ABSTRACT
This chapter provides multiple choices, examples, and practices that relate to mindsets, movement in learning, self-regulation, sensory processing, experiences and environmental resources and practices, teacher self-care, teacher-student connections, and whole school trauma-sensitive and compassionate approaches. It begins by reviewing the data related to the prevalence of anxious, traumatized, poor regulating students, when presenting training on creating brain-based, trauma-sensitive classrooms. The brain-based, trauma-informed, trauma-sensitive response is just one of many that are now practiced in brain-based, trauma-sensitive environments to realize improved learning and student regulation. Just as movement helps with self-regulation, it also helps students with sensory processing issues. Many students–an estimated one in six—struggle with some form of sensory integration processing difficulty or with sensory processing disorder (SPD). Neuroscience has once again helped us appreciate the sensory needs of many students as a result of how their nervous systems receive information and then turn that information into behavioral and motor responses.
