A Principal's Roller Coaster Ride: Trauma-informed Principaling- the new normal??

Who would have thought it would happen again? In 2017, our city was hit by the Tubbs Fire. My school’s attendance area was destroyed. We are in the middle of rebuilding and, on, October 27, 2019, the Kincade Fire caused the area to be evacuated. All of my students were evacuated from their homes for 5 days. The school was closed for 9 days. Everyone was feeling everything: Happiness, sadness, anger, nervousness, gratitude, love.

We knew we had a big job. We had 450 students coming back to school with all the emotions. During the 2018-19 school year, we, as a staff, had spent most of the year learning about how trauma affects the brain. We drove into learning about how to help students with calming and mindfulness activities. We read articles, attended conferences, and did research on Trauma-informed classrooms. This came in handy today.

Yesterday was the first day back for staff. I needed to support them and remind them of the learning from last year. In researching how to begin this staff meeting, I came across Stephanie McConnell’s blog about We are stronger together. In this post, she talks about the paracord and that “When soldiers landed in the battlefields, they would cut the cord off their parachutes and pack it up for later use. The cord would come in handy for the soldiers during battle.” This spoke to me. I went on amazon and order enough for all staff (side note, bad idea when you are evacuated: no amazon delivery...duh) In Stephanie’s post, there were also two quotes that stood out for me. One: "I survived because the fire inside me burned brighter than the fire around me." and Two: “Things don’t always go ac”cord”ing to plan.” I made a little sheet with these on it and personalize the note with the paracord bracelet for staff.

I also wanted to have the staff, classified and certificated, interact during the meeting. I decided to do a jigsaw reading activity with four different articles. The groups read, discuss and then share the “ah ha”s with all of us. The articles I picked were:

Here are pictures of their posters:

I also spend quite a bit of time talking about Teacher/staff self-care. I had each person fill out the “Self-care Plan”. I copied it on bright Yellow paper so they could find it quickly if they needed it during the school day. Teachers also spend some time writing thank you notes to others that had helped them over the past week.

We spent time talking about how to support our students. I showed the “Flipping your lid” video (in the presentation below) and remind staff that we need to build in movement and calming breaks for students. Teachers shared different activities they already do in their normal day. One teacher shared about the “Caring Circle” from our Toolbox Curriculum. Another teacher shared about the MIndfulness videos in Class Dojo. A third teacher shared about Calm.com activities. Another Teacher shared about an emoji “weather” activity. This activity is so cool. Students make an emoji for themselves and place it on a weather map daily to reflect how they were feeling.
My Presentation for the meeting is here.

I also gave each teacher a book, “In My Heart”. I purchased a TPT curriculum for each of them as well. I don’t give many directives, but I did with this one. Everyone is to read this book to your students. What I love about this book is it talks about feelings. Therefore, it opened up conversations if they needed them. Otherwise, we were just teaching about feelings. Many teachers did it as a buddy activity. That worked really well. They read the book together and different activities. The teachers had great things to say about the book and how it went. Some pictures are below of the book activities.

I am sharing because I know this will not be the last time I have to do this. I also know this is becoming the new “normal” for us principals. Please, use my ideas. Share with me yours. Ask me or others for help. We were not trained for this, but this is our job now. I have also started a “Disaster book bin”. For teachers to check out books to read to their students as these events keep happening. I have added the following titles to it: