Mathew Portell and Tyisha Noise discuss the need for a human-centered approach in schools and how to make the shift.
Post-pandemic schools are still feeling the aftershocks—socially, emotionally, and politically – say educators and co-authors Mathew Portell and Tyisha Noise. Educators, students, and administrators are navigating a landscape that feels more uncertain than ever, with growing political pressures, policy shifts, and the lingering impact of disrupted learning.
“In this hurrying time of, ‘we've got to get kids caught up,’ that intensity is there. And I think it's playing a major role in missing gaps that we need to support for students who didn't have those developmental experiences starting at a very, even young age, and building their capacity and their tools to manage all that's coming,” Portell says.
Portell, an elementary school principal, and Noise, an educator and leadership consultant, believe a trauma-informed approach can help -- that is if schools truly undertake the work to make the systemic shifts necessary. They are co-authors of “Reducing Stress in Schools: Restoring Connection and Community,” a toolkit of actionable, evidence-based practices for educators that focuses on how to support students’ and adults’ nervous system regulation. One of the biggest shifts they advocate for is moving from reactive policies to a more human-centered approach aimed toward not just students but also adults.
“If we want what we say we want for children, we've got to bring healing and love and support and compassion to adults. We have to pour into the adults who serve children what we want them to pour into children,” Noise says. “Draining people of everything good inside of them, and then asking them to pour from empty cups every day is not only unfair, it's inhumane.”
In this episode, we discuss the tension between academic recovery and social-emotional learning as schools face increasing pressure to accelerate student progress while navigating political and logistical obstacles, and what it means to be a trauma-informed school.
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JILL ANDERSON: I'm Jill Anderson, this is the Harvard EdCast.
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Mathew Portal and Tyisha Noise know that schools often promote themselves as safe spaces for everyone. But that ideal is rarely reflected in the day to day realities within their walls. They are experts in trauma-informed practices, having spent years working to create schools that go beyond surface level safety to provide truly supportive environments. I wanted to know how schools, despite their best intentions, can sometimes become dehumanizing spaces. Mathew and Tyisha share how schools need a systemic shift that prioritizes the well-being and resilience of students, educators, and staff and what it takes to get there.
I asked them to help us understand why schools today seem to be under so much stress.
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MATHEW PORTELL: We are post-pandemic, but we're still experiencing the aftermath of the pandemic. And to layer that, education has now become a political battleground. Now, this discombobulation and unknowing of the future of public education-- I'm in Tennessee, and we just passed a massive voucher support legislation that is going to allocate $400 million. So now, the sense of safety feels even different than the pandemic. We might be quote, unquote, post-pandemic. And we're not. I mean, our students are struggling, our adults are struggling.
I'm seeing the impact every single day in the school that I lead. There's so many pieces that the pandemic, again, kind of exposed, and then layering it with multiple issues, culturally and politically, and to be honest, our kids feel all of that, our adults feel all of that. And I think it's only getting more complex. I certainly don't think it's gotten any easier. What do you think, Dr. Noise?
TYISHA NOISE: I agree with that. I'm only two years off of school site leadership myself. And I get to spend most of my days supporting, training, planning with educators. And I think the biggest piece, to your point, about post-pandemic is that our children missed a great deal of opportunity in terms of social emotional development. Right? And so not just the skills of understanding my own feelings, but the habits and practices associated with navigating the emotional states, and habits, and ways of being of 25, or 30, or 40 other humans in a space. Right? Because when we got to be at home, it was us and our family, us and our siblings. Right? Or us in a neighbor, in a very small group of humans. And those dynamics changed the way a space feels. It changes the way learning feels. It changes my sense of safety in a space. And the other day, I was working on some new research, so I was looking at the reports by NCS. And they're talking about the fact that right now, 50% of school leaders nationwide are worried about their own mental health, 50%, followed by high 40s percentage of teachers being worried about their own mental health in the 80s of percentages of schools that are working on SEL curriculum. But 57% of those schools say they haven't had enough time to really embody the curriculum, to learn it the way they want to, in order to teach it. And so our desire to pendulum swing back to business as usual, with folks whose neurology has not returned to usual, just, I think, makes people feel a bit suffocated. Students, educators on campuses, and then that much more with all the political pressure that comes from superintendencies and district-level leadership who are not on campuses with students, and so they cannot feel the difference in tenor. For them, it does feel like business as usual. Well, the budget is still due. All of the politics are still happening. All of those things are still occurring, and they want to push down into schools without stepping on campuses to feel what it feels like now, when everyone on a campus, on average, is on high alert every day.
