In the Newsletter Teaching Practical Boundaries (31st July 2017) I outlined the process of establishing effective boundaries. The work described how you know your boundaries are being threatened and how to protect yourself. This simplified approach is useful to either protect yourself from harm or to teach students how they can protect themselves and to develop independence.
Of course, boundaries are not that simple in the complex world of a teacher and the following will help create more professional boundaries that allow you to stay ‘in control’ in the most challenging situations.
Let’s start with a more realistic description of how we create our boundaries. In a pure form your boundary is the interface between your-self and non-self. As we grow we constantly build a connection between incoming stimulus, how that affects us and what happens if or when we act in response to that stimulus. Eventually, after a number of trial and errors a set of rules will develop; those rules will be our reality. The more consistently the impact of the stimulus and/or the consequence of our behaviour is interconnected the stronger will be the accepted reality. The link is why we really start to believe we know what just happened or what will happen in any experienced situation.
The day to day correlation between our experiences of the physical world is considerably robust. We soon learn that if we jump off a wall we fall to the ground or if we go out into the rain without protection we get wet. But, people are biological beings and our experiences are dependent on the environment in which we develop. Therefore, the correlation between what happens in my reality and yours is not so consistent.
However, there is enough of a matched response to situations between individuals to allow a broad sense of a shared reality. This is particularly true if the development of our reality is within a homogenous group. When we grow-up in a neighbourhood with shared socio-economic and cultural norms, the links between actions and consequences are more likely to be alike. The chances are that you and the person with whom you experience an event will share the similar beliefs about that incident. This shared reality will allow you to predict what is most likely to happen in a given situation and that is essential in building a safe and secure environment.
What are the complications for teachers?
The first is that there is a probability that you will be working in a community where the cultural expectations you learned are not the same as the culture you are working in. The expectations of families, for their kids may clash with yours. What you expect to happen may not be what they expect to happen. To compound this problem, even within communities over time traditions change; the older you become the more out of touch you are with those pesky teenagers who grow-up in a ‘modern’ environment. So again a clash of customs will occur. It is this clash which will create a level of tension. To protect yourself from that tension the likely thing is to defend your view of reality which by implication means you reject the other view. You’re right and they are wrong!
The second professional consideration is that you are dealing with children who are just developing their sense of reality. Because of their limited experience very young children are still learning the stimulus-response/action-consequence connections. Also, many of these lessons belong on the developmental path they are age dependent and so their reactions you expect for a given situation may not be present. Say you are annoyed at something they have done, it may well be that they just didn’t know what to do. Your ‘annoyance’ may provide the correct feedback they need to create this reality!
Finally, the kids we are focused on, those with damaged childhoods will most likely have an interpretation of any situation where there is a disagreement. Their idea of what should happen, their reality may well be very much at odds with yours. One example of this clash of realities is that many of these kids are comfortable in a noisy, chaotic classroom while such a classroom will/should strain your sense of ‘safety and security’ this situation will violate your boundaries. But, when you get the class under control, achieve a state of calm this situation will threaten the abused child, it is not their reality.
One of the great impediments to having strong and effective boundaries is the faulty belief that your reality is another’s reality. This can never be the case (see Newsletter - Theory of Mind, 7th August 2018) your internal world, your reality is yours, it is unique and has developed in response to your perceptions and the environment in which you developed. Too many people take for granted that their reality is the only reality and when there is a clash in the response to a situation they believe the other person is deliberately taking an action that annoys you.
As a teacher, you have a professional duty to understand that the children you are dealing with may have a very different view of the world so it is worth repeating the third step in setting those practical boundaries.
Ask the Questions
‘What is really happening’? This is often not the obvious event.
‘Who is responsible’?
If ‘me’ then I must take responsibility, take action to address the cause of the stress.
If not ‘me’ then I ask a further two questions:
‘What is causing the attack’?
What do I have to do to change this situation in the long run’?
Boundaries are extremely important in every part of our life but it is no more important than when you are in charge of a classroom. This is where your skills define you as a professional teacher! Remember reality is just a set of rules learned to live in the environment you first develop and continue to live. These children need the reality that will help them change their reality and so you need to create a structured and supportive environment that will facilitate this.
