's rooted in oppression
and therefore our wellness and our resilience,
it becomes really a social justice issue.
And if we're gonna uproot oppression,
we have to be well enough to examine our biases.
We have to engage in self-reflection.
And when we strengthen our wellness,
when we strengthen our resilience,
we are participating
in the dismantling of oppression.
I'm gonna quote Dr. Hardy again,
"The person with the power
has the most responsibility for the relationship."
So it's really critical that we're thinking
about where we are in the power differential
with our students, with our colleagues.
If we're an administrator
or because of our tenure, we might have more power,
and that we're being responsible for that relationship,
cognizant of that power, and self-reflecting
about what that power might do to our relationship
and how it might influence
how we interact with one another,
how we see ourselves, and how we see our students.
So we know that the legacy of historical trauma lives on
and it is expressed genetically.
It is expressed in our interactions with one another,
and that we just have to be thoughtful
that what we're seeing in the present
has likely also been influenced significantly by the past,
either through direct experience
or through genetic expression and genetic...
What's the word, sorry it just slipped.
So we'll just stay with genetic expression.
And just to build a little bit on this
when we think about, you know, the Minority Stress Model
who Meyers introduced in 2003
and this quote from Adrianna Rich.
Sometimes when we're working with kids
who've experienced developmental trauma
or we're working with kids
who are in the minority in our classroom,
we find ourselves creating unintentionally an environment
where kids can't share important parts of themselves
and so therefore, it's hard to have meaningful conversations
or they express parts of themselves
in behavioral responses to their distress.
So we wanna be thinking about systemic influence
as well as our own individual influence
when we think about our interactions with kids.
We wanna build relevance
in our teaching, in our interactions,
and we wanna be monitoring our self-disclosure,
our verbal and non-verbal self-disclosure.
So for example...
I'm gonna stop sharing for a minute
'cause I'm gonna ask you to use the chat.
If I'm in a classroom full of students
that, let's say, are primarily
from a socioeconomically disadvantaged community
and I come into the classroom
and I'm all put together, right.
I've got my really put together clothes
and I've got my nice jewelry
and maybe I drove in, in my really nice car,
and I'm not representative
of these young people at all.
I could create this disequilibrium for them
because they look at me
and they don't see themselves in me.
Similar to kids of color.
They look at me as a white woman.
They don't see themselves in me.
So we wanna be thoughtful always, about,
are we creating this psychic disequilibrium
and how are we ensuring that kids feel
like they have a voice and they have a mirror
in their learning experience?
So I'm gonna invite you to put in the chat, if you will.
Can you think of some experiences or some examples
of describing the worlds in which your kids are in,
in your class classroom
or whatever environment they share with you
in the building, in the school?
Some examples of when they're in the world
where they don't feel like they're a part of that world?
So go ahead and type in the chat,
some examples where your kids
are in their learning environment with you
and they don't feel like they're a part
of that learning environment
and what is it about either the content
or the physical environment, itself?
"When we did ALICE drill this week."
Oh, Ashley, can you say more about that?
- I believe ALICE is the run, hide, fight.
- Yes. - Something similar.
Is that correct?
- Yeah, I'm familiar with ALICE.
I just wondered how that caused kids
to feel like they weren't a part of something.
"We also had to do a lockdown," thanks Ashley.
Two Ashleys. - Mm-hmm.
- Okay.
"Some kids were worried it was about them."
Okay, thank you.
Thanks for that clarification, Ashley.
"Museum of Science in Boston."
Yeah, right?
So that might feel very different.
"They expressed fear, sadness, anxiety,
about the need in America
to run lockdown drills for students and staff.
Then we had to transition back to learning."
Right, thank you for that example, Ashley.
Let me just give it another moment in the chat.
So we wanna really just be thoughtful
about what are we communicating
to our kids verbally or non-verbally.
What is happening in the content
that we're delivering that might cause a kid
not to feel connected to their classroom?
There was just something in there about...
Oh, here we go.
"We have a transgender child in our classroom
and frequently use the incorrect gender term,
and I can witness her immediate detachment."
That is a very powerful example, Mary.
Absolutely very powerful example.
Thank you, "So an ALICE drill
and having go back to normal
can cause kids to feel disconnected
or not sure what's going on."
So yeah, again, I just wanna emphasize
that being thoughtful about the content you're delivering.
Genders and pronouns
is such an important piece.
What are you non-verbally or verbally talking about
that cause kids to check out and become more dissociative,
or distressed to the point where they're having
a maladaptive reaction behaviorally
that's causing them to feel disconnected
and gets them out of the room
'cause they don't feel connected to what's going on?
Okay.
Thank you.
I'm just gonna go back to the screen share.
So I wanna talk a little bit
about social injury requiring social healing
when we think about trauma.
It is a social injury.
Kids are hurt in relationships
so they need to heal in relationships
but that's really, really hard because the relationships
are the very environment in which kids were harmed,
and so they're weary and they're leery of adults.
We have these co-regulatory networks
that they're responsible for regulation.
They're responsible for relationship and reward.
When these co-regulatory networks are wired well,
when babies' needs are met,
when they're relationally active,
and the reward neurology is activated,
it's a reciprocal experience, right.
We have these dopaminergic reward centers that light up
when we have these really positive interactions
with each other.
And when our neuronal connections
are starting very early on,
if the kids are wired well,
this is going well.
So in optimal experiences,
the brain is connecting relationship
with reward and regulation, right.
And we know that connectedness to family,
to the community, connectedness to culture,
is more predictive of our mental health
than our histories of adversity.
So we talk about causation versus correlation.
So we know that there's a correlation
between adverse child experience and poor outcomes.
Whether they're relational outcomes,
risk outcomes, health outcomes,
but there's not necessarily a causation
because connectedness has the power
to counterbalance adversity.
So when we have kids that are relationally reactive.
Kids who have what we call a hostile attribution bias.
Kids who have a neural pathway
or a neural template for adults that were not safe.
When we constantly work on these relationships with kids,
we build their resilience and we build our own resilience.
We know also that the brain continues to remodel itself
in response to experience throughout our lives.
Our emerging understanding of neuroplasticity, right.