MATHEW PORTELL: I was out of a school for 2 years, 2 and 1/2 years, and I've come back as a principal. Dr. Noise, you are spot on. This fear and drive of districts to bridge that learning gap, the learning loss that experienced during COVID, we have lost some of the importance of around the social and emotional health of our students and our adults. It's just kind of gone by the wayside. And again, due to the political climate, and depending on where you are geographically, like, we can't use the word social, emotional learning here in the state.
So even those things have had a major impact, because it's like, but we've got to catch kids up. We know the neuroscience is very clear. We understand the human brain and how it works. It must feel connected and safe. We must be able to process emotions in a way that makes sense, or our prefrontal cortex doesn't allow us to absorb new information. We know these things. But in this hurrying time of, we've got to get kids caught up, that intensity is there. And I think it's playing a major role in missing gaps that we need to support, for students who didn't have those developmental experiences starting at a very, even young age, and building their capacity and their tools to manage all that's coming.
JILL ANDERSON: When I look at your work, this is really a lot more than just stress reduction, at the end of the day. And it really requires a system-level, deep change. Talk about trauma-informed schools. What does that look like?
MATHEW PORTELL: Trauma-informed schools, those three words are thrown around a lot. And I was very fortunate, like Dr. Noise, to consult, and travel, and meet with districts, and support them through these processes. And I would hear things like, oh, well, we're trauma-informed because we've had this training. The one thing I would always hear is, what are we going to do with the kids? First thing I would say was, tell me about the adults. Because I would hear things like, kids aren't motivated, they're not connected. And I would say, so tell me about your adults. Are they connected? Do you have supports in place?
This is a system-wide mindset. It's not a program, right? It is using some critical, agreed upon foundational understandings of trauma, and then responding to those in a systematic way that sees everybody as a human first, and then builds people's capacity to understand the impacts of stress and trauma, and then building and creating strategies that are brain-aligned and human-centered. It sounds so easy in that space, but it is so very complex. Because it's counterintuitive to the systems that are in place, and have been in place for centuries. We've been trained as teachers about punishments and rewards. We now know-- the research is very clear, that is not actually how humans thrive. It is how we get compliance and how we get people to sit and do what they're told. This isn't a generation, and I'm glad for that, that that's the outcome of the generation that we are educating today. It is to build strong-minded, very diligent, equity-centered people who can speak for themselves and others and meet their fullest potential at whatever they want to do. And so when we say trauma-informed, it's so much deeper than stress and trauma. It's looking at historical context. It's looking at the systems that have been in place for centuries, who are oppressing many of our kids.
So there's so much to it. But the foundation is built in that right there, those ideas. And I will tell you, I walked into the school that I'm in now, and I heard, we're a trauma informed school, and there's de-escalation spaces, and there's all kinds of things that point to what, on the surface, a trauma-informed school would be. But I listened to the adults speak to the children, and there was nothing aligned to being trauma-informed. I have a handmade sign that I had in my previous school, and it's-- we are a trauma-informed school, and it's all these characteristics. And they said, why don't you put it in your office there? I said, because we don't meet those characteristics right now, but we're going to work towards that. That's the depth of the work. It's not a label. It's not a program that we've bought. It's a system of operating.
JILL ANDERSON: Do I dare to ask how many characteristics were on that sign?
