What If the Whole School Went to Therapy?

In the world of post-pandemic urban education, 2025 is giving a lot.

It’s Giving Unhealed Institution

It’s Giving: We Were Never Trained for This

It’s Giving Front Row at a Breakdown

It’s Giving Burnout, but the Performance Must Go On

It’s Giving:....A Whole School in Therapy

And this last one may be the best idea.

After I posted a blog entry about Taryn Elam—a pseudonym I used to describe a former teacher who resigned after burnout—one teacher shared the piece on her own Facebook page and tagged others. Some of the teachers tagged expressed feeling seen and even relieved to hear someone articulate what they had struggled to name. But in the comments section one person shared a particular reply that drew my attention.

It came from a teacher who had left the profession for nearly a decade, only to return and find a changed landscape. She shared:

“How could they prepare us though? It literally is like a battlefield so to speak with all that we face day in and day out. I feel like so much has changed in the last 20 years too. Teaching then being out for 8 years and back in, the difference was quite alarming in student engagement and attitude.”

The original poster, also an educator, responded in agreement—but also pointed to what she wished she had learned sooner: trauma-informed educational practices fused with basic child development and de-escalation techniques. She also mentioned simple (and genius) humanizing questions that have helped her muddle through classroom tensions: “What do you hope to accomplish right now?” and “If you keep doing ____, what happens next?”

That beautiful and deeply revealing exchange is what this blog post is about. This post is my way of answering the first teacher's question, not with blame or band-aids, but with a reframing that begins where many of us are: overwhelmed, discouraged, underprepared, and less cautiously and more loudly asking ourselves if we’re the problem. (We’re not.)

So let me first get this out of the way: This is not a failure of children. This is not a failure of you. It’s a failure of how little we’ve prepared schools—and the adults inside them—for the cultural, social, emotional, and political shifts of the world we live in now. This isn’t simply because people didn’t care or weren’t trying; it’s because the pace of change has outstripped our systems’ ability to respond.

The Trump era introduced a wave of political hostility toward public education, undermining trust in educators and reshaping how schools are governed and perceived. Meanwhile, the disruptions caused by COVID were initially treated as temporary, but we’re only now beginning to understand their more permanent impact. Young people returned to school altered—socially, developmentally, and emotionally—and so did the world around them. Many adults are more dysregulated than what should be expected from those entrusted with guiding the next generation. We are more visibly bitter and jaded—and our children have been watching. They’ve seen us take to the streets in literal protest and counter-protest. They’ve overheard the ways we talk about neighbors with differing views or identities. They’ve absorbed our disillusionment and our exhaustion. And in many ways, they’re responding exactly how you’d expect from kids raised seeing even the grown-ups seem unsure how to be. Alongside these shifts, we’ve seen a dramatic rise in youth mental health challenges, with anxiety, depression, and even trauma becoming more visible and more widespread than ever before.

But the research and training infrastructure that teachers and schools needed to meet that shift simply haven’t had time to catch up. We are witnessing a lag in adaptation to both hostile attacks and unfortunate coincidences that are changing education faster than any of us were prepared for.

So it should not sound strange that one of my answers is therapy. Not therapy in the narrow, couch-bound, individual sense. I mean therapy as an invitation to understand what we’re carrying and whether it still serves us.

Let me offer an analogy: Imagine a workplace where everyone is limping, but no one talks about it. Instead, the job descriptions just get longer, the expectations grow higher, and any display of pain is seen as a sign of weakness or unfitness. Eventually, you forget you're limping. You just think, this is what walking feels like now. That’s where many teachers are. That’s where many schools are.

So when I say “therapy,” I’m talking about a collective process of recalibration. A kind of school-wide reflection where we ask:

• What are we doing that worked in the past but doesn’t anymore?

• What survival strategies are we clinging to that are actually keeping us disconnected?

• What behaviors in our students are we labeling as defiance, when they might be desperation?

• What behaviors in ourselves are we excusing as “tough love,” when they might be unexamined trauma responses?

This kind of therapy isn’t individual. It’s institutional. It’s not about fixing “bad teachers” or “broken students.” It’s about treating the school as a living, breathing, wounded organism that can—and must—heal together.

Doing the self-work—like examining our own biases, unhealed traumas, self-sabotaging behaviors, and emotional triggers—helps us show up with more clarity and intention in the classroom. When we pair that personal awareness with practical tools for recognizing and responding to trauma in students, we begin to shift from reacting to behaviors to understanding their roots. This combination is what makes a trauma-informed approach powerful: it creates space for mutual healing, where both students and educators can feel more supported and regulated within a school culture that values growth over punishment.

In a way, it’s a return to more collectivist roots: elders guiding youth, communities raising children, healing not alone but in circle.

But of course, schools don’t always speak the language of healing. They speak the language of professional development. So, let's think about development....which is really how we perform our roles and functions.

Erving Goffman, a sociologist, famously wrote about life as theater—about how we all perform different “selves” depending on the social stage we’re on. In his dramaturgical theory, there’s a front stage (where we perform for others) and a backstage (where we can be more raw, real, rehearsed, or exhausted). For teachers, the classroom has always been a front stage—an emotionally charged performance where expectations are high, cues are tight, and errors are public. Teachers that I have studied have described it like that: how they literally take a few minutes in the car, fix their face, and go into the school ready to perform.

But here’s the thing: the entire production has changed.

Post-COVID. Post-George Floyd. Post-remote learning. Post-disinformation and culture wars. The stage lights are harsher now and the audience is restless—if they’re even paying attention. The props don’t work like they used to. The set keeps shifting mid-performance. And the script is full of anachronisms and outdated directions.

Some teachers are still gripping their old lines, waiting for cues that no longer come. Others have gone backstage to catch their breath and aren’t sure when—or if—they’re ready to return.

That’s where professional development must step in—not as a lecture or compliance checklist, but as an ensemble rehearsal. A space to re-block the scene. To improvise new dialogue. To reimagine the character you were once cast as. To grieve the old show while daring to audition for what’s next. Yes, in my forthcoming book, I get to the nuts and bolts of this. But first we just have to be open to the need for it.

So to the teacher who asked, “How could they prepare us though?” — they couldn’t, at least not immediately. But we can. Together - Boldly -Tenderly.

Through trauma-informed understanding, creative retraining, and reflective self-work that isn’t about performing for survival—but showing up for transformation. Training not just outcomes, but about orientation.

Let’s not mistake disconnection for disorder or change for chaos. Let’s not mistake today’s classroom for yesterday’s battlefield. Let’s stop clinging to the last act. Let’s write a new one.

The classroom isn’t a war zone. It’s a stage. And it’s time to teach teachers how to act again—not performatively, but authentically—for this audience and this era. 

Let’s rehearse differently. Let’s teach like we mean it.

Let’s rewrite the script.

I get it, 2025 is giving a lot. But I think it is also giving hope. There are things that CAN and SHOULD be done. We just all have to first agree that the change is needed. But I leave it to you all. Please engage: Do you to still believe in urban ed and the ability of our teachers to succeed? Please weigh in.