The Research to Practice Gap

Regulate, Relate, Reason: From Trauma Research to Classroom Practice

• Helen Flores • Season 1 • Episode 6

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In this episode, I sit down with Tara Tedrow to explore how trauma impacts learning, behavior, and brain development—and what teachers can do about it. We break down the “regulate, relate, reason” framework and share practical, trauma-informed strategies educators can start using right away.

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SPEAKER_00

Welcome to the Research to Practice Gap, a podcast that bridges the divide between research and classroom practice. I'm Dr. Helen Flores, and each episode I sit down with an expert whose work informs education and translate their insights into practical, evidence-based strategies that you can use in your classroom right away. Today with me I have Tara Tedro. Tara is an assistant professor of instruction in special and inclusive education at the University of Northern Iowa and a PhD candidate at the University of Iowa, where her research focuses on the intersection of special education and neuroscience within teacher preparation. She's deeply committed to professional service, including active involvement with the Council for Exceptional Children and Related Advocacy Initiatives. Beyond her academic work, she values family, wellness, and lifelong learning and proudly geeks out for all things education, trauma, and neuroscience. Welcome, Tara. Thank you. All right. So to get started, in one or two sentences, what problem in education does your research aim to address?

SPEAKER_01

So there's a multitude of problems that this research could address. For me specifically, the problem is underprepared teachers coming into the classroom for the students that they um that they come into contact with in today's society.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you. And what first drew you to this line of research? Was there a classroom moment that sparked it?

SPEAKER_01

Yes, I started my teaching journey in high school. I was teaching high school special education, and I had a student who would eventually become my adopted daughter. And through educating her all four years and throughout learning about her and um and her earning disabilities and behaviors and things like that, I found that um she had experienced a lot of trauma, especially at a very young age. Uh, when she was born on the south side of Chicago, she did not sleep in a crib, she slept in a box. And her mother died when she was three. Her father was an addict, they both were addicts, and um they moved here to Iowa and in seventh grade, child protective services came and picked her up from school in seventh grade, would not allow her to go back home. And so she was placed in foster care, where she tried to escape many times and run away. And by the time that she came to me in high school, she was basically houseless, sleeping on friends' couches and things like that. And so I received permission for her to come live with me, and she is now getting ready to be 31 years old. And I had two grandsons. Yet at 31, she's still affected by the trauma that she's had in her life. And she checks every box of ACEs, every box of complex trauma, every box of toxic stress, you name it. And you can see how it not just affected her in education, but in her adult life as well.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you so much for sharing that. And I think just with the enormity of what you've already talked about, my next question is probably pretty obvious, but who should care most about this research?

SPEAKER_01

Yes, really everyone. I mean, when we when we look at how complex this issue is and how many outlets that it affects, we really all need to be concerned with this. We're seeing higher rates of trauma, and trauma is right, has always existed. This isn't anything new. However, with social media and the sociopolitical context and other factors in the world, uh, it's not just more prevalent. I it's it's more intense. And our brains didn't develop to handle what we go through in today's world. And so that's when you talk to everybody, everybody's overwhelmed, everybody has anxiety, everybody is stressed out. And it's because we our brain didn't develop to handle what we handle today and all the things that come at us. So you can look at this as a medical model as far as if we treat students, if we find trauma early and we can treat students, you know, then then that increases positive outcomes later on in life, right? There will be times where pro trauma doesn't present itself until high school. So you may have a student that that comes along just sailing through, and then they hit um high school or junior high where all the chaos happens. And and then we start to see those symptoms or signs of traumatic experiences. And so administrators need to understand that children need support and teachers need support, and policymakers need to understand that I'm I've been advocating for universal screenings for trauma. At minimum prior to entering kindergarten, entering middle school, entering high school, we need screenings. And it's not going to catch them all. It's just one tool that we can use to help start to identify students who need those supports. And it's just prioritizing that we take a look at these things and make sure that we have the ports in place. So if a student needs more intensive supports, that they're there. And really looking at multi-tier systems and supports in terms of trauma, and we can use some interventions and some practices in that RTI MTSS model, but when it comes to trauma and kids. As far as teachers go, teachers need the support, and that again falls on administrators, school boards, districts, and of course, funding is always nice. And so we can further this research and definitely teaching our anybody who's coming into contact with children. A lot of this work, of this work came from the medical field, trauma-informed care, and they were really looking at it for nursing students. And so any profession who's going to work with children should understand what trauma does to the brain, to the body, and understand some interventions that they can do to help kids.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you. Yeah, I'm excited to jump into this because I think there's a lot of buzzwords. Trauma-informed care is something that has maybe come on and off the radar in my about uh a little over a decade in education. But you mentioned aces, complex trauma, toxic stress. I know that I know some of these things, but I'm really excited to have you break this down for us. So for listeners who aren't familiar with this line of research, what are two to three key findings or really important facts to know about it?

