Teaching with strengths in trauma-affected students: a new approach to healing and growth in the classroom.

T he National Child Traumatic Stress Network in the United States reports that up to 40% of students have experienced, or been witness to, traumatic stressors in their short lifetimes. These include home destabilization, violence, neglect, sexual abuse, substance abuse, death, and other adverse childhood experiences. The effects of trauma on a child severely compound the ability to self-regulate and sustain healthy relationships. In the classroom, the effects of trauma may manifest as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, conduct disorder, oppositional defiance disorder, reactive attachment, disinhibited social engagement, and/or acute stress disorders. In this article, we contend that the classroom can be positioned as a powerful place of intervention for posttraumatic healing both in the context of special education and in mainstream classrooms that contain traumaaffected students. The current landscape of trauma-informed practice for primary and secondary classrooms has focused on teaching practices that seek to repair emotional dysregulation and fix broken attachment. In working for more than a decade with mainstream and specialist schools, we have discovered that positive psychology has a role to play in contributing to trauma-informed learning. We argue that combining traumainformed approaches with positive psychology will empower and enable teachers to promote both healing and growth in their classrooms. This article presents scientific and practice-based evidence to support our claim. We present education interventions aimed to build positive emotions, character strengths, resilient mindsets, and gratitude, and show how these can be embedded in the daily routines of classroom learning to assist struggling students.