The flexibility of our brains
is showing us that relationships
can actually stimulate neuronal activation
and even remove the synaptic legacy
of early social experience.
So that's the good news, right.
It's hard.
If we are persistent
and are working on our wellness
and we are being self-reflective
and we're being self-compassionate,
we will have the strength and the capacity
to tolerate the rupture and repair in relationship
to engage in this social healing.
So we have to sustain our compassion.
We have to sustain our empathy
and we have to allow for rejuvenation and revitalization.
That goes again with, sort of,
the organizational responsibility for wellness,
and to really strengthen our compassion and caring.
Many of the kids that we work with
who've experienced developmental trauma,
sit in the world of shame.
That neural pathway's been reinforced
way, way, way too many times, unfortunately,
and they have this sense of self
that they're bad, right.
Shame versus guilt.
I am bad versus I did something bad.
And you know, a lot of these kids that we work with,
they really are more afraid of living than dying
'cause living causes pain and discomfort.
So they engage in these really complex,
confusing, perplexing, maladaptive ways
of responding to stress in their environment
and they use these destructive forms
of personal empowerment.
So again, our compassion, our wellness, our resilience,
is critical to activate that social healing.
'Cause if we're really gonna hear their stories?
If we're gonna enter into the darkness with them?
We must be well enough to be fully present.
We have to be well enough to sit in that discomfort.
Listen rather than problem-solve.
So going back to that graphic, right,
where we're gonna go through all those steps
before we respond.
Again, tolerate that rupture
and repair of the relationship.
Focus on the repair.
Tolerate the rupture,
and think about, we are treating broken relationships
when we're working to help kids heal from trauma,
and we need our resilience to help develop
this healing-relational opportunities for kids.
So I want you to just go ahead and put in the chat,
what do you see right there?
It's not a trick question.
What do you see and how would you respond?
"Whale fin or shark fin."
"Shark fin, shark fin."
How would you respond?
"Danger, fear," Jen says.
Hi Jen, nice to see you.
"Shark fin, fear," yep.
"Terrifying."
Oh Robin, I'm sorry.
It's not a dolphin.
We can't always see what...
Oh, so Maurine, perfect.
"We can't always see what's below the surface."
"Shark fin," yeah.
Thank you so much, right.
So I've used this many times.
"Oh exciting, as long as I'm not swimming there."
Okay, Jennifer.
Great, that's an important point.
Yeah, so that is a shark fin
and that's representative or analogous of behavior.
And what is below the shark fin,
really is a child, right,
who's swimming in a sea of distress, abuse, and neglect,
and all of these different things.
These are elements of developmental trauma.
Sorry.
And so what we wanna do
is we wanna develop a second theory
because how I see you impacts how you see yourself.
And so if all we see is the behavior
and we don't understand the drivers of the behavior,
we're gonna respond to the behavior
and ignore the child that's swimming
in this sea of distress.
This view contributes to inequity.
And if we see children differently
then we're gonna treat them differently, right.
We wanna promote seeing the child from the inside out,
not the outside in, right.
What's internal in that child is beauty, is innocence,
and is suffering, and is hurt.
And when we have self-reflective practice,
we can contribute to looking at the inside out
rather than the outside in.
I'm not suggesting that we ignore behaviors
that are dangerous
and that we don't address the behaviors
with appropriate interventions
but we have to sustain our compassion for that child,
which ties into having our own self-compassion
if we're gonna have compassion for others.
And our internal view of the world
becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
We project what we expect
and that helps elicit what we expect.
So there is an example,
a school that I'm supporting right now,
where there's a couple of middle school students
that are really engaging
in destructive forms of personal empowerment
and they're causing a lot of distress in the classroom.
When we think about if we're gonna see...
Sorry, I'll say this again.
If we project what we expect.
If the teacher walks into the classroom
and that teacher is already worried
about the potential behaviors of the child,
then that teacher is going to project what they expect
and the children are gonna pick up on that, right.
So it's, you know...
We have to center ourselves.
We have to balance ourselves.
We have to ensure that we're engaging in wellness
so we can walk into a classroom, and again,
see the child from the inside out
because the primary drivers of the behavior
are more important than the behavior themselves
and that's what allows us to have empathic response,
and if we focus too much on behavior,
then we're really ignoring humanity in the work.
So when we think about seeing the kid from the inside out,
it's about changing our mindset.
We change mindset.
We change practice.
This is a phrase that you've heard a long time,
probably by now we'd shift from
'What's wrong to you?" to "What's happened to you?"
This was actually coined by a guy named Joe Foderaro
who worked with Sandra Bloom.
Sandra Bloom is this brilliant, brilliant psychiatrist
who wrote "Sanctuary in Schools"
which I didn't put in the materials
but it's a great article
if you were interested in reading.
And we just really wanna be thinking
about that too often we punish the hurt.
We wanna transition from a blame model to a repair model
and ask the question internally, as well as out loud,
"How can we help?" and "What can you teach me?"
"What is your behavior teaching me?"
So again, this is a shift of mindset
so that we can change our practices.
This is just another way of looking
at shifting our mindset.
This is from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction,
but you can see uninformed view
versus a trauma-informed view.
What we're thinking about kids engaging
in maladaptive survival strategies
in order to get their needs met.
That they're not willful.
That they're not engaging
in intentional behaviors often.
Or if they are engaging in manipulative behaviors,
it's to keep themselves safe
and that they've been triggered by their environment.
Whether it's a physical lighting or a visual noise
in the room or proximity
or my own non-verbal communication,
that that is causing them to struggle.
So we're shifting a misbehavior
to a stress behavior lens.
We understand that actions are motivated by survival.
And that we're thinking of sequence of engagement,
that first we're working on regulation
while incorporating relationship before we go to reason
so that we're able to not expect kids
to access cortical modulation or their cortex
before they are regulated.
So what time is it?
Let's see.
I think what we're gonna do,
is let's take a five minute screen break
so people can get up and move,
stop staring at their screen.
And look at your respective time pieces,
and if you could check back in five minutes
from whatever respective time piece says
and we will continue from there.
Before we get going,
are there any questions or reflections
from what we've talked about so far this morning
that we wanna put out there
before we continue with the slideshow?
