Promoting Resilience Through Trauma-Focused Practices: A Critical Review of School-Based Implementation

The current review sought to describe the implementation and evaluation of trauma-focused school practices
as represented in the published literature. Through a systematic literature search, we identified 39 articles describing
trauma-focused practices implemented in school settings with elementary populations and coded data regarding
these interventions’ characteristics as well as their implementation and evaluation procedures. Reviewed interventions
were most often implemented by external clinicians or researchers with select populations in response to traumatic
events experienced by a community (e.g., natural disaster, political violence). Additionally, interventions were most
frequently evaluated solely using rating scales assessing psychopathological symptoms and without consideration
of important dimensions such as treatment integrity, fidelity, and acceptability as well as outcome generalization and
maintenance. We call for coordinated practice and research agendas focused on embedding trauma-focused practices
within integrated multi-tiered systems of supports; designing culturally sensitive practices and training school personnel
to serve as intervention agents; and increasing the rigor and broadening the methods, informants, and foci of screening
and intervention evaluation procedures in the direction of leveraging multi-method, multi-informant, strengths-based
assessment.