MATHEW PORTELL: It's quite a few. To be quite honest, those characteristics all are aligned to one simple thing, humanizing education. That's what it all comes down to, that we connect before we correct. We de-escalate and we co-regulate. You know, we understand, especially with this work around stress contagion, my self-care is important as a school administrator. Because when I'm stressed out, the teachers are stressed out. When the teachers are stressed out, the kids are stressed out. When we talk about self-care, it's not just this idea, well, I'm going to take care of myself because it's about me. It is, 100%. But when I do that, it's also about our community. So self-care was part of it. But it's really getting to the depth of this science and work. And it's a lot of times, I think because it is such a hot topic, and the research is so clear, that sometimes we just want to scratch the surface and then say, we're done. Oh, I'm still deep in this work, and I've been for over a decade, and I'm still unfolding things going, oh, my goodness, we got to do this different, oh, my goodness, we've got to figure this out. It's a journey. We're always making these adjustments. The more we know, the more we do different.
TYISHA NOISE: And I just want to loop back around to humanizing in systems, those are two concepts that we often don't put in the same space. And I was just having a conversation with someone the other day about the idea that systems are made of people. And so systems change as people change. And if we're going to have a conversation specifically about creating trauma-informed schools, trauma-informed systems, trauma-informed spaces, then the truth is, the humans are who have to heal first. If I am regularly dysregulated, always stressed out, unmotivated, unhappy, depressed, filled with anxiety, dread, terror, fear, then that is what shows up in my classroom, or in my professional learning space, with my teachers, or in my office. It comes with me. I come with me everywhere I go. If we want what we say we want for children, we've got to bring healing and love and support and compassion to adults. We have to pour into the adults who serve children what we want them to pour into children. Draining people of everything good inside of them, and then asking them to pour from empty cups every day is not only unfair, it's inhumane.
JILL ANDERSON: It feels like often what we see is we have to fix the kids, save the kids, and the approach is there, but we seem to be leaving behind the educators, the people who have to deliver that, even though we know, I mean, all the data is there about how stressed out, how burnt out educators are, how often teachers leave the field. It's a big piece of it. So is there a way to course correct?
TYISHA NOISE: I absolutely believe there's a way to course correct. Now, the challenge is, do I really want to, and how bad do I want to? Because that change, as a leader, is always going to begin with me. When I had the opportunity to start the work of building a foundation for a trauma-responsive school, one, my boss and I were in it together. Our small admin team was in it together. Upper management was not excited about that. So I had to be very careful about when and how we had those conversations. But there were decisions that we had to make as a leadership behind closed doors.
And Matt, I think, highlighted one of those things, that it was like they are human first. We are going to love them the way we want them to love children. And I know for people, using the word love when we talk about education, feels warm and fuzzy, but it's not so warm and fuzzy. This is a human every day. I had a mentor whose wife was also in education, and he had two small children when I first met him. And he used to say to me, if it's not good enough for my children, it's not good enough for my school. And if it's not good enough for my wife, who was also an educator, it's not good enough for my teachers.
I've taken that with me everywhere I've gone. And so when I step into a classroom, I'm looking at this human who could be my-- and actually, my sister is an assistant principal. Literally, this person could be my sibling. What would I want for my sibling? What would I want for my best friend, if that was the teacher standing in this classroom, no matter what has happened? And being able to look to that human first and to assess what they need in their humanity first. I've had the fortunate, or unfortunate privilege, of being on campus with teachers who have lost their children, lost a child to death while we work together, teachers that have lost parents while we work together.
And at some point, they've got to come back. Leave is not that long. And we expect them to be in a classroom with children. I've had teachers who had late term miscarriages have to come back to school, and we were there to walk alongside them. And if we want them to be whole, healthy humans, because we want them to help cultivate an environment to build whole, healthy children, we've got to put the kind of care in place that allows for that to happen. Matt's point about psychological safety was extremely important. As leaders, we have to be the kind of people that folks can knock on the door and say, hey, listen, I know you're the principal, I know your Dr. Whoever, Whatever, However, I just need Tyisha right now. I just need another human to sit across from.