SPEAKER_01

Well, as far as research that is out there, we we had the um the ACE study, which a lot of people are hearing about now. However, it's pretty old. And the name of this podcast addresses that perfectly because there's still people in education who've never heard of ACEs. And so it's important to understand that we have moved past those original 10 ACEs. What I'm finding with my research is that it's being talked about, trauma's being discussed, but it's being discussed more on a surface level. So we are acknowledging that it's out there. We're talking about, okay, yes, it does affect behaviors, it affects the brain, but not in any kind of nuanced way. And special education students have much more trauma than their gen ed general education peers. And so that's one of the other reasons why this work is really important because we're we're not finding a lot of research that's talking about special education specifically. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

ACES are adverse childhood experiences. Is that correct? Am I remembering that right? I remember it was some point while I was an EBD teacher. We had some training on it. And I remember even being sort of surprised by things like having divorced parents and sort of even being surprised that that was considered trauma because of how common that it is. So I remember being, you know, not surprised by some, like abuse and other things that are very widely considered as trauma, and then surprised by some of the things that really affect a lot more people than I think we consider. And then when you add in these other current traumas, uh like systemic racism and inequities, uh, among other lines, that's a huge percentage of the population of students that are dealing with trauma.

SPEAKER_01

It really is. And the statistics are out there of how many students will encounter trauma.

SPEAKER_00

We don't always know, right, if a child is undergoing trauma or not. How necessary is it for us as teachers to know that a child is going through trauma versus embedding trauma-informed care in a universal design for learning type way? Or is it really important for us to know and be able to tailor to specific things?

SPEAKER_01

Well, that's a good question. Um, I would say it's both. And especially depending on if you're a special education teacher in a behavior disorder room versus a general educator depending on the clientele, if you will, universally teaching these techniques to everyone has major implications later on in life. If we think about how many, how many adults do you know right now that have a have trouble regulating themselves? So even if you haven't had trauma, if you know the tips and the tricks, and and if you're taught how to regulate yourself, or if you're taught how to how to recognize feelings within your body when you're starting to get upset, are those things are really important because at some point in someone's life, they're going to experience a traumatic event. And so that's important as a whole, also helping with things like conflict resolution and creating safe classrooms and classroom communities. You can't assume everybody's had trauma. Just because little Jimmy had an outburst doesn't necessarily mean he's had trauma. However, if you start noticing that Jimmy has outburst every time a stranger comes into the room, or if other factors come about where you're like, hmm, that might be a trauma response. First of all, we as educators have so much to do, so much on our plate. No one can stand to throw another thing on there. And so I don't expect you to be a therapist. However, you are the front line of defense, and you have to be able to recognize signs and symptoms of possible trauma and then investigate a little further or hand it off to someone because we know that trauma affects brain development, trauma affects brain volume as far as gray matter and white matter, which is which is going to affect reading, processing, working memory, all of those executive functioning skills that are happening for students. And so is it a matter of they've had trauma and we need to work on that so then we can have better academic outcomes? Do they have trauma and don't necessarily need special education, but maybe just interventions that work on that? We need to do it as a whole system-wide, but also understanding um the implications of individual students themselves.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you. No, that was that was very helpful. So, with that background then in mind, whoever's listening to this on their drive to work, what are two to three practices or strategies they could try in their classroom tomorrow?

