 A deal trauma-informed educational space is where the teacher is aware of their own trauma or their own experience in life. They practice self-care and they translate that into how they work with the students, recognizing that there are all the students come with different baggage, different perspectives, different backgrounds, different identities that come in with those differences. So for a teacher to honor those things, and not to say that things like discipline and things like teaching appropriate behavior in social setting are not things, I mean you should definitely do those things. But making sure that we understand the child's perspective when, a lot of times when we hear about trauma-informed practice and whether it's good or not, is when we see schools where kids are being expelled or kids are being overly disciplined and there are a lot of phrases that people use like, oh if you expel a kid that's a road to prison or it's like the road to a place of disparity. Well that may or may not be true but what it is is what they're describing is a place that doesn't care. And to me if you want to overgeneralize it but also make it very specific, a trauma-informed place is a place that cares and also a place that identifies what kids need in order to learn well and to be able to meet that need in a very specific way. When every single one of the students who enters into your classroom could either have trauma in the background that they may or may not know or trauma in the family that they may or may not know that affects them or trauma in their generation or in the generations leading up to them being born that they may or may not know about that affects them in either a cognitive or subconscious level. You don't know. So to say it affects a very small limited number of kids is overgeneralizing saying well we only want to deal with this type of trauma. Only the ones who have been in big accidents or the ones who've been mistreated or the ones who've had mothers or fathers who've been drug addicted etc etc only the ones with very obvious trauma we will deal with them. That is a small number. But when you look at kids who've gone through trauma or have families who've gone through trauma that you may or may not know about well then you start looking at larger and larger and larger populations. You look at the staff and they might have gone through some traumas that they may be unaware about. Even in our conference today I have a prosthetic arm which I don't necessarily define as trauma in my lifetime but it has a lot of similar pieces and so even when we did a hand holding activity it really triggered me and my personal sensitivities because I have anxiety about a new person who doesn't know me and know that I have a prosthetic arm having to hold my hand for the first time. Trauma in form practice benefits me in a situation like that. The person sitting next to me at the table has a family member not sorry not a family member a family friend who actually passed away yesterday in a car accident so she was trying to engage in the content of the day sitting on that. These are you know not typically people you would associate as living with trauma and yet we would we are both you know coping the best that we can in the situation and trying to engage cognitively in a task when our physiological cells are reacting to something that you know we've been experienced in the past so I can't think of a student in a classroom anywhere who wouldn't benefit from from the strategies that we use that we consider trauma in form practice. Trauma in form practice is just good teaching practice.