And I remember, I had a teacher once who had missed a few meetings with me. I thought she was upset with me. I couldn't figure it out. I thought she was ducking me. And when I finally got to sit down with her, and I was like, is everything OK? Did something happen? Did we have an interaction that didn't feel good to you? And she said, no, I've been a little bit overwhelmed. We're worried that my mom has cancer. And so sitting in that moment, one, I felt really privileged that she would bother to tell me. I knew I had built the safe space when she said, and by the way, would you pray for her, please?
But we can only build those relationships because I didn't chase her around every time she missed a meeting, and shake a finger at her, and go, you know, this meeting is contractual, and, you know you have to, you have to, you have to. My question to her was, is there something you need, or did something happen that has created distance in this relationship? Because it's got to be a relationship. For me, that's the-- the big piece is that we've got to humanize every single human who's a part of this experience, no matter where they are in their developmental space. Adults have needs, and children have-- everybody on the campus, all the humans have needs.And we have to meet those needs, if we want to produce humans who bring their highest and best selves. And we cannot be mad at people who don't, if all we do is take from them, but we don't pour anything in.
MATHEW PORTELL: I hear this all the time. We miss the principles so very often in this same exact space. And as a principle who lost my mom, while I was a principal, to cancer, and it was a long, drawn out thing. Here's what I always reflected on during that time. The staff did for me what I would also do for them. The staff that I worked with supported me so incredibly. They knew I would be at school a week, I would be off a week. It was, as soon as I came back, what do you need? We got your back. Hey, we know you gotta go. We've got everything here. And I think that is as important. Because as an administrator, I too have experienced that same thing.
And I think sometimes we make it so much more challenging than it needs to be. When we just literally have collective efficacy, collective support, that is the game changer for a school culture. And I say that because just this year, I stepped into a school that has gone through a lot. Student achievement is down, morale is down. Culture was struggling. And so I came in not using what I know to do. Because I felt this weird urgency, and I missed the mark for the first several months, completely. And Dr. Lori Desautels, who is very, very well known in the trauma-informed work, she's a professor at Butler and does the educational neuroscience program there-- she did a presentation to the staff. I kept saying, all in for kids, and she stopped me in front of my staff and said, no, you got it wrong.
And I said, tell me more. Now, this is in front of everyone. She said, you have to be all in for all. Everyone. And I paused for a minute, and I did vulnerably reflect in front of the staff and said, I'm sorry, I've missed the mark. Right? So when you talk about being an example, and doing what we know, it also is that vulnerability, when we make a mistake or a misstep as a leader, just owning it and saying, you're right. And I'm going to tell you, that was a pivotal time of this school year. Things have shifted drastically since then.
There is a different feel in the school culture. People are coming to me more openly. And I've really meant it. I've really taken that feedback and I've taken that to heart. But sometimes, when you get deep into it, you can lose your way, right? That's part of this trauma-informed journey, is just pausing sometimes and going, oh, got a re-level set. Because I always say, don't do anything to students you wouldn't want me to do to you. I also have to say that to myself, don't do anything to staff that you wouldn't want somebody to do with you. And sometimes, it's that simple golden rule. What we model, and how we interact with our teachers, whether that's co-regulation, whether that's showing self-regulation, whether that's being authentic and being vulnerable, that's what we're modeling, and that's the culture that we can develop, as leaders, by doing what we want to see done. And so I think it gets as fundamental as that. And right now, more than ever, we need more of what we're talking about. Because it's hard. And I think we have to be seeing ourselves individually, as human and collectively as just being human right now.
TYISHA NOISE: Absolutely. And no disrespect to rocket scientists, because I got a lot of respect for those who work in what have been referred to as the hard sciences. But I said to somebody, literally earlier today and yesterday, I said, so when you can take two humans with the exact same DNA, raise them in the same household, with the same parents, into the same schools, give them all the same things, including meals, and get two completely different humans, that is hard science. There is no formula for developing the strongest, best version of any human. Because all of us need something different, right? And it's the beauty, it's the-- as much the art as it is the science of the work that we do. And so I think education has not gotten its credit for being a hard science, because it's not the science of pedagogy, it's the science of humanity and humanizing.
