Chapter 8: Schoolwide Trauma- informed Professional Development: We Can! Building Relationships and Resilience

A community-based research partnership was initiated by passionate school leaders in one elementary school located on a centralized campus that serves students from both urban and rural settings. The school principal and school counselor (both authors on the chapter) were interested in developing and evaluating trauma-informed professional development for their staff. This chapter describes the school team’s initial efforts as they moved to become trauma-informed, then how the team reached out and worked with university partners to develop We Can! Building Relationships and Resilience, a schoolwide, yearlong, Tier 1, universal, professional development training for implementing trauma-informed practices. This chapter reports on the quantitative and qualitative results of We Can! being tested at all elementary schools in this district. We discuss how this work expanded to broader community connections. The authors also discuss reflections on what we have learned from this collaboration.