SPEAKER_01

Well, first and foremost, in teacher education, we need to really get the message out that you have to take care of yourself first. As an educator, I, you know, I assign a self-care plan to my students. Uh it and I tell them it's like the airplane oxygen mask, right? They tell you when you're on the airplane, if you have young children, put your mask on first and then put their mask on. You need to first know your own trauma if you have a history of trauma, know how that affects you, know how you may be triggered in a classroom. So just really knowing and understanding yourself, understanding what is what is my what is my stress response that I go to in my fight response. So that's the first and foremost is to educate yourself, educate yourself as far as culturally responsive teaching, because other cultures have experienced higher loads of trauma. And so we want to be cognizant of that, and how to regulate yourself. And if you're having a bad day, all in for a sub. It's not worth damaging a child or yourself if you're having a bad day. If you are stressed, if you are overwhelmed, don't push yourself to be in the classroom if you're not in a good mental state. And so when we do emotional check-ins and I say, okay, where are we at today? Just checking in. Um, because it gets harder and harder to leave things outside the door. Be honest and real with yourself. The next thing I would say would be to teach your students how to recognize initial signs of distress and teach them how to start to learn how to regulate themselves. If you have a student who gets anxiety around math, we could be teaching those strategies to say, okay, what do you what do you start to feel? Math is coming. Are they sweating? Is their heart starting and things like that? This could be taught to anybody at any age. And most importantly, what I mentioned before is understanding the signs and symptoms and getting assistance to that child, you know, as quickly as possible.

SPEAKER_00

Love those, Tara. In episode four, I talked a bit about social emotional learning with my guest. And one of the big things that she brought up was adult self-regulation. Even within myself, like I have a three-year-old, and there are times when there are tantrums happening around me that I feel myself getting out of control also. And it's so hard to be around kids and all of those little emotions bouncing off of us. And like you're saying, know your own trauma, your own triggers, know yourself how to self-regulate. And then I love that putting it in the students' hands, that independence of knowing them and being able to articulate to them. I know there's certain times of the day you get stressed out. Where do you feel that in your body? What can you do to bring yourself back down? I love that. And it's very doable. Like you're saying, we don't have time to throw in some trauma-informed workbook to do at the end of every day, but these are things that we can do. And really, I imagine could transform your classroom by doing them. You shared awesome examples. Do you have any other concrete examples you've seen of how this has worked really well?

SPEAKER_01

One thing I teach my students is Dr. Perry's sequential model for trauma-informed practices. Uh, he's he's a neuroscientist, he's an MD and a PhD, and I I call him my go-to dude. I don't know if people are familiar. He co-wrote the book with Oprah, What Happened to You. He also has the book, Um, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, and he's worked with children for decades now. And what I show my future teachers, and I I repeatedly come back to it throughout the semester, is he says, first you have to regulate, then you have to relate, and then you can reason. And so he said, he says, and we know anytime somebody says calm down, nobody calms down. Nobody is calming down. As a matter of fact, I escalate. And and the other thing that's really critical with this is that there has to be a really a good relationship involved in order for that relate and reason to happen effectively. Because if you have a child who's experienced trauma, if if you have a student who has emotional behavior disorder, if you don't have a relationship with that student, they're not going to take you as seriously. And so one thing that is paramount is to build relationships with your students. And I'm happy to finally see that that is coming into the curriculum for teacher ed prep. And so don't try to read, don't try to reason. Don't try, first of all, your brain shuts down, right? When you go into that stress response, your left hemisphere for language shuts down because when you're in survival mode, you don't need to talk about it. You just need to survive. And so if you go ask a third grade kid, you know, well, what were you thinking? Well, they weren't thinking they're surviving. And even if they were thinking, they may not be able to express clearly what they were thinking. So it's important to understand that regulation has to occur first before anything else can happen. So we can get that student calm to where they can start thinking more rationally and then be able to help um get to that regulated state and problem solve so we can minimize this from happening again, possibly.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you. Are there grade levels, content areas, or student populations where this research is especially impactful?

