Dr. Gerald Neal, an associate professor in the Master of School Administration program at UNC Pembroke from Laurinburg, recently celebrated the release of his second book, The Trauma-Sensitive School: Transforming Education to Heal Social and Emotional Wounds.
In this work, Dr. Neal explores the impact of trauma experienced by children in the home and community, often unseen until they are triggered, usually resulting in some form of consequence or punishment on the part of supervising adults.
“To teach and develop children, whether you are the parent, teacher, or preacher, you must understand their needs and their responsiveness to the environment in which they live. Cries for help, or frustrations based on some hidden emotional scarring, is often because the adult misinterprets the signals the child is trying to project,” said Dr. Neal.
The research that went into this book inspired Dr. Neal to create an organization called “Tassel” representing “Trauma-Sensitive, Social-Emotional Leadership” (TSSEL). This organization features Social and Emotional (SEL) assessments for each grade level, forms and documents to navigate adults through therapeutic behavior interventions, and a process with which adults can be trained to recognize and remedy many of the ills caused by childhood trauma.
Neal continues, “It is not important that we diagnose each child to determine what their needs are in search of the source of some adverse childhood experience. We should be analyzing significant data that characterize culture and society to determine how all children in a region might be impacted by trauma. What is good for the most impacted child is also good medicine for all children.”
In his book, Dr. Neal prescribes a process that requires the triangulation that leads to “whole child development” in every school. He proposes that principals, faculty, and all staff members change the culture through a relatively simple process of focusing on social-emotional development alongside cognitive growth. Research proves that cognitive growth is accelerated when supported emotionally and socially.
Dr. Neal states, “The book gets into some basic concepts of the brain’s reaction to stress and social and emotional support. Memory is essential to learning, so if the focus is to build relationships and positive dispositions, the memory will be unimpeded as it transforms into knowledge during the brain’s developmental years.”
The book has been adopted by universities across the globe, from Germany to Thailand, but the most interest has been in the United States. Schools such as Stanford University, North Carolina State University, and the University of Pennsylvania, some of the leading educational leadership research institutions in the United States, have added it to their libraries. Dr. Neal has been working with Stanford University since 2018 developing online adult learning strategies that effectively promote transformational leadership competency development in virtual classrooms.
“Graduate students in educational leadership programs are adults with jobs and families. They need a program that is interactive and flexible, yet one that equips them to become servant leaders that are effective while possessing the competencies and dispositions needed to transform today’s schools,” said Neal, who lives in Laurinburg.
Dr. Neal hopes to eventually work with motivated school districts to help them reap the benefits of the TSSEL program. When appropriately applied, the most challenging schools have experienced sustained growth in areas such as academics (test scores) and teacher retention while seeing dramatic drops in out-of-school suspensions and dropout rates.
“You have to know the client, and for educators, the client is the student. High disciplinary incidents and dropout rates are the messages students are sending us, and we must respond appropriately. What we are doing is ineffective, so why not invest in a new approach?” adds Dr. Neal.