Okay, great.
All right.
So I wanna spend a little bit of time on
the four premises of trauma-responsive/informed schools.
So we talked earlier about the contagion of stress, right.
We talked about how it's community property and how...
Excuse me, I should have taken a sip of water.
That it is a reciprocal stress, right.
So we think about this graphic that if student...
Whoops, students are experiencing stress,
it influences the workforce, our administrators.
It can influence the SU level,
and that goes the other direction as well.
And stress becomes viral
when proper universal practices
and precautions aren't in place.
So if you wanna optimize performance,
you gotta understand and you gotta regulate stress.
And PBIS promotes cultural wellness
and through consistent systems and practices,
stress is reduced.
And we wanna really think about
when we're talking about reciprocal stress
is how have you activated your resilience?
How have you reflected on your resilience?
And what I did several slides ago
is really marvel at your resilience,
that can help you with these four premises
of trauma-informed/trauma-responsive schools
so that you're better equipped to manage it
when it happens to you.
And we know that workforce development
is really the most efficient way to change practices.
So engaging in professional development.
Ensuring that you have organizational wellness activities.
That there's an organizational responsibility
for your wellness.
And thinking about the lens through which we look
at behavior has been antiquated.
I think it's been shifting a lot in public schools,
which is really, really great.
Again, as I said earlier,
we're looking at stress behavior versus misbehavior.
When we establish and we develop universal language.
When we provide psycho-education to students
as well as staff and faculty.
When we engage in reflective practice.
When we challenge ourselves.
When we use practice and experimentation.
All of this can help us look at children differently
and look at each other differently
in a more compassionate way.
So just as these are the causes of stress,
they can also be the primary sources of intervention.
We know that stress is a primary mediator of performance.
So some of the phrases that you hear over the years
like "athletes choke,"
"performers have stage fright," right.
There's "test anxiety."
And when you think of a kid who's experienced trauma
or you think of insidious trauma,
and you think of they're having these unabated experiences,
these unabated indignities
and you ask them to perform,
how difficult that is.
You know, when I was thinking recently
while I was preparing for this presentation.
I don't know how many of you watch the Olympics,
but Mikaela Shiffrin, excuse me,
who is a very accomplished skier.
Her specialty is slalom and giant slalom, I think.
She was in the Olympics
and she did not finish several of her races,
and I just was thinking about how
that level of stress for her
and that particular experience
mitigated her capacity to perform well.
So we all need a certain level of stress to perform
otherwise we'd never get out of bed,
but sometimes our stress is so significant
that it reduces our performance.
So I wanna ask people if they wouldn't mind un-muting.
Challenge by choice.
If anyone could give an example
of when either stress enhanced your performance
or stress inhibited your performance?
Anyone have an example?
Mary.
Thank you.
You're muted.
If you could unmute, please.
- There we go. - Thanks.
- I mean, it's nothing huge.
I mean, I feel it on a daily basis
if I've had stressful stuff going on personally
and I walk into work,
I'm more critical to myself. - [Kym] Mm.
- I'm not as compassionate with the children.
Get a good night's sleep?
The next day can be completely different.
I mean, I feel it all the time.
- Right, thank you Mary,
and that's such a great reflection
for yourself to have that awareness-
- [Mary] Mm-hmm. - that helps a lot, I think,
with understanding that,
and maybe responding to it for yourself.
Anybody else have an example of when stress is either...
Brenda, thank you.
- Sometimes I think when it's stressful,
like you're dealing with
some kiddos that are having a tough time.
You kind of get on high alert.
- [Kym] Mm-hmm. - So you're tense.
You're always on high alert,
which happens with me.
- Yeah.
Right.
That's interesting 'cause that's kind of mirroring
what's happening for kids who've experienced trauma
is that you're always on high alert as well.
It's a great reflection as well.
Anybody else, Amanda?
- I've just noticed it with my coworkers.
If I come in and I get like just negative stuff
from them first thing in the morning?
It kind of sets me up for- - [Kym] Mm.
- a not so great day with the kids which-
- Yeah. - So like I almost try
to avoid some interactions first thing
'cause I don't want to be that way all day.
I don't want to be under any more stress
than I already have, you know.
- Right, that's a great example
and I think- - So-
- Go ahead, Amanda.
I interrupted you. - No, I'm done. That was it.
- Yeah.
That's an example of negative group think, right.
We wanna rely on our colleagues
to enhance our wellness and our resilience
but if we just get into this sort of container of yuck
where we've just sort of got all
that bad neurochemistry going on,
it can have a significant influence on our performance
and the way we see ourselves and we see others.
Any other examples of how stress
has either enhanced your performance
or inhibited your performance?
Caitlin, and then Jennifer.
- I think for a way that I can kind of turn my stress
into a positive is that it really forces me
to triage kind of the crisis in my building
and to take a step back.
I mean, I'm a neurodivergent learner.
Like I function really well under pressure.
So I'm able to kind of break down
like what is the need to do.
What can I put off to the side for later?
So it kind of helps me organize that way.
- Great, thank you.
So you are able to really get right up here
into your cortex when you're having stress,
that actually helps you.
That's a wonderful example.
Jennifer?
- Yeah, I was thinking about
when I am going back to school.
So when I have a deadline for a paper-
- [Kym] Uh-huh. - that I'm able
to really focus as I approach that deadline
and it's kind of a positive stress
that gets me really focused,
and a negative stress is more like
if I have something personal and emotional going on
like a sick family member.
- [Kym] Mm-hmm.
- Something more emotional,
then it kind of drags me down.
- Great, thank you for those examples,
and congratulations on being back in school.
So, good examples.
Thank you everyone.
So we just wanna be cognizant of that.
Again, thoughtful about,
can we recognize our level of stress
and do we understand
whether it's enhancing our performance
or is it compromising our performance.
And think of that through the lens too,
for our kids, right.
What level of stress are they experiencing
that could be compromising their capacity
to maximize their performance?
Oops, and now I'm just gonna...
Sorry, go back to sharing my screen.
Great.
The third is when stress is unregulated,
it hurts people.
