HOW TRAUMA AFFECTS THE STUDENT BRAIN.
But when students have many experiences of trauma or even one acute, very difficult experience that has manifested in their brain as symptoms of trauma, they're really coming to school with the brain thinking about survival.
And survival becomes the most important job of the brain, because remember, the brain is thinking about remembering and often reliving the traumatic experience. So it wants to avoid that at any cost. Regulation is compromised. Social-emotional learning and connections, quality, friendships, all of those things are compromised and they're harder for a child to be able to develop. And cognition becomes the last part of what the brain is thinking about.