This change takes time so you have to rely on your own boundaries to allow you to hang in with these most deserving kids. Understanding their reality, how it damages them, how to help this change should be your reality and this will give you the resilience to turn up each day.
One of the hallmarks of successful students is their resilience; that is, their ‘toughness’ they display when facing some stressful situation that may have long-term negative consequences. Resilient kids soon get over inevitable set-backs and get on with their life. Teachers know there is a clear link between a student’s resilience and their learning outcomes and school bureaucrats and educational academics have quickly adopted this link and promote the development of resilience in our schools.
They understand that students with healthy resilience have confidence in their ability to get through the hard times and have a positive outlook about their future. Resilient kids have:
A deep-seated trust in their community, that they will be safe and supported even when they make a mistake
They have confidence in their ability to solve problems and that they will be supported while they work through difficulties
They have a strong sense of self and know they are valued by those that care for them
They have the ability to control their levels of stress when faced with a difficulty.
It will come of no surprise that those students who have severe behaviours, those for whom we advocate and we deal with in these Newsletters are not resilient. In fact, they are just the opposite and It is no wonder.
Children with severe behaviours:
Do not trust the community and never expect support; their experience has taught them just the opposite!
They have no confidence that they will succeed, not in the short term and they have no concept of long-term consequences
They have a toxic view of their sense of self, that is they don’t make mistakes they believe they are mistakes
They are imprisoned by their inability to control the overwhelming effects of stress levels experienced when they are under threat.
They have given-up on their self.
The fact is when these children are faced with a crisis situation that threatens their sense of security they will either be consumed by that stress, that is they can erupt with high levels of anger, act out against the threat or they can internalize these acute emotions or implode into and dissociate from the problem. In either case they are beaten by the stress; they are firmly locked into this dysfunctional response.
The fact is the vast majority of these kids have developed this non-resilient sense of self because of the parenting they have received and the idea that the teacher can provide effective therapy to help them develop resilience is fanciful. It is important to recognise that teachers are not therapists, they have to deal with these kids within the confines of four walls and a significant number of ‘other kids’. So, what can we do in our resource poor classrooms for these kids?
As always for so many of these kids the only chance they have is their teacher so again, it is up to the teacher to try to develop their resilience. Sadly, unless they can, these students will never reach their learning potential.
So, what to do? Well resilience can be considered a personal set of characteristics we would want for all our students. We want them to:
Have a positive sense of their worth
Have them develop a sense of trust and be trusted by others in their class and life
Have the confidence that they have the ability and the right to solve their own problems in their own way while knowing the support is there if and when they fail
Have a sense that they can pursue their own goals and careers; they have something to live for.
The solution in the classroom lies is in the way the classroom is run; by the teacher presenting a very structured set of behaviour rules each child learns to develop a sense of power over the situations in which they find themselves. They gain an understanding that their outcomes are related to their actions both positive and negative. Keeping in mind, as the student’s confidence develops it is important to increase the level of challenge to a level that ‘gets the child’s attention’ but not too much that will overwhelm them.
This structured action – consequence organisation will allow the students to gain a cognitive understanding of how the world works. But, this is only half the equation.
The level of personal support the teacher offers is critical if we are to develop personal strength in these kids. Just how much we are there with them while they learn reinforces their sense of worth, first to you a significant other in their life and gradually to themselves. This level of support, in a normal situation is proportional to the age of the student. That is, young students require high levels of support and this drops as the students mature, developing their resilience as they age.
However, and importantly, for students with severe behaviours this relationship between support and development is not directly related to ‘age’ but to the level of their self-control. A totally dysfunctional thirteen-year-old will need the same level of personal support as a child in kindergarten. When you have one of these dysfunctional students in your class it is your professional duty to give them this level of support. The good news is they will develop at a quicker rate if you get the environment right.
Resilience is a desirable quality for all of us, we deserve it. Damaged kids have had that ability taken away from them through the abuse or neglect they grew-up in. Society owes it to them to develop those characteristics that were denied them so they can take their rightful place in their community!
