Examining the Impact of Trauma-Informed Care Training on Educators\u27 Knowledge, Attitudes, and Behavior: A Qualitative Study

According to the National Survey of Children\u27s Health (NSCH), nearly 35 million children in the United States have experienced one or more types of significant childhood trauma. In the average public school, this statistic translates to as many as half of the students in a given teacher\u27s classroom. Children exposed to the toxic stress of trauma often experience negative consequences that affect their academic, psychological, social-emotional, and behavioral health. To aid educators in addressing this reality, trauma-informed care practices have increasingly begun to be translated into professional development opportunities for educators. One such training, Compassionate Schools, has been recently evaluated using the Attitudes Related to Trauma-Informed Care (ARTIC) scale. Comparing pre and post-test scores in a previous study on the ARTIC, researchers found a significant change in the attitudes of participating educators of a standard deviation. In an effort to clarify and contextualize these results, the current qualitative study involved conducting follow-up semi-structured interviews with ten participants of the Compassionate Schools training who were public school teachers in a southeastern school district in the United States. Findings added to the nascent literature evaluating the impact of trauma-informed care training, by exploring perceptions of changes in knowledge, attitudes, and behavior of educators who attended the Compassionate Schools training, and by providing recommendations for improvement and additional needed resources to support implementation of the trauma-informed care practices