R ES TO R AT I VE P R AC T I C E S I N E L E M E N TA RY S C HO O L
this “plugging in” phenomenon when I was
taking belly breathes next to a student who
“flipped his lid;” he was able to “bring his lid
back down” without taking the breaths him-
self. We were then able to have a conversa-
tion using restorative prompts and together
come up with a solution that met his needs.
tial that, no matter what the action, adults
remain steady, calm, and consistent in their
responses to traumatized children.
A trauma-sensitive school recognizes that
when people are in a constant state of arous-
al their frontal cortex is not engaged and
they cannot communicate or connect. Regu-
lation is a technique that allows the body to
calm down and re-engage the frontal cortex.
Students need to be regulated before they
can have a restorative chat (Souers, 2016,
p. 80-81). Likewise, adults participating in a
restorative chat also need to be regulated.
Emotional regulation, according to van der
Kolks, is how to heal from trauma (p. 209). If
the adult is not regulated and tries to have
a restorative chat with a student that is not
regulated, they will both re-escalate each
other. There cannot be a repair to connection
unless all parties are regulated. One strategy
I use to ensure a student is regulated is al-
lowing the student to plug into my regulated
system and use my energy to calm down,
also known as coregulation. I experienced
In my classroom I teach students how their
brain works by combining the idea of char-
acters in the brain from Social Thinking with
Dan Siegal’s hand model. After reading Tina
Bryson and Dan Siegal’s The Whole Brain
Child, I adopted the house model as a way
of talking about the upstairs and downstairs
of the brain (Siegal & Bryson, 2012). During
the first lesson, I show students a model of a
house and tell them that we have two parts
of our brain—an upstairs and a downstairs
—and that the characters that live in each
represent different emotions. The upstairs
holds our logic, our problem-solving skills,
our creativity, and our ability to calm our-
selves down. The downstairs is made up of
our survival characters, the ones who tell us
to run, fight, freeze, or hide. I then introduce
the characters to the students one-by-one.
After the students are more familiar with the
brain characters and their functions, we start
to talk about times when one of those char-
acters has taken over their brain. This exer-
cise gets students comfortable talking about
emotions in a low-risk way. For students who
have a hard time talking about their emo-
tions, this exercise is not as intimidating be-
cause they’re talking about characters, not
their own emotions.
“A trauma-sensitive school
recognizes that when people
are in a constant state of
arousal their frontal cortex is
not engaged and they cannot
communicate or connect.”
Continues on page 30
CSEE Connections
Winter 2019
Page 29