One of the time-consuming things teachers face is trying to get to the truth of student disputes. Despite the protests of many parents who insist ‘their child would not lie’ it is a fact of life that kids will lie on occasion especially if they are trying to avoid trouble! This is an unpleasant job but it is an inevitability for those running a classroom or school.
I came across an article in Scientific American by Roni Jacobson ‘How to Extract a Confession … Ethically’ and it referenced the process used by President Obama’s High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG). In the wake of the unethical interrogation techniques used in the Abu Ghraib prison during the second Gulf War, there was a demand for guidelines that authorities could use when interviewing ‘suspects.’ The process described in the HIG report meets the ethical standards of the American Psychological Association.
There are times when you will need to get to the truth to:
· Teach the student that has made a mistake that there will be consequences eventually
· Protect the student (or teacher) who is the victim of the lie
· Demonstrate fairness in the school setting
Also, remember there are some students who will immediately ‘spill their guts' and they are not the problem. This technique is for students who are practiced in avoiding facing the consequences of their inappropriate behavior.
The following are the steps developed to get to the truth of the matter in a practical and still ethical way:
1. Build Rapport
Think about the ‘good cop – bad cop’ scenario and then eliminate the bad cop. Develop an empathetic approach to the student you are questioning. You want to build an atmosphere of cooperating as you approach the problem. Forming such a relationship is the critical step, not only to get to the truth but because you are genuinely concerned for the student, relationships can survive even after you get a confession. The action and the child are separated.
2. Fill in the Blank
Don’t just ask direct questions straight from the start but begin by telling what you know about the situation in a manner that suggests you already know what happened. As you go on the guilty student will start to add details or correct part of your story without realizing they are doing so. Don’t go ‘in for the kill’ when this starts to happen – you are building a case, be patient. Research conducted in 2014 indicated that people who are interrogated using this method tended to underestimate how much they were telling the interrogator.
3. Surprise Them
The students who know they are under suspicion often practice their answers ahead of time. In the age of mobile phones, I have seen texts between students where stories are ‘coordinated.' Under the pressure of the interview they try to keep the story intact while they struggle to remain calm and relaxed. If you ask them something unexpected, something out of the blue about the incident they often slip-up while they try to fit the new facts into their fabricated story.
4. Ask Them to Tell the Story Backwards
It might appear counter-intuitive, but students who are telling the truth will add more details as the retell their story. Those students who lie will stick rigidly to their tale being careful not to make changes. Inconsistency is part of how memory works. This technique exploits the difficulty liars have reconstructing their story from the back to the front. Again the HIG investigation found that liars produced twice as many details when telling their story in reverse order often contradicting their original story.
5. Withhold Evidence Until the Crucial Moment
A study showed that when people were confronted with evidence of their wrongdoing early in the interviewing process, they either clammed up or became hostile. After a period of time, when you have established the ‘right’ conditions, that is they think they are safe the release of evidence will often be accepted because they give up trying to sustain the lie.
Finally, this is just a technique to get to the truth; it is not a set of tools to BEAT the student. When it works beware, you might be tempted to take pride in how ‘clever’ you are. It is never a competition, finding the truth is just to help all the students!
Teachers are often faced with a class that is ‘out of control’ and we previously have discussed (Taming that Difficult Class April 2018) the advantage of taking an inventory of all the ‘things that are wrong’ and dividing them up into manageable chunks. The crafty understanding behind this approach is the handling of the students’ stress levels, their level of arousal that any change to existing behaviour involves.
The graph below illustrates the process involved. When the teacher changes the behavioural environment in such a way that the student’s behaviour attracts a negative consequence that student will be thrown into a state of disequilibrium and experience the stress that comes from that disorder. However, if the consequences are not overwhelming and delivered in a way that respects the child and focuses on the behaviour, that stress will soon subside and the student will return to a state of calm even though they have accepted a ‘new environment’ as being normal.