SPEAKER_01

So of course, the earlier the better. I was speaking to a student yesterday and she said, I don't remember when my parents got divorced as I was two. And I say the brain holds on to that. So even though you don't remember, that trauma is still in there. So with younger kids, even if they don't remember that trauma, it may come out and it may come out as behaviors, it may come out as disassociation, it may come out or where they just shut down or don't speak. Dr. Ross Green says over 8,700 preschoolers are expelled every year. Babies don't come out bad. Why is it that we're expelling over 8,000 three-year-olds? So if you if you're seeing those behaviors in children, aggressive behaviors, disassociation, flight behaviors, all of those things, that we really want to get that sooner rather than later because brain development, as we know, up to two to three years old, is very, very active, right? That's when most of our brain gets developed. If a student has had trauma, it's going to affect the development of that prefrontal cortex. And so we really want to mitigate those factors sooner rather than later. So we can put those interventions in place to minimize any detriment to brain development, any detriment to learning and socialization within children.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. My um, when I did my PhD, one of my professors did a lot of work on executive functioning. And I remember that's the the pre-K area is the best time to focus on building those executive functioning skills, which include self-regulation. And then the other time being adolescence and puberty when the brain goes through like another sort of leap. So it is nice to hear it's like, all right, if we don't catch it in preschool, there's definitely more time to work on it, but catching it early, absolutely. Um, and you shared your very personal story. So this has been something that you have probably had a had a heart for for most of your life. Has your thinking as a researcher or educator changed as you've delved more into this work?

SPEAKER_01

Well, I think one of the most profound learning that I've had in my PhD program is that not all research is good research. Right? Just because it says it's research-based doesn't mean it's good research. So you have to do your due diligence and make sure that whatever you're looking at is solid research and is valid, reliable, and that sort of thing. The other thing, I I was kind of under the assumption that we weren't really covering trauma in teacher prep. And now that I've interviewed my subjects and my preliminary findings are that we are mentioning it, which is great, but we're still not to the point where it's it's something that we're practicing and you know, that we really need to start embedding more field experiences in Title I schools, which have more prevalent trauma. Because while poverty isn't a cause of trauma, the concepts within poverty are traumatic, food scarcity and things like that. I would say that was probably my biggest shift. Okay, we are talking about it, but they're still not prepared. We we need to do a better job of preparing future educators about its effects and how to respond. It would be imperative for all teacher prep to make sure that everyone has an experience in a Title I school. It would really prepare them for the the gambit of students.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that's really interesting because I'm a professor in a teacher ed program and I'm also the program manager. And so we're, you know, continuously seeking to improve. And field placement is one of the areas when I observe my students in their practicum settings. Sometimes I tell them, like, you know, I I gave you effective for cluster management, but you didn't really have to do anything because it's a really quiet group, and your mentor teacher is sitting right here staring all of them down. So keep that in mind because when you are a teacher on your own in a classroom, it's gonna be all you setting up everything. And that's definitely one of the challenges is getting these experiences to students so that they can practice because you can't really practice this without a student in front of you.

SPEAKER_01

We've been talking about we have a teacher shortage, and and I found a quote the other day that said, we don't have a teacher shortage. We have we have many people here in the United States who are fully qualified and capable to be a teacher, they're choosing not to be. And why are they choosing not to be? One of the reasons is because of behaviors in the classroom and burnout due to behaviors in the classroom, which so if we if we can affect those behaviors by preparing them better with those PBIS strategies, trauma-informed pedagogy and practices and things like that, that you know, maybe we can keep them in the classroom longer.

