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THE SCHOOL WELLNESS WHEEL
more traditional schools—a challenge that many innovators are aware of and are actively seeking solutions.” Providing teachers and school personnel with professional training in competency-based school models, trauma-informed care, and culturally responsive pedagogy—while asking them to continue operating in a traditional school mindset—is ineffective in bringing sustainable growth and lasting change. Putting more things on the plates of teachers and principals without evolving the existing educational construct is, ultimately, futile. Educators are just beginning to grasp that trauma and toxic stress are detrimental to brain development and deeply understand their role in the origins of many diseases. Thus, there is a professional need for educators to continue to leverage the most current science to inform the creation of innovative school structures and classroom instructional strategies to reduce the impact of toxic stress on children and to mitigate its negative effects on development and health across the lifespan. As such, a teacher’s role is to become an expert in learning and the brain, as well as in the factors that can either enhance or inhibit learning. Becoming doctors of learning rather than purveyors of content is the ultimate challenge of every educator as the world and the profession continue to evolve into the future. When a school or district offers professional learning sessions in areas such as SEL or culturally responsive instruction, but doesn’t revise or evolve the overarching system , it only adds more to teachers’ already full plates. The school wellness wheel provides the framework in which schools can accomplish this new vision. This model for success focuses educators’ cognitive energy. As the education research becomes more robust, schools and teachers can adopt it into the school model as appropriate. If we encourage ourselves to approach the critical issues from a different perspective, it can open up a new world of unlimited possibilities. This is about the humans and the learning. It’s not about the curriculum and the content. By understanding and responding to students’ past and current experiences with trauma and stress, school administrators, teachers, and staff can break the cycle of trauma, help reduce its negative impact, prevent retraumatization, support critical learning, and create a more positive school environment. Until we create schools that actively focus on the overall health of the brains, bodies, and psyches of the humans in the building, the quality of the curriculum, instruction, and assessments is irrelevant. Thus, the adults in the educational system have a critical responsibility to adjust their professional orientation away from simply delivering curriculum, providing instruction, and maintaining traditional grading systems, to adopting and growing within a humanized educational model that recognizes students’ individuality and helps them grow to the greatest capacity possible.