So if the teacher has followed the advice of examining all the problems and choosing one to attack it is important that the targeted behaviour is not extremely threatening. From this it is obvious that the taming of a dysfunctional classroom is a process over time that involves a change in the structured environment that occurs during that period of time. You never ask for big changes and you move the behaviour in a non-threatening manner. The harder you push the more stressed they will be and the more they will resist.
This model exploits the process used by negotiators who work to resolve conflict between two parties. In any dispute there are some areas that both can agree are not that important and are willing to sacrifice to facilitate a settlement. These are referred as areas of indifference. Once they give them up they no longer become in dispute. By slowly moving both parties through these areas they eventually identify the core problems and the energy can be focused on a possible solution.
As teacher we are not negotiating the right for all students to be taught in a calm, supportive environment and so we focus on moving the students to our desired position through a series of their points of indifference. Each stage refers to a ‘rule’ you have negotiated using the process discussed. This is important because you can refer to that rule when delivering the consequence while pointing out the student’s ownership of that consequence. This allows the relationship to remain in place over the long term.
This diagram illustrates the step process in making change in the classroom.
Finally be aware that your behaviour towards the students as they move through this process is important. When they inevitably complain about the new situation you should pay them the courtesy of actively listening to them making sure your non-verbal communication, body language, facial expression and tone of voice is not confrontational.
If you do follow this process of structured management there will come a time when the students will accept that you do have control and that is for their benefit. You have created a new environment and they have learned a new set of behaviours to achieve a state of equilibrium.
‘Good girl/boy’ or ‘you are such a clever little boy/girl’ etc. are everyday comments I hear when around teachers and parents when they are talking to their kids. It wasn’t always like that. I hate to put on my ‘in my day’ hat but before the 1960’s the custom was children are seen and not heard, children developed their position in the community by their actions and by watching adults. So what happened?
The reason given for this change is that at the beginning of the space race the United States felt humiliated by the success of the USSR. This failure created a lot of retrospection and review amongst a range of their systems including their education practices. Coincidentally a book “Psychology of Self Esteem’ by Nathaniel Branden, the founder of the self-esteem movement came out and this caused a ‘positive praise’ movement that is alive and well to this very day.
No longer were children just a part of the family unit, ‘good parenting’ made them the focal centre of the family. Educators were taught that praise was a valued tool to raise the educational outcomes. I remember in my early years in ‘special education’ my American peers were expected to provide four positive comments to the class, morsels of praise for each negative statement. I must say that in my classes for students with severe behaviours, even the most ‘inventive’ teacher would have trouble adhering to this requirement without resorting to ridiculous incidents.
Granted the development of a strong sense of an authentic self is critical for all children but the term self-esteem is confusing and clouds that concept. An authentic sense of self is a truthful understanding of your character and abilities. This allows for self-criticism and improvement. The term self-esteem suggests that what is important is to value what you are. The difference is subtle but important. The latter view, the importance of the self is defensive, the popular book ‘I'm OK – You're OK’ by Thomas Harris (1969) is based on the idea that whatever you do you are ‘alright’.
The former is more like taking the view that ‘I’m imperfect and that is not OK; I have work to do’. This approach allows you to understand that you are not perfect, you make mistakes but because you are a good person you will work to improve. This is a better approach to achieving authenticity.
Enough of this philosophy the question is what is wrong with praising our students? Well it depends on how, when and for what you praise them. Lets start with the two lesser issues around praise; the when and how to commend.
Young children below the age of about seven will take what an adult says on face value. If you say to them ‘great job’ or ‘what a clever girl’ they take that on face value, they believe you. Soon they mature and become more critical of others’ judgments; teenagers are very suspicious of praise. They understand the truth; that praise is a form of manipulation and for it to have any validity it must be earned. There is an inverse relationship between age and the effectiveness of praise.
For the older kids an effective approach is the ‘second hand’ method. You can do this by saying to a student or a class that Ms. Smith told me you did some great work in her art class. I would of course follow that with some friendly humour like ‘she must have got her class mixed up’ to avoid their potential embarrassment. This second-handedness allows the kids to be a step away and the fact Ms. Smith told someone else about you indicates she really must have been impressed. Another way to provide this second hand praise is to tell another staff member about how much you value the class in a situation where they can overhear you.
