Rethinking traditional behaviour management to better support complex trauma-surviving students

Abstract

Children and adolescents who have survived complex trauma have suffered the type of ongoing and repeated traumatic experience that includes factors such as physical, sexual, and/or emotional abuse, significant neglect, and/or family violence. Complex childhood trauma (sometimes referred to as paediatric or child maltreatment-related post traumatic stress disorder (De Bellis and Kuchibhatla, 2006) can have a significant impact on the developing nervous system which can lead to impairment in the capacity to relate and to emotionally self-regulate. During the schooling years, this can lead to the presentation of concerning school behaviours that schools tend to respond to with equally as concerning punitive consequences, often involving practices of exclusion. This article will emphasize the importance of schools accessing and then encompassing learnings from neuroscience into their behaviour management policies and practices. Neuroscience has provided an extra explanatory framework to complement understandings of student behaviour drawn from the clinical sciences. It is not only explaining why and how some of these student behaviours occur, but is also providing a different template of possibility for enhancing the educational and life outcomes for this vulnerable group of young people through more effective and more inclusive school practices.