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When I first began researching socio-emotional learning and how to implement a trauma-informed curriculum into the classroom, I did so because of my own personal experiences with the topic. Trauma is something that is very near and dear to my heart. I was a student who experienced a great deal of personal trauma growing up, and it often showed up in my classroom experiences. Fortunately, I had two teachers who understood enough about trauma to help me find ways to succeed in spite of it.

In 2016, when I became a teacher, I found that many of my students wanted to stay after class or during their lunch breaks just to talk. As I listened, I saw myself in so many of these middle schoolers. It broke my heart to hear about their parents’ divorces and how they felt caught in the middle between Mom and Dad. I shed tears with students who shared stories about the death of a sibling or an aunt struggling with addiction. I watched middle school girls skip meals and catch glimpses of themselves in mirrors or window reflections, sucking in their stomachs with the desperate desire to be smaller. I watched students panic before tests, act out during group projects, or simply not turn in work because everything felt too overwhelming for them to process.

After years of listening to my students share what they were going through, I began to recognize a pattern. Many of them felt anxious, stressed, and overwhelmed. Many felt the need to shrink themselves in order to fit into society’s expectations because they believed they were somehow inferior. These observations aligned with the research I was doing, which showed that middle school students are already prone to stress, anxiety, and feelings of inadequacy, and that trauma only intensifies those experiences.

I knew I wanted to help these students. In many ways, it felt like a calling. As an English teacher, I knew I was expected to focus on test scores and meeting state standards, but what I cared about most was helping my students’ hearts and minds. It made sense to me that their academic performance would not improve until they felt safe enough to learn.

Until 2020, I didn’t realize there was a name for the work I wanted to do. Since then, I have spent a great deal of time studying socio-emotional learning and intentionally incorporating it into my classroom. The more teachers I spoke with about this work, the more I realized that many of them shared the same desire to support students who struggle with anxiety, stress, and overwhelm. They wanted to help, but often felt unsure where to begin or believed the work would be too complicated to implement.

What many of them didn’t realize, however, is that they were already incorporating socio-emotional learning into their classrooms, they simply didn’t have a name for it yet.