Finally, in the ‘how’ category, when you praise a student leave out the ‘I’ in your message; don’t say I am proud of you. For some kids, especially those who have attachment issues linking the value of their work to your acceptance can be threatening. You're their teacher, personal acceptance is a given. Instead link the praise to their work. “You did a great job’ or ‘Just look how good you set out your title page’. The praise should reflect what they did and this will lead to intrinsic motivation.
The real issue around praise is the ‘what’. There are two types of praise personal and process.
Personal Praise
This is when you praise the child for what they are. Things like, you’re very clever, you are a natural, you find this work very easy, etc. There is plenty of evidence that this has a negative affect. Children praised for ‘what they are’ will lack motivation and lose interest in the tasks and have their grades actually fall. Most dangerous is to tell them they are very clever.
Psychologist Carol Dweck gave a group of students a relatively easy ‘IQ Test.’ The test was done individually, that is, only the examiner and the student were present. For half the group, the examiner commented, ‘You must be clever.’ The other half was told, ‘You must have really worked hard.’
After a period of time the students were re-gathered for a second test. They were offered a choice of tests. One test was similar to the first test. The other was described as more difficult, but they were told they would learn a lot. Ninety percent of the students who were given the message about making an effort chose to do the more difficult test. The majority of the ‘clever’ kids took the easy option.
What this tells us is that if you praise kids for their intelligence, the following occurs:
They don’t make any effort; they expect things to come easily to them.
They are afraid to take risks, feeling it is better to be safe and look good.
If and when they fail it is final; their failure is evidence that they are not as smart as you told them. More importantly, there is a faulty belief that there is nothing they can do about intelligence. The quantity is given; they can’t get more, and there is nothing they can do to control this failure. They have no useful response to failure.
Process Praise
This is to praise them for their effort. Be specific about what you are praising them for; describe the detail of what was good about what they did. Dweck’s work is at the frontier of the ‘effort’ movement that now dominates the current theory of student motivation. We are to praise them for their effort! There are problems with the ‘effort’ movement for instance some start to believe that ‘failure’ is only because you didn’t make enough effort but more of that in another Newsletter.
The students who have been praised for their effort are more likely to see failure as a result of not making enough effort. This gives them something to work on to change the result. This approach allows the students to take control, and they are more likely to maximize their learning in areas that capture their interest.
I can’t imagine teaching without praising the students. We become teachers because we love kids and the joy of seeing them grow into successful, independent young adults. This is our job!
If you have young children or, as in my case grand children, recently you may well have been terrorised by the title song from Disney’s blockbuster film Frozen. It was the most requested karaoke song in 2014 and is a tune loved by children all over the world. What made Frozen the number one animated film of all time and why do kids love its pivotal song ‘Let It Go’ so much? Two psychologists decided to find out. Their verdict: the song recognises our desire to be happy and free.
But why are the words ‘let it go’ so important if we want to be happy and free? The fact is, if you look at the opposite of the positive emotions like happiness and freedom you arrive at feelings like anger, sorrow, hatred and fear. While ever you hold onto these types of emotions you are locked into a negative spiral that keeps you their prisoner.
For all of us a great portion of our happiness is tied up in our relations with others. We love being with those we care for, our friends and family and while these relationships are running smoothly, life will be OK.
So how is it with the students you teach. Unlike family and friends the relationship is not so easily formed and is often one sided especially for those kids with abusive backgrounds. These damaged kids find it very difficult to establish the kind of relationships that leave them happy and content. More importantly for teachers, often their behaviours are so repulsive they sabotage any attempt you may have of forming a positive relationship.
In a recent research paper from the Monash University it was found that teachers, particularly those who handle the discipline side of our work are eight times more likely to be abused, psychologically and six times more likely to be physically attacked then the general public. It is part of our professional duty to deliver consequences for dysfunctional behaviours and we have to learn to deal with the abuse that often follows.
It is not unusual for these most difficult kids to abuse their teacher, most often verbally but in too many cases they physically attack the teacher. We understand that these severe behaviours have their origin in their past and even though it is an extremely difficult thing to do, we must separate the behaviour from the child.
