Students who have learned to endure toxic environments often develop a “survival brain” — which can be the result of years of living with harmful stress.
Once he understood that many student behaviors were the result of how students’ brains had been “rewired” as a result of trauma, Sporleder went on to implement a breakthrough trauma-informed model that was captured in the 2015 documentary Paper Tigers. Jim is co-author of The Trauma-Informed School and will present a keynote session entitled Catching Kids Before They Fall at the Innovative Schools Summit Atlanta.