Collaborative Professional Development Supporting Trauma-Informed Practices: Linking Preservice Teacher Candidates with Behavioral Interventionists

This chapter details a pilot collaborative professional development (PD) experience to enhance understanding of trauma-informed pedagogy (TIP). We engaged eight professional behavioral interventionists (BIs) in an urban school district with three teacher candidates (TCs) at a comprehensive state university. Through this PD experience, the TCs gained first-hand exposure to the work of the BIs as they implemented TIP in their work with teachers. These collaborative relationships deepened TCs understanding of the symbiotic relationships between professional roles of teachers and BIs in schools. TCs and BIs gained knowledge about the challenges and areas of expertise of each other’s work in schools. Further, it is anticipated this introduction to school and local resources will increase the capacity for these TCs to identify support resources and work collaboratively with a team, starting from their first hire in a school system. Lastly, we hope through this project that participants can employ the knowledge and understanding of TIP to support student success in the schools. As a pilot study, this project is limited in scope but the results warrant replicating it on a larger scale.