So when we think back to that continuum, I showed,
about whether you're trauma-responsive or trauma-informed
or reacting to trauma
or whether you're in a healing organization.
We wanna make sure that we're cognizant
of the harm it's causing.
The example of, if you walk in
and your colleagues are being really negative.
That level of stress can have an impact
on how you are functioning the rest of your day.
And I suspect all of you,
I asked has anyone here been stressed
and there was all yeses in the chat box, right.
We've all had levels of unregulated stress.
And when we are stressed
and it feels somewhat unregulated,
we tend to see and experience what we're looking for.
We have this thing in our brain
called the reticulated activating system,
but it's like our sort of traffic control.
And if we're really stressed and we expect a bad day,
we're likely to experience a bad day
'cause we'll catch things in our environment
based on what part of our brain is most activated
that reinforces our thoughts and feelings.
So we wanna be, again, mindful and reflective
about where we are in the stress continuum,
and relying on our colleagues to help us as well
to notice where we are.
And finally, we know that
when we have unregulated stress
that it activates our biases, as I said earlier.
It reduces our capacity to engage in self-care
and we tend to go into a blame sort of place, right.
We look for something external of ourselves
that we can blame.
And I don't know if any of you have seen a video?
It's a video-short that Brené Brown did on blame
and in the interest of time, I'm not gonna show it today,
but it's a wonderful example of how we instantly
can go to blame if we're not feeling very regulated.
And it's really easier when we think about the stress,
it becomes easier to talk about the kids and their struggles
than it is to talk about ourselves
and our own level of stress, right.
To be self-reflective.
So we wanna talk about sitting within our own discomfort
and enhance our ability to sit in the discomfort with kids
and not get into that sort of finger pointing way
of looking at the world.
Okay.
And then the consequences of unregulated stress
can be learned helplessness.
This is true for ourselves as well as our students.
It inhibits our creativity.
It causes us to be fragmented.
Our threshold of tolerance becomes somewhat diminished,
and sometimes we can ignore the very obvious in ourselves
or in the students or in our colleagues.
And the final thing I just wanna talk about,
in terms of the four premises,
is the two different paths we can go on.
So I can guarantee you
and I apologize that I have to say this, that you,
regardless of this webinar, are gonna continue
to experience stress in your world.
Whether it's your professional world or personal world.
Sorry, you may wanna hang up now
but that is the truth, right.
So when you have these stressful experiences
and you have these emotions,
your responses can either cause you to go into
that sort of dwell, quell, avoid, and get maladaptive.
That's where you do those negative subgroups
and you kind of stay in this place of yuck,
and that causes burnout,
that causes compassion fatigue or empathy fatigue.
Or if you really engage in that reflective process,
in that vulnerable process of wondering
and being curious about what's going on for you,
the outcome can be vicarious resilience
versus vicarious trauma, right.
Where you have growth.
And while it's really, really difficult,
it can be unbelievably inspiring and motivating,
and this is all a part of workforce development.
So I'm gonna just do a couple slides here on MTSS
and trauma-informed care or TIC.
For those of you who have memorized the MTSS field-guide,
these are the areas that it focuses on.
This is their graphic about, you know,
continuous improvement and decision-making
for excellence and equity,
and what's inside of that circle
is the systemic and comprehensive approach.
If we were gonna, you know, kind of synthesize that?
We wanna meet students where they're at
and help them get where they need to go, right.
That's what Vermont MTSS is.
It's trauma-informed
because it talks about the whole child,
because it talks about having different levels of support
depending on the need and differentiating
between a child's strength and a child's challenges,
and designing intervention as a result of this.
This quote is from a paper
that was written by Christopher Blodgett.
It's in the links in the handouts.
It's a collaborative learning
for educational achievement and resilience paper.
I think it's pretty long.
I think it's like 85 pages,
but it's brilliant.
I really appreciated it's content.
But it talks about what resilience is,
"the capacity to grow despite adversity."
And we talked already about the importance of relationships,
about reflective practice and social support,
and for all of us to master skills, not only children.
And we know that PBIS, when we think about MTSS
is the broader that includes academics.
PBIS is something that...
Excuse me.
Is trauma-responsive framework
because it does all of what is described
in that banner, right.
We have to build resilience into our system
as well as to ourselves and to our kids.
And we need to really be celebrating success
and be willing to equally learn from our failure
as well as when we do well.
Elements of resilience are self-awareness,
problem-solving, growth mindset, optimism,
adaptability, self-determination, empathy,
collaboration, and caring relationships.
So resilience isn't about invulnerability
but about growth and success
in the face of vulnerability,
and that happens with our interactions with each other
and it happens in our interactions with our students.
I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on this,
but this is again from the Wisconsin Department
of Public Instruction,
and it just shows the three tiers of support
and talks about care as on the right-hand side.
and then trauma-informed care.
That all of these,
safety, empowerment, collaboration,
trust, and choice are critical elements
to providing tiered interventional support
so that kids can feel successful,
and so that all of you can feel successful.
And I think that's all I'm gonna say about that,
in the interest of time.
Just gonna spend a few minutes revisiting
for those of you who aren't as fluent
with the core elements of trauma.
For those of you who are,
hopefully this is just validating your knowledge.
Trauma is about events.
It's about experience,
and it's about effects.
And so this is really an illustration
of post-traumatic stress trauma, right.
So we have direct trauma,
we have secondary trauma,
and we have vicarious trauma.
The experience is that helplessness, right.
How do we feel after the event or during the event?
And the experience is also what other people do
when they know that we've experienced a traumatic event.
So if people are supportive and helpful,
that that can have an impact on what the effects are.
Or if people are dismissive or say things like,
"Oh just get over it.
It's not that big a deal," right.
They forget about that relative deprivation social construct
then the effects can be significantly more difficult
or more impactful.
And it's really important to remember, you know,
I talked about the raccoon example earlier with Cassandra,
that we can all have a similar experience
and have very different effects.
I don't know if any of you have read the book
that Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey co-authored?
If you haven't, it's called "What happened to you?"
It's great.
It's really good, and they use this example
of a fire in an elementary school
and the different experiences.
So the firefighter.
For him or her or they, the experience was,
'This is my job. I go and I fight fires."
