Susan E. Craig, Ph.D. is a lifelong student of early trauma and its effects on children’s learning. Her teaching experience, as well as years of on- site training and technical assistance to school districts throughout the country, provides the context for her advocacy for trauma-sensitive educational reform.

Dr. Craig began her writing career in 1992 with an article in Phi Delta Kappan describing the educational needs of children living with violence. This work received special notice in the now famous “purple book” Helping Traumatized Children Learn published by Massachusetts Advocates for Children: Trauma and Policy Initiative, 2005. Her texts Reaching and Teaching Children Who Hurt: Strategies for Your Classroom (2008) and Trauma-Sensitive Schools: Learning Communities Transforming Children’s Lives (2015) are best sellers among teachers and administrators who use them to guide their efforts to make schools more accessible to children with challenging behaviors. Her latest book, Trauma-sensitive Schools in the Adolescent Years: Promoting Resiliency and Healing Grades 6-12 was published in August, 2017.

In 2013, Dr. Craig was among those interviewed in the Safe Start National Resource Center series profiling women who have made an impact on the issue of children’s exposure to violence.

Dr. Craig is an avid blogger and sought after public speaker. In 2014 and 2017 she participated in the Attachment and Trauma Network’s Educating Traumatized Children Summits. Her blog www.meltdownstomastery.wordpress.com is read by educators from around the world.

Judith is currently a senior lecturer with the Queensland University of Technology after an extensive career with state schooling in Queensland.  She has worked as a teacher, guidance counsellor, and behaviour support specialist.  She has held both regional and state positions with the Queensland Department of Education and Training overseeing policy development and implementation, staff development, school, student and family support programs (all in the area of student behaviour management and support).  Judith oversees pre-service teacher education at QUT, regarding student behaviour support and classroom management and (more recently) trauma-informed schooling.  Judith’s main research interests include the impact of complex trauma on the developing child, primary and secondary school behaviours, and the well-being and resiliency of educators.  She is currently involved in a research project investigating the requirements for a state-wide framework for trauma-informed schooling. Through her research, training seminars and consultancy with educators, she continues to encourage schools to adopt a neuroscience informed approach to the behaviour management of trauma surviving students.  She is the author of the popular teacher resource/book: “Distressed or Deliberately Defiant: Managing Challenging Student Behaviour due to Trauma and Disorganised Attachment”.

Tom Brunzell (MS, EdM, PhD candidate) has experience as a teacher, school leader, researcher and education advisor in New York City and Melbourne. Currently he is the Senior Advisor, Education and the Leader of the Berry Street Education Model at the Berry Street Childhood Institute, Victoria. Tom presents internationally on topics of transforming school cultures, high expectations for differentiated instruction, trauma-informed practice, wellbeing and the application of positive psychology, and effective school leadership. He is also a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, Melbourne Graduate School of Education studying trauma-informed pedagogy, positive psychology, and their impacts on workplace meaning.