The Los Angeles Teacher Who Turned Trauma-Informed Teaching Into a Citywide Creative Learning Movement

Rosa Medina, a teacher in East Los Angeles, is already rearranging the classroom on a Tuesday morning before the school bell rings. The place’s emotional atmosphere is more important than the desks themselves. She places a small basket of fidget toys next to the window, turns down the overhead lights a little, and writes three words on the whiteboard: Breathe. Make. Start. It appears easy. It isn’t.

For eleven years, Medina has been an elementary school teacher in Los Angeles. She talks about feeling as though she was controlling chaos that she didn’t comprehend for the first four. No matter how carefully she prepared a lesson, there were students who seemed unreachable, kids who erupted without warning, and kids who just stared at the wall. “I kept thinking something was wrong with them,” she said. “It took me years to figure out the question I was asking was completely backwards.”

This change in perspective—from “what is wrong with this child” to “what happened to this child”—is the foundation of what educators now refer to as trauma-informed teaching. The notion that students may be bringing invisible wounds into the classroom is not theoretical in Los Angeles, where violent crime rates have historically exceeded national averages. It is a fact of everyday life. According to a National Institutes of Health study, teachers who underwent structured trauma training reported being much better at helping struggling students—not because the kids changed right away, but rather because the teachers stopped misinterpreting them.

In the end, Medina finished a six-week trauma awareness course provided by LAUSD, a program that has been subtly growing throughout the district in recent years. Her teaching methods were not the only things she changed as a result of what she discovered there. It reorganized her understanding of how people behave under pressure. Children who are exposed to long-term violence or instability frequently develop neurological fight-or-flight responses that make it extremely difficult for them to think logically. They’re not acting rebelliously. They are being shielded by their brains.

Medina’s story is unique because of more than just her metamorphosis. That was her next action. She began incorporating movement and artistic expression into her regular classroom routine, including storytelling, rhythmic exercises, controlled breathing, and drawing. Instead of being a distinct wellness period, it is integrated into science, math, and reading. A collaborative mural that depicted fractions helped kids who couldn’t stay still during a worksheet maintain focus. It sounds out of the ordinary. The results of the test indicated otherwise.

Like real things, word spread slowly. A nearby educator posed inquiries. Next, a principal. After school, a small, unofficial working group was formed, with teachers coming together on their own initiative to discuss what was working. That detail is noteworthy because no one ordered it. These were worn-out individuals who decided to stay later because something seemed to be working at last.

A city gradually coming to terms with what its children have truly endured is reflected in the larger movement that Medina helped spark. Beautiful and brutal, ambitious and profoundly unequal, Los Angeles has always been a complex place. Generations of that tension have been absorbed in its classrooms. Some people still view the notion that creative learning could serve as a kind of healing and that a child drawing a picture is also processing something that couldn’t be processed in any other way as experimental.

Medina might object to being called a “movement leader.” On a Wednesday afternoon, she stands close to her whiteboard and characterizes herself as a teacher who grew weary of failing students who she could see were making an effort. It may be more important to focus on that honesty than any policy or program.