SPEAKER_00

What are you studying next? What questions remain unanswered for you?

SPEAKER_01

Oh goodness. Well, when I first started my PhD, I was looking to do a mixed methods um study. And then I was reminded that a good dissertation is a done dissertation. And so uh so I would like to do a quantitative study on looking at just how much trauma is embedded in the curriculums versus are there standalone classes, you know, and really take a look at programs as far as where are they getting this information? And and then I also have ideas about specific interventions that I would like to research, especially for students with behavior disorders and students with with trauma.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, and you know, this is one of my hopes for this podcast. Our teacher prep programs are so full of required information. We're really trying to cram so much into a four-year degree. This is this, you know, 30-minute episode. Is not a replacement for a course or even a single lecture on trauma-informed care, but maybe a springboard for both pre-service teachers and in-service teachers to understand it a little better because I have a PhD in special education and I don't know all of this about trauma. You know, I taught students with emotional and behavioral disabilities and went through some specialized trainings on trauma, but that was only because I was an EBD teacher. That was not something that the general education teachers had access to even.

SPEAKER_01

There are only a handful of states that require trauma-informed practices be put into teacher prep. And so that kind of goes back to that policy piece. We don't have pockets of trauma. It's everywhere. And so I would like to start seeing a shift in teacher prep. Another point that I would like to make that, and another shift that is happening, not happening fast enough, um, but that we start shifting from a deficit model to a strengths-based model when we're talking about educating students. And it's really tricky. Special education is a deficit model. We need to learn our students' strengths, then we need to use our students' strengths to help them make up those deficits. Um and also think differently about the way we educate students and about neurotypical versus neurodiverse. There's always things that somebody's going to be good at and somebody's not going to be good at. And it doesn't matter whether you have a learning disability or not. And I think that if we could move to a strengths-based education program, we can really start changing the way we look at students, changing the way we look at how we teach and how we support children.

SPEAKER_00

Is there anything that you're involved in right now? Where can educators go to learn more about you or your work?

SPEAKER_01

Well, I'm kind of a baby in the researcher world here. Hopefully, hopefully get those initials behind my name this summer. And so uh I don't have a lot of work out there right now. I will tell you that at the University of Iowa, we have our Scanlan Center for School Mental Health that came about with COVID funds. We're doing a lot of great stuff there. Uh and through the Council for Exceptional Children, we're doing a lot of really, really great work there, especially, you know, hanging on every word when it comes to policy, especially what's happening with our government situation right now, what's getting funded, what's not getting funded. And so I would I would tell anybody if you are not a member of the Council for Exceptional Children, you should be, because it it just has so many wonderful positive avenues for learning and educating and helping and also to check out the pioneers in this field and the experts in this field, like Dr. Perry, Bessel Vanderkoope, Dr. Lori DeSaltel out of Butler University, and Dr. Green, Maisy Mod. And the other thing that I would add is that there's a great book called Neurodevelopmental Differentiation. And it talks about the different types of processing strengths that people have. And it also gives really great practical strategies to help build those areas if you have a deficit in one area, and it talks about using your strength to help build up the other areas. So, so there's there's a lot of things out there. I just wish they we could just bring them all to the forefront, right? And we just need to put a spotlight on this because again, it's not going away. Uh and we we have to start educating the whole child.

SPEAKER_00

Well, thank you. And all of those um names and resources, I'll link in the show notes so that everyone has access to them. Thank you so much, Tara, for all of your expertise and and your time and your stories. I I really appreciate it. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. Thank you for listening to the research to practice gap. If this episode challenged your thinking or gave you something practical to try, share it with a fellow educator. You can find us on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook at the Research to PracticeGap. And subscribe anywhere you listen to your podcast so you never miss an episode. If you have any questions, feedback, or would like to be a patron on the podcast, you can reach out to us at research to practicepod at gmail.com. Research doesn't change classrooms. I don't have time. I keep reflecting.