Transforming Trauma: The School as a Healing Community in the Context of COVID-19

Dave Melnick, LICSW

Oct 20 @ 9:00 am – Nov 17 @ 2:30 pm

Target Audience: PK - 12 educators.

Many students today arrive at school with unprecedented adversity due to high rates of traumatic stress, the current pandemic, social isolation, and inequities. Oftentimes, our traditional methods of relationship building, discipline, and instruction are falling short for these students, leaving educators strained, frustrated, and self-doubting. In this workshop with graduate course option, we will study the harmful effects of trauma on students and on the workforce, the premises for trauma-informed practices, and the core capacities necessary to successfully address posttraumatic stress. The graduate class will take a comprehensive look into these core capacities, with a focus on helping educators transform their mindsets in order to make shifts in their practice. Finally, we study the central components for building resilience, first for the workforce and then for students. Through a mix of lecture, dialogic learning, video and role plays, and case consultations, participants will:

• study the central role of mindset and its impact on our choice of intervention, strategy, and technique.

• examine our own beliefs and biases as the driving force of our actions with students.

• analyze how stress can be both a generative and positive influence on our lives and a destructive and harmful one.

• learn the core capacities necessary to be more successful with students.

Course participants will:

• Increase knowledge of the impact of traumatic stress on a child and understand the unique and innovative strategies to address it.

• Learn and apply the “Seven Domains of Impairment” to their work setting.

• Increase understanding of the neurobiology of stress, use dependence, and vicarious trauma.

• Study and implement various models of buffering the effects of ongoing stress to help improve a student’s resilience and accountability.

• Learn basic tenets of organizational change and effective treatment models in the field of trauma transformation.

• Develop their own training module for their school/program/department.

Dave Melnick has been a clinical social worker for 30 years, working with children, teens, families and adults. Dave has also provided consultation and training to over 100 schools in Vermont over the past decade. He is the Director of Outpatient Services at Northeast Family Institute (NFI Vermont). In 2015, the Child Trauma Academy (CTA) acknowledged that Dave had completed NMT Training Certification through the Phase II level, and in April 2017 he was selected as a Fellow.

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