JILL ANDERSON: And so it sounds like this isn't a case of, hey, I'm working in a school, and this is a checklist of things that I can do to move through this. This is like a living, breathing, constantly evolving thing. And it really needs to start with the school leader, and trickle into the educators, and then trickle down to the students. You were talking a lot about the importance of just seeing your teachers as humans. What happens from there, though?
MATHEW PORTELL: Yeah, I think the big shift comes from, we have to understand this internally in ourselves. If I can wave a magic wand and change one thing for pre-service teachers, it would, be you would have to go through your own lived experiences, and be able to unpack some of the things that you have experienced, and then start the process of healing. I've seen it year, after year, after year, that unhealed educators have the hardest time when you're going through these transitions, if they're unwilling to do that, I'm not telling humans they have to do that, right? You're here, you have to do that, because that is a lived experience process. But those who have, I've seen such a major transition. But it is explicit at getting down to the kids. So we have to move away from carroting and punishing kids, getting in the, here, if you do this, you're going to get this, or if you don't, you're going to get this, right? We've got to move away from that. Because we know that isn't how, as emotional humans, we develop. It's not good strategy and skill. We've got to be able to be honest with kids and teach them the power of breathing. I mean, one of the strategies we explicitly taught in our school was breathing. And I would literally put a pulse oximeter on a child's finger. We would co-regulate and breathe together, and they could watch their heart rate decrease. And there you go. Here's your superpower.
So we have to get as explicit as all this scientific stuff, the neuroscience and the physiological science of stress and trauma. But then we've got to get to the practicality of, what does that look like in a school? How are we going to handle a student who, quote, unquote, has a behavior problem? It's not a behavior problem. It's either a lived experience that's not been processed, or it's a form of communication. We've got to get all the way down to that. And that's where the systems change. I do want to push a little bit and say, you don't have to have a school administrator that buys in. Because here's the thing, they can't mandate that you can't be kind to kids and teach them self-regulation and that you can co-regulate.
Nobody can tell you, yeah, you can't breathe with children, right? You can't be kind to kids, although I've heard that in some schools, oh, you gotta be mean for the first two weeks and show them that you're the boss. These are things that we've heard as teachers, that we now know, that's actually not true. And so it does get to the point where you have to not just believe this, you not have to process it, but we've you've got to really be strategic in, what does it look like? How are we going to teach the kids about the brain? They can figure it out. Trust me, kids get it very quickly when you talk about the three parts of the brain, right? They'll get it when you say, what-- where are you at in your-- are you red, blue or green? Whatever you-- you know, there's all kinds of things systems to use. And they'll be able to tell you, I'm really red right now. I'm really frustrated, irritated, angry, teach that vocabulary. OK, so what are we going to do? I probably did this, no joke, 25 times today, with 25 different kids. And they get it.
JILL ANDERSON: You kind of answered my next question, but-- which was my fear, that there were educators listening who maybe knew they wouldn't have the support of leadership to do this kind of thing.
TYISHA NOISE: I think we can. I was a special education teacher, which, in most campuses, sort of makes you an oddball anyway. You're not quite content, not quite PE, that people don't know what to do with you anyway. But that was where my learning began. I started in mental health, and then transitioned into K-12 education. And so the way I operated in the classroom was extremely different from other people who I was on a campus with. And what I've learned about educators, for the most part, is what they don't argue with is your results. When things happen in classrooms, when you can get kids to do with you, and for you, things they can't get that same child to do in a different space, people immediately have questions. And so I'm a firm believer of, lead from whatever seat that you are in. I've had influence on every school campus I have ever worked on, regardless to my title, because my results spoke for themselves. When people came into rooms and was like, so-and-so doesn't talk, how do you have this child speaking to you? This child doesn't write, but they did this for you. Yes, they did this with me. We did this together.
