Family of Kidz

Dr. Maurene Goodman

Patient Care Advocate

Dr. Maurene Goodman serves as Director of Kidz Educational Services at Family of Kidz. Her work is guided by a commitment to supporting children and equipping families and schools with practical, evidence-based strategies.

In schools, staff are constantly bombarded with buzzwords: mindfulness, universal screeners, calm-down corners, trauma-assumed practice- all of them valuable. But when these strategies are implemented without understanding, they can feel like just one more thing to do. That’s exactly why we want our teams talking about the biology of trauma. Not because everyone needs to qualify as a psychologist or become a “trauma expert,” but because when we understand why we’re doing something, the practice elevates. Instead of becoming another checkbox activity or rule of thumb, it becomes a framework.

When we talk about the why, we’re really talking about semantic encoding: we remember things better when they mean something to us. If school leadership tells teachers to “take attendance within the first 10 minutes of class,” it’s just another rule to remember. But if an administrator explains why those first minutes are crucial for safety- and shares a real story about a child who wasn’t accounted for- suddenly there’s a reason behind the expectation. There’s emotion, there’s understanding, and now there’s buy-in. Those teachers will remember the attendance requirement because it’s encoded into their practice and framework. So, when we talk about trauma-assumed practice, this is the style of learning we want our teachers and support staff engaged in.

You might be wondering: what do we actually want teachers and staff to know about trauma-assumed practice? At Family of Kidz, we’ve started this conversation with our behavior team, made up of BCBAs and BTs. We begin with a straightforward notion- that our bodies hold on to stress and flag it when a situation looks or feels similar in the future, even when there’s no real threat. It’s a simplified version of the concepts Bessel van der Kolk introduces in The Body Keeps the Score (2014). Our team walks away understanding why their own bodies respond with a fight/flight/freeze reaction in all kinds of scenarios- even ones as ordinary as hearing their boss say their name in a certain tone. The body reacts physiologically before logic can be applied. From there, we expand into frontal lobe functions: emotion regulation, social behavior, planning and organization, attention, problem-solving, and working memory. When the brain perceives a threat, blood flow leaves the frontal lobe and is redirected by the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline to the lungs, legs, and arms.

This is a lot of information, and you may be wondering why it matters to the teachers and support teams who work with students every day. We bridge that gap by explaining that the body redirects blood flow to the lungs, legs, and arms because it is preparing to survive what it perceives as a threat. In other words, the brain is responding as though it has come face-to-face with a lion; it needs to be ready to fight, flee, or freeze. Our students aren’t running from lions, but many who have experienced trauma are living with nervous systems that respond as though they are. In these moments, their brains are focused on survival, not learning. The executive functioning skills we rely on—problem-solving, attention, emotional regulation, flexible thinking- become temporarily less accessible as reflexive survival responses take over.

When teams understand this, the way children are spoken about changes- their whole conceptualization shifts for the better through a trauma-assumed lens. A child once described as “attention-seeking” becomes “connection-seeking.” Teachers are better able to say, “He can’t access these skills right now,” or “She seems overwhelmed by this.” Strategies taught through a trauma-assumed lens are elevated into true biological accommodations.

The goal isn’t for school leadership to become trauma experts (although we’d certainly love that). It’s to create systems where trauma-assumed knowledge spreads naturally through a community until it’s ingrained in the culture. This is where the dissemination, or diffusion, of knowledge comes in. The idea is relatively simple: we share our research, ideas, and best practices with key personnel, who then carry them forward to others to enact real change. So how do we get there?

A good first step is identifying who the primary educator or consultant for trauma-assumed practice will be. Is it a psychologist? An outside consultant? Fortunately, technology has made sharing information easy and accessible, even for large teams. At Family of Kidz, I’ve used Microsoft Teams to deliver these trainings- laying out the biological foundation, sharing real-world examples, and creating space for discussion and application. The goal is simple: equip staff with enough understanding that they can bring these ideas back to their schools, colleagues, and communities.

In full transparency, when I was first asked to lead a trauma training for our behavior team, I geeked out. I shared far more biology and neuroscience than I’d originally intended- which, admittedly, tends to happen when you ask psychologists to talk about the brain. Halfway through, I apologized for going into so much detail. Instead of agreeing, the team told me it was exactly what they needed. Understanding the biology finally made everything click. It wasn’t that they’d never heard the strategies before; it was that no one had explained why those strategies worked. Once they understood the why, they could view behavior differently- through the trauma-assumed lens we strive for.

At the end of the day, our goal isn’t simply to teach trauma-assumed strategies. It’s to build educators and teams who understand the science behind them. When we understand the biology, the conversation shifts. That’s how buy-in really happens- not by asking teams to do more, but by giving them more to talk about.