For the first grader who was in the classroom
where the fire was.
The effect of that fire was very traumatic
because they were in immediate danger.
For the fifth grader who was down the hall
who knew the fire happened.
There was an effect on that fifth grader as well,
but not as significant, right.
So we wanna be thinking about what is the event,
what's the experience, and how do we mitigate
that experience or influence that experience,
and then how we then take a look at the effects?
So when we think about developmental trauma,
really quickly, because this is not specifically
around all the elements of it.
We know that being exposed to chronic abuse and neglect
when the brain is in that explosion of development,
it has a significant, significant impact
on neurobiological development.
And that when neural networks
become abnormally organized...
Excuse me, there's this cascade
of problems that happen,
and we'll talk about the domains of impairment
in a few minutes.
We know that our kids
who've experienced developmental trauma
tend to be relationally reactive.
Again as I said earlier, the neural template they
have for us is that we're dangerous.
And so when we talked about social injury
requiring social healing, as I said before,
it becomes really difficult.
If you have multiple, multiple traumatic experiences
early on during that brain development
with minimal relational buffering?
Adverse outcomes and domains of impairment
are most likely going to happen.
You know, we have sort of a triune brain, right.
So when our brain is working well together,
when these three different parts of our brain
are talking to each other,
we're able to respond to danger in ways that are adaptive.
So we either get out of the danger's way
because our flight, freeze, flock,
and submit is activated,
or our cortical part of our brain
is able to talk us through difficulties
so that we can get back on track, right.
So it's sort of like we
have these different operating systems
that talk to one another
that helps us function well under extreme stress.
But when we think about trauma as a virus,
we think about disintegration.
So high level of stress causes adversity,
and these three parts of our brain
don't talk to each other, right.
So if we're gonna use a computer analogy,
trauma is a virus and these are our operating systems.
When a computer has a virus,
what do we know that happens to it?
Go ahead and type in the chat.
What happens to a computer when it gets a virus?
Let's see what we got?
"It's hijacked, it freezes."
Yeah.
"It shuts down," yeah.
"Shuts down."
"Shuts down and freaks out."
I freak out when my computer shuts down, that's for sure.
"Consumes the computer and shuts down."
'Spreads it to other computers," right.
"Does not function how it's supposed to."
Exactly right.
"It doesn't work how it should."
So we know that stress
separates our three operating systems
and when our three operating systems don't work together
then we can't take information
that comes to the bottom part of our brain
and have it go to the top part of our brain,
so we can integrate it
into our repertoire of functioning, right.
And we know that trauma is contagious.
So the infected person is someone, put in the chat,
can spread that trauma to other people
which interferes with our resilience development,
interferes with our self-compassion.
But back to relationships.
If trauma is a virus,
relationships are the firewall, right.
And so those are what help us
overcome adversity and distress,
and those relationships is what helps kids
overcome adversity and distress.
However, with kids who've experienced developmental trauma,
we know it takes a lot, a lot of repetition of relationship
for them to rewire their neural pathways
to trust that adults are safe.
This is a graphic that I enjoy too
that talks about when we have typical development,
the survival part of the brain
is functioning unconsciously, helping our heartbeat
and our blood pressure and our body temperature.
And the cognition part of the brain
is the strongest part of the brain, right.
That is what's activated most of the time.
Developmental trauma, that triangle is reversed.
So the survival part of the brain,
the regulation part of the brain, is over-activated,
and we know that there are no networks
in the bottom of the brain that think or tell time.
So when you have an environmental stimulus
that causes you to feel that you're in danger
and for our kids who've experienced developmental trauma,
they can be incredibly benign stimulus.
They can't differentiate that,
"Oh, I'm in school now. I'm safe."
Their reaction is,
"I'm in danger and I need to get out of danger,
and so I'm gonna do that by either freezing
or I'm gonna flee, or I'm gonna fight,
or I may even just submit," right.
So we know that the brain organizes from the bottom up.
So therefore it needs to heal from the bottom up,
and if these lower parts of the brain
are over-activated because of overuse
then our job is going to be thinking
about where do we intervene.
Do we do bottom up interventions
or top down interventions or both,
and what combination of those do we utilize?
And the last thing I'll say about this
is the more the neurobiological system is activated,
the more those functions become built-in,
those states become built-in.
So once again, if you're chronically exposed
to abuse and neglect when your brain
is in this explosion of development?
Those lower regions of the brain,
those limbic regions of the brain,
are gonna be highly activated
and very, very hard to shut down.
We wanna think about ways
to sort of regulate that limbic region,
regulate the amygdala in order for kids
to be able to access their education
and access their cortical modulation capacities.
And then this is also from Bruce Perry's work,
patterns of stress activation.
What I just wanna point out here is that what we know.
Predictable, moderate, controllable,
creates tolerance and resilience in all people.
And when kids are exposed very early
to this unpredictable, extreme patterns
of unregulated caregiving that is prolonged,
their brains become very sensitized.
and they're very, very, very vulnerable
to environmental stimuli.
Bessel van der Kolk, who writes this wonderful book
called "The Body Keeps the Score,"
talks about how we store trauma in our body.
We convert our experiences to our neuroanatomy
and if you can't organize your body,
you can't organize your thinking.
So there's a couple things in our brain,
a posterior insula,
which helps us know where we are in space.
It helps our brain talk to our body.
Those are compromised as a result of trauma,
and so really kids need a lot of proprioreceptive feedback
because often kids who've experienced developmental trauma,
they have these dysregulated bodies.
They don't know where they are
in their physical environment,
and it can very be very disorienting.
And an analogy I like to think about that
is you've ever spent the night in a hotel
or in a home that you've never been in,
and you wake up in the middle of the night
and you need to either get out of bed
to use the bathroom or something, and it's dark.
What do you do?
You put your hands out.
You try to figure out where you are in space.
It's very dysregulating.
This is a chronic experience to many kids
who've experienced developmental trauma.
They're always putting their hands out in space
trying to figure out where they are.
And we also wanna consider
about when the body keeps the score
of motor vestibular memories.
So you know, if you've ever curled up
in kind of a fetal position,
or if you've kind of crossed your arms
or held your neck like that?