I learned what they were-- there's work that I put in, in order to produce those things. And so I think particularly when we talk about de-stressing and helping kids regulate themselves, that when adults are able to step into the space and watch it happen-- the other thing is that when kids have positive experiences, they tell other people. Oh, and Miss So-and-so's class, we did x or y. And so whether you're a teacher, or a para, or the school administrator, you can practice in a way that makes other people say, how did you get them to do that? Because my background is in special education, and I started a lot of my career in mental health with students who were classified as emotionally disturbed. I learned to deescalate. I was a trainer in a mental health facility on how we deescalate humans, and so people have asked me, over my years, that child was yelling, and screaming, and throwing things, and you walked up and whispered in their ear, and they walked away with you. How do you do that? One of the challenges in education is that we don't have nearly as much time to train and practice things together as we need, and so our understanding, often, is cursory.
And so the experience of seeing something happen in front of you that you didn't think was possible piques interest in educators. That's my experience. When you can help a child co-regulate, that everybody thought was out of control, and they thought they were going to have to call the police, they will ask questions. When you can help a child calm down, and then return to work, where they were shut down in the entire class period before that, and the educator they were shut down with gets to see it, they have questions. But I'm a firm believer. You can lead from whatever seat you're in. So however you practice that with children, and other adults are able to-- and other children are able to see it and talk about it, and you help give them language for the experiences that they're having with you-- And then, you know, in the best cases, children will take those skills into the next classroom and use them with another child, in front of other adults. It really can be infectious. Systems are wonderful, and when you have great leaders, like Matt, like some other leaders that I know, who are willing to put the time aside, and train everyone, and bring everyone along together, it's wonderful. But what I know, as an educator, over the last 25 years, is that if you commit, and you do that work, and you build the change with students on a campus as an individual, it will run over into other experiences with other educators and other students, and it can take on a life of its own. Before you know it, you have a movement on your hands you weren't necessarily trying to start. You were just trying to be really good at what you do.
MATHEW PORTELL: What I've learned is, just ask questions. Hey, when I was in your room, I noticed you kind of got frustrated. Tell me more about what was going on there. And then these conversations start happening. And I'm like, now I'm getting it, right? It's not as simple as that. What you said earlier, Dr. Noise, there's a life experience happening for them out of school that's impacting them. When we're curious and not judgmental with students, with adults, with our friends, with our family members, with our spouses, it's a game changer.
And I think, in schools, when we can do something like that, it makes such a huge difference on how we lead, on how we operate, and how we interact with everyone. Parents are the same way. Like most principals, I've been cussed out. I don't ever take it personal, but I operate in curiosity. And I'm like, sometimes parents have right to be very upset. And I understand why you came in here hot. Tell me more. And I'll be honest, I found that because parents had terrible experiences in school, so they bring that lived experience with them, and they're expecting that's what their child is going to have.
TYISHA NOISE: I think as educators, we are trained to know, to have the answer all the time, always, to assess immediately, and to come to a conclusion quickly. And curiosity requires inquiry. It requires waiting to assess, waiting to decide. Right? It requires creating and asking questions about what we see and trying to see it differently. And I think we have to, one, create the psychological safety for adults to do that. Because all of us want to be right, in education. I think we are the most want-to-be-right humans that exist, right? We always want to be right. We feel like we need to, and we feel like we're failing as educators if we don't immediately have the answer. But the idea that the complexity of humanity doesn't have any easy answers, and that's OK. That it's OK, and that we'll walk with you, in curiosity, to find the answers that are necessary, to bring the highest and best out of everyone.
JILL ANDERSON: Well, you both have shared so much to think about, and ponder, and just bring into my own life. I appreciate all that you've just shared. Thank you.
Tyisha Noise is a veteran educator and consultant. Mathew Portell is a school principal. They are co-authors of “Reducing Stress in Schools, Restoring Connection and Community.” I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast, produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening.
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