Occasional Paper Series #43

Emotionally Responsive Practice as Trauma Informed Care: Parallel Process to Support Teacher Capacity to Hold Children with Traumatic History

by Lesley Koplow, Noelle Dean, and Margaret Blachly

“If you hadn’t heard him and brought his comment to my attention, I wouldn’t have even heard his voice.”
—A pre-K teacher

Emotionally Responsive Practice (ERP) is a trauma-informed approach to supporting social and emotional well-being in schools (Koplow, 2002, 2007, 2009, 2014). Developed at Bank Street College of Education, ERP teaches adults to understand children by looking through the lens of child development as well as through the lens of life experience. While ERP includes many child-focused therapeutic techniques1, its focus on adults is an equally powerful feature of the approach. Essentially, ERP engages teachers2 in a parallel process, giving them felt experience with the emotionally responsive techniques that can be useful in the classroom throughout the day. When teachers feel validated, seen, and heard, they are much more likely to be able to hear and see the children they work with. In this way, ERP strengthens teachers’ foundation for integrating an empathic approach into their work with children with traumatic history.

This article will focus on the aspects of ERP related to work with teachers and administrators with their own traumatic histories. While most trauma-informed programs in schools primarily focus on teaching adults to recognize and understand trauma in children, ERP presupposes that the way that adults in schools respond to reactive behaviors associated with trauma such as fight or flight is in part influenced by the adults’ own histories. ERP work acknowledges that both children and adults bring their life stories into the classroom. Without a parallel focus on the adults’ experiences, their stories might interfere on an unconscious level with the best intentions of adult members of the school community. It is necessary to simultaneously give teachers, along with children, room to express, reflect on, and heal from their own traumatic experiences, within a safe community as witness.

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About the Authors

Lesley Koplow, MS, LCSW, is the Director of the Center for Emotionally Responsive Practice at Bank Street College. The Center collaborates with early childhood programs and elementary schools to support the social and emotional well being of children, parents, and teachers in the school setting. Ms. Koplow is the author of several books on child mental health in schools, including; Unsmiling Faces: How Preschool can Heal, Creating Schools That Heal: Real Life Solutions, Bears, Bear Everywhere: Supporting Children’s Emotional Health in the Classroom and Politics Aside: Our Children and Their Teachers in Score-Driven Times. She was the winner of the 2013 New York Zero-To-Three Emily Fenichel Award for EducationalLeadership and the 2018 Bank Street College Thomases Award for Leadership.

Noelle Dean, LMSW, has been a social worker in New York City for over 20 years with more than half of those years working at Bank Street College. At Bank Street, she is a mental health consultant in the Center for Emotionally Responsive Practice and is the “feelings teacher” in the School for Children’s Lower School. In past years, she has taught as an adjunct in the Graduate School as well. She has experience as a community organizer as well as using dance as a form of expressive arts therapy. She is passionate about social justice issues and believes that emotional wellbeing is a human right.

Margaret Blachly

Margaret Blachly, GSE ’05, is a psycho-educational specialist at the Center for Emotionally Responsive Practice at Bank Street College. She is also an advisor and instructor in the Early Childhood Special Education and Bilingual Programs at the Bank Street Graduate School of Education. Margaret spent 11 years teaching pre-K and kindergarten in dual language and inclusion settings. She is a Learning Specialist at The Children’s Learning Center of Morningside Heights in New York City and is a graduate of Bank Street’s Early Childhood Bilingual General and Special Education Program.