That's a motor vestibular memory.
That's what happens when we experience distress.
It's this unconscious response to distress.
So that's our body telling us,
without our brain necessarily telling us,
that right now things are really hard for you
and you are under significant, significant stress.
So I wanna talk a little bit
about some primary intervention considerations,
and then we'll move into the domains of impairment.
So one of the things that is important to consider,
and there's a handout in your handouts
that is called the hexagon tool
which can help you walk through
determining evidence-based practices.
There's a school level intervention mapping tool
that can help you look
at your current intervention strategies,
your evidence-based intervention strategies.
And there's something called a chart
for tiered interventions
which identifies different interventions
that you can align with different tiers.
So you wanna do an intervention inventory
to assess the fluence in the administration
of these measures, of these strategies,
of these interventions.
'Cause we know if we don't intervene with fidelity,
if we don't administer with fidelity,
then we're likely not gonna experience success
and we can be very, very frustrated.
So some primary intervention considerations.
This we talk about ad nauseum with PBIS
but we really wanna have data-informed decisions
for effective interventions.
And MTSS references, one of the core features
is comprehensive assessment, right.
So we really wanna be sure when we're intervening,
we know what we're intervening on
and what exactly we're addressing.
And the MTSS trauma-informed features,
which is in one of your handouts as well,
talks about data, talks about...
Excuse me, ensuring early access,
and a formal process for selecting interventions.
And there's a handout called integrating...
What's it called?
"Integrating a trauma-informed approach
into a PBIS framework" that has a lot of information
about the crosswalk and the alignment,
and strategies to employ.
So we wanna think
about a systematic approach to decision-making
and consider how our existing resources,
our existing practices,
can be brought to bear on the problem.
And it's tricky with trauma
'cause when we talk about using data,
it's really an important.
So we can use behavioral data.
We can use community data.
We can use data about nursing visits.
We can use academic data.
Developmental trauma is not a diagnosis in our DSM-5
and families can be hesitant, as you well know,
sometimes to talk about trauma
because of their fear of judgment
in terms of their parenting choices
or their fear of protective services involvement.
So there is a lot of data out there to use
but the diagnosis can be very, very tricky.
So we wanna be really looking
at the drivers behind behavior.
Again, that inside out view.
Another consideration,
if you're using targeted interventions.
This is a layered daily progress report.
So think about socio-emotional, trauma-informed practices
in your DPR
versus maybe more academic considerations, right.
So as you can see,
the DPR has the three school-wide expectations,
but then they're using
what they're defining in those expectations
to do a daily progress report
is trauma-informed practices or SEL practices.
And this is also in that...
I'm just looking at my notes.
It's also in that handout
of integrating trauma-informed practices
in your PBIS school-wide framework.
So there's lots of great examples in there.
And then when you think about your PBIS matrix,
if you can see on the very right-hand side of this matrix.
Again, there's the school-wide expectations
but on the right-hand side
are some trauma-informed practices that you might use.
And there is a framework
called "The Interconnected Systems Framework,"
which is in a really brief brief description
talks about the intentional integration
of mental health practices within the PBIS framework,
and this is an example of how to do that.
So when you think about your next PBIS meeting
if you're part of your PBIS team,
maybe take a look at your matrices
and see if you can include some trauma-informed,
socio-emotional behavior learning components.
And particularly, you know,
you're gonna target that at the universal level,
but also at the targeted and intensive level
for the kids who need the most intensive supports.
I said earlier,
we wanna think about bottom up or top down approaches.
Schools tend to be very top down
because you're teaching academics, right.
But you know, the lower parts of our brain
are responsible for our emotional regulation
and if they are highly activated all the time,
it's hard for kids to engage in top down approaches.
So you wanna utilize data to assess when top down
or bottom approaches are gonna work
and are most conducive to kids being able
to generalize their practices and their skills.
And think about universal classroom opportunities
for bottom up approaches like movement.
For example, ReYoga.
This can help down regulate the amygdala.
Let me think if I wanna say anything more about that.
I don't think so.
Again, an intervention consideration
is how are you incorporating throughout the day
lots of bottom up approaches
to help kids feel more regulated in their bodies
so they can access their cortex
and take advantage of top down approaches as well?
And upstream interventions
are universal approaches to supporting kids.
One way to strengthen individual
and organizational wellness and resilience
is through those upstream interventions.
When I think about upstream intervention...
Sorry.
Ah there, my mouse is working.
We know that socio-emotional learning
or socio-emotional behavior learning
is an upstream intervention.
Brandi Simonsen identifies five dimensions
of effective socio-emotional learning practices
that encompass both self-management
and interpersonal relationship,
and both of those self-management
and interpersonal relationship
are most likely disrupted by trauma.
So those five dimensions
are you maximize the structure in your classroom, right.
You post, teach, review, and you monitor,
as well as reinforce the classroom expectations
and keep in mind incorporating some
socio-emotional behavioral learning expectations as well.
You actively engage your kids, right, in observable ways.
And you use a continuum of strategies
to respond to when things are going well
and a continuum of strategies to respond
when things aren't going well,
and knowing those strategies
can enhance your own sense of wellness and resilience
because you're confident about what strategies
and resources are there.
It's also important to think about when you're thinking
about socio-emotional behavioral learning opportunities
for kids, to consider the role of your school counselor
or other mental health providers that are in your school.
Another handout that's in your resources
that I provided today
is "The Role of the School Clinician."
So thinking about are you
having a lot of push in versus pull out?
Are you having your mental health
or socio-emotional learning behavior experts
in the classroom to provide observation and support.
So that kids can experience stress
in the context where the stress occurs
and not constantly being pulled out of the classroom
where academic instruction is interrupted,
their sense of belonging and membership is disrupted,
and they're not able to practice the strategies
to be more adaptive in their responses
to stress in the classroom.
They're practicing out of the classroom
which reduces the likelihood of generalizability.
I'm just gonna put this slide up here.
Some examples of upstream interventions,
but this is my favorite upstream intervention
in the whole wide world.
Positive greetings at the door.
So you can see here that this teacher
has different ways of greeting kids.
Choices that they can make.
And now that COVID is in decline,
we can do more of these.
There's an example of a teacher
who has a handshake for every single kid.
So making that eye contact.
Connecting with kids.
If you can have some body-based experience
whether it's an elbow bump or a fist bump,
that's a way of helping them regulate their body,
and this is a really great universal upstream intervention.
Another intervention consideration is,
excuse me, avoiding re-traumatizations.
So here are some examples of responses
that can cause re-traumatization.
Some of the literature talks about the four R's
of trauma-informed/trauma-responsive practice,
which is recognizing signs of trauma
which we've talked a little about what they could be.
How do you respond to trauma,
and how do you have a realization that trauma
has an impact on functioning for adults and kids,
and finally, how do you prevent re-traumatization?
And then one final intervention consideration,
excuse me, that I wanna talk about
is reframing motivation and behavior.
So we know that the primary functions of behavior
are seeking attention or avoiding or escape, right,
and those are important.
We need to employ the applied behavioral analysis approaches
when we're doing functional behavioral assessments,
and trying to understand what's going on with kids
and how we can best design interventions
to support them in being more successful.
But we also know that if you're living in survival mode
which most of the kids
who've have experienced developmental trauma are,
not only are you seeking attention
but you're seeking safety,
and that attention may be a form of seeking safety, right.
And sometimes forms of seeking safety is maladaptive.
For example, fleeing from the classroom
or engaging in destructive behavior
because it's causing you not to have to engage
in something that causes you to feel unsafe.
We also know that kids when they're
in that survival mode of avoiding danger.
And again, the way they avoid danger
can be perceived as maladaptive
because that's the only methods
that they've learned so far
that's helped them keep safe,
and it's often an unconscious response to distress.
It's pretty rare that a kid says,
"Oh, the teacher just said something
that really caused me to feel fearful
therefore I'm gonna throw this chair," right.
It's very instantaneous because the signal goes
to the lower part of the brain,
and that's where the fear response comes from.
So we wanna think about the function, the behavior,
but also again, the drivers behind the behavior.
What is the distress in which the kid is swimming
and what is the feeling?
And the feeling often is fear,
and it's not often identifiable.
Kids don't always recognize that the reason
that they've engaged in a maladaptive response
to stress is because they're afraid.
And then just the simple
but essential intervention considerations
is that we need to help rewire neural networks.
I'm curious if anybody knows,
maybe you can put in the chat,
how many repetitions does it take to learn something new
and how many repetitions does it take,
on average, to unlearn something?
Anybody wanna volunteer to put their thoughts
about that in the chat?
How many repetitions does it take to learn something new?
"21 for new," Robin says.
And how many to unlearn?
Yeah, to unlearn a neural pathway
or to rewire a neural pathway?
Okay, we're seeing a lot of responses in the chat
and that's fine.
So on average it takes eight repetitions
to learn something new
and 28 repetitions to unlearn something.
For kids who've experienced developmental trauma,
it'll probably take that much more.
So we wanna be thinking about activating neural networks
by targeting specific behaviors
or specific components of learning.
So if we're really trying to regulate the amygdala,
we're gonna be doing some calming strategies over
and over and over again.
So activating those neural networks.
Slowing things down for ourselves and our kids
because when we rush to find a solution to a problem
or respond to a stressful event,
we can cause more harm.
Again, the repetition we talked about.
How many repetitions are we gonna need to change behavior,
and our tolerance for seeing a behavior change
and then seeing a kid revert back
to that old behavior again
so that we have to do more repetitions.
And then dosing is really, kind of,
like dipping your toe in the pond of distress.
Being wrapped with interventions that support you
in being successful in experiencing that distress,
and taking your toe back out of that distress.
So thinking really carefully
about how much am I gonna push a kid right now,
and how much am I gonna provide these micro-moments
of experience of success
versus asking for huge steps of success.
And then what was the last thing
I was gonna say about dosing?
Oh, we know that, you know,
therapy is a really useful intervention for kids
who've experienced developmental trauma,
but again, micro-moments can be far more impactful
and effective in shaping and rewiring neural networks
than long therapy sessions.
And I apologize if there's any therapists on the call,
you're valuable and your work is invaluable
but what can be done in a school setting
is so incredibly useful and impactful as well.
Okay, I am gonna stop sharing for a moment.
Lots of information.
And I'm just gonna check in with everyone
if there's any specific questions
about what we've talked about thus far?
Any clarification that you want
about intervention considerations?
The PBIS framework?
Okay, I'm not seeing anything in the chat.
I'm not seeing any hands go up.
So we'll spend the next 10 minutes...
We're gonna go through it fairly quickly.
Just gonna highlight some of the domains of impairment
and some of the strategies that can be used
at the universal, targeted, and intensive level,
and then we will end on time.
Okay.
So we talked about physiology.
We talked about the body and the brain, right.
And what we know is that when we think about
whether we're gonna do bottom up or top down interventions,
that we're working to stabilize the nervous system.
We wanna do movement.
We wanna do rhythmic activities.
We wanna get kids moving around the classroom
as much as possible.
All of these intervention strategies
are easily done at the universal level.
When you think about intensive level,
it's developing a behavior support plan
that's gonna enhance these strategies
in different opportunities.
Whether it's one-on-one with a school counselor.
Whether it's in a small group.
Whether kids are earning breaks.
Actually they should be contingent
and non-contingent breaks
so they can practice some of these strategies.
So we're really working to slow down a heart rate,
to calm down the blood pressure,
to regulate the body temperature,
and to help regulate the amygdala
or that limbic region of their brain.
We talk about attachment and relationships.
Here are some of the domain components of attachment
and relationship that can have an impact on kids, right.
They can be very highly sensitized.
They have a hard time with perspective taking,
hard time with attuning.
They have these atypical seeking behaviors.
Again, I go back to seeking safety
which can be very confounding and perplexing.
And some of the strategies that we talk about
is relational deposits and relational endurance.
This again goes back to tolerate the rupture
but work to repair with relationship.
Think about validation, not reassurance.
What's the difference between validation and reassurance?
Validation is when you are just sitting with them
and saying, "Yeah, that sounds really hard. I get it."
Reassurance is saying, "It's gonna be okay."
Reassurance can be incredibly, incredibly invalidating,
and so you wanna be careful to avoid that.
It's saying things like, "It's gonna be all right.
Don't worry about it."
You know, "That's not a big deal."
Things like that.
And we talked about reframing connection seeking
versus attention seeking, repair seeking.
PACE, is something from Dan Hughes attachment work,
which has got to do with patience,
acceptance, curiosity, and empathy.
Excuse me, playfulness, acceptance, curiosity, and empathy,
and really working on your own attunement.
Being a feelings detective
and really figuring out what's going on with a kid,
and understanding what are those antecedents
in the classroom, in the school environment
that's causing a kid to be triggered.
I'm not gonna show that video.
Kids who have experienced developmental trauma
struggle a great deal with identifying affect
and they have a pretty restricted range of affect.
So it's hard for them to know their experiences
and they can misread non-verbal cues very, very easily.
They may misinterpret frustration as anger.
They may misinterpret sadness as anger.
And sometimes they hear a change
in our modulation of voice and they are threatened
by that change in our modulation of voice.
So they have a hard time with sleeping,
and that their emotions can be really, really dangerous
because their emotions have caused them
to be harmed in the past by adults.
And their autonomic nervous system
is really the sympathetic division
of that is over-activated.
Again, that's that fight, that flight,
that freeze, that flock element,
and so they're hypervigilant.
They're constantly aware
and it's hard for them to slow things down.
It's hard for them to activate the parasympathetic division,
which is like rest and digest, to calm things down.
So they often show physical signs of distress
even when the stimulus has been removed.
The activating stimulus has been removed.
Movement, helping kids understand
where their body is in space.
I worked with a teacher recently, who did this thing.
She was a third grade math teacher
and she did this activity with kids
of hundreds, tens, and ones.
And we talked about possibly having the kids stand up
and move around the classroom and be a group of a hundreds,
be a group of tens, be a group of ones.
So the more that we can get kids' body moving,
the more they know where their bodies are,
and they can manage their affect and their emotions.
And again, you can apply these intervention strategies
at all three tiers of support.
Universal, targeted, and intensive.
I'm actually gonna skip through these slides.
When we think about cognition and learning,
kids struggle with cognitive distortions.
They can be very rigid and concrete in their thinking.
They might have challenges
with using and receiving language to understand,
to restore and to remember information.
This is because their hippocampus
is compromised in it's functioning.
It's got to do with cortisol being toxic
and really compromising the development
of their hippocampus.
Again, it's not a big surprise
when we think about intervention strategies
across all three tiers.
Movement.
Multisensory experiences.
We wanna target executive functioning, right.
So that's our capacity to inhibit our impulses.
It's our capacity to use our working memory.
Et cetera.
I'm just gonna stop sharing.
I know that we're running out of time,
but I would love for people
to just drop in the chat quickly.
What are some examples that you're using in your classroom
or whatever environment that you work with kids in,
that is incorporating movement?
"GoNoodle brain breaks.
End of morning meeting, we have an active activity."
Great, love these ideas.
"Movement breaks, shooting hoops."
Love it Lynn, that's terrific.
Yep.
"Movement breaks.
Cosmic yoga for kids.
All breaks earned, scheduled always include a walk.
Sensory path yoga.
Brain breaks.
Frequent sensory room breaks.
Sensory path."
These are wonderful ideas.
"The use of fidgets.
Outdoor classrooms."
Oh yeah, wonderful.
"Outdoor classrooms."
Great, thanks.
Yeah, and so these are terrific ideas,
and even enhancing these ideas more
are their strategies you're using
during the delivery of instruction
that allow kids to get up and move their bodies,
and move around the classroom
or move around the building.
However you wanna do that.
So I'm aware that we have four minutes left.
So this is what I'm gonna do.
First of all, I'm gonna thank you for your attention
because it's been a lot of information.
And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna talk
a little bit about movement.
There's a document in your handouts
that Dave Milner created about reframing.
I highly encourage you to look at that.
That's a way to change mindset
and build your own resilience
when we think differently about how kids see the world
and how we can reframe their behavior
so that they don't cause us as much stress.
So here's some examples.
But where I really wanna end
is as you're leaving this webinar,
this is again another resource
from our wonderful colleague, Rebecca Collier.
Take a look at this slide and put in the chat,
in terms of your self-compassion
and being able to honor your vulnerability,
to strengthen your resilience,
and to marvel at your endurance
over the last couple years and beyond,
what do you need from this list here?
You can take more than one,
in order to get through the rest of your day,
the rest of this month, and the rest of the year.
"All of them."
Jen, yes.
"A cup of hope.
A cup of laughter.
A cup of patience.
Hope, laughter."
Yeah.
"Hope."
Yeah, hope is important.
"Creation," thanks Jen.
Yeah.
"Kindness."
Be kind to each other.
"Kindness, laughter and patience."
Yep.
Be kind to yourselves as well.
Okay.
"Patience," from Peter.
Thanks Peter.
"Patience, hope and creation.
Creation, hope and laughter."
Yeah.
So as you're continuing to do the chat,
I wish all of these cups for all of you.
I, again, am incredibly appreciative
of you hanging out with us for the last couple hours.
I hope you're able to take something with you today that,
again, either revitalizes your own practices or feels new.
All of these materials, as Cassandra has said,
will be on the website and they're in the chat.
Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions,
and I hope this warm sunny day
helps to revitalize you
for today and moving forward.
- Thank you so much, Kym.
Virtual round of applause.
That was so helpful.
I took so many notes.
I'm not sure about all of you,
but this is wonderful.
Love the little nuggets too.
Lots of important information.
So thank you all so much for joining us.
Thank you so much, Kym,
for spending the morning with us.
After this webinar, you will receive an email
from Anne Dubie with a survey.
Let us know how things went for you this morning.
Halfway through the survey, you'll see a link
to click on your certificate of attendance.
So be sure to do that.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact Anne.
And this has been recorded
so it will be up on our website within the next week
if you wanna look back.
And again, as Kym mentioned,
all of the resources are on our website.
So thank you all so much.
Hope to see you at the next event soon.
Enjoy your day.
Take care.
- Thank you everyone, bye.