The alternative is to not ‘forgive’ the child and let the incident dominate the future relationships. This is holding a grudge and a grudge is the feeling of anger and resentment and drives the desire to ‘get even’.
We are human so think about the last time you were wronged, did you hold a grudge and if so was it a feeling of carrying extra weight? We often talk about ‘carrying’ a grudge like we’ve got a heavy load.
In an experiment the psychologist asked participants to remember when they’d experienced conflict. One group were asked to recall a situation that ended in forgiveness, while the other group were asked to remember a situation where they did not forgive the offender. All participants were then asked to jump five times as high as they could.
Participants in the ‘forgiving’ group jumped the highest, while the ‘grudge holding’ group jumped almost one-third lower (on average) than the forgivers. So there it is; carrying a grudge really does weigh you down. Forgiveness can lighten the burden so let revenge go.
It is most important that teachers let go of this extra burden in their life. Letting go is not easy, it may well be the most difficult thing you can do but it is imperative if you want to retain your mental health. There are some things that you can do. These include:
Debriefing – After any situation that you are ‘attacked’ you need to go over the circumstances around the issue. It is best to do this with a trusted and informed colleague who understands your work. The use of your family should only be as a last resort as it will cloud the boundaries of your home and your place of work.
Boundaries – We have spoken about boundaries elsewhere but briefly they protect you from abuse you don’t deserve, inform you of your contribution to any incident and let you plan how you will deal with the problem if it happens again. The fundamental questions are:
What is really happening?
Who’s responsible?
If it’s me then I have to take action
If it’s the student I have to take action – this doesn’t seem fair but you are the professional and you must understand your health is your responsibility. Don’t hold a grudge!
Decide what you want in the future and take action to make that happen.
The final step is to let go. Generally it just requires you to forgive the student and start each new day afresh but in some cases no matter what efforts you put in nothing changes and you continue to be abused. If things are like this ‘letting go’ may mean someone leaves the relationship!
At some time in your training you have been in a discussion about morality and how it can be threatened by reality. The exercise is more likely than not about the run-a-way trolley car where you have to make a decision, do you let five individuals die or will you act by pulling a switch that changes the lane but by doing this you deliberately kill one person to save the five?
The most common response reflects a utilitarian view of the world. The loss of one life is better than that of five but is that a moral stance, are you interfering with destiny? Does being faced with such a choice involve a moral obligation?
The recent movie ‘The Eye in the Sky’ is a Hollywood version of this dilemma; do we kill a few for the sake of the many? How you answer might well be prompted by how attached you are emotionally to the participants.
The stark confrontation of this conflict was brought home in the movie Sophie’s Choice where a mother was forced to choose one child to live or both would die. This is an impossible dilemma.
The exercise not only makes us think about the difficulty of living a moral existence it also shines a light on the participant’s compassion and empathy.
Scientists have made interesting findings while studying how the brain responds to these moral judgments. Neuroscientists have highlighted the role of the prefrontal cortex and area of the brain that deals with generating social emotions. It is the emotional function of the dilemma that makes us agonize over choice when the situation is personalized. This is the power of the choice Sophie had to make.
These findings have been confirmed through replication and further study including considering the influence of elevated stress and different types of brain damage. In fact, the people with damage in this region due to stroke or other causes experienced severely diminished empathy, compassion and sense of guilt.
So what is the relevance of this information in informing practice for dealing with kids who have been abused or severely neglected? A major consequence of the early childhood abuse/neglect is the real damage to the brain in particular the prefrontal lobes. These are reduced in size by up to 20% and the neural density is significantly reduced. These children are for all intents and purposes brain damaged.
When undertaking the task of dealing with these children many teachers try to evoke some sense of shame for behaviours they have done that hurts others. This may well be an appropriate approach when dealing with healthy kids but for these kids (along with those on the Asperger’s spectrum) it has little impact. Judgments made are driven by the utilitarian approach but because they have no emotional attachment to others the so-called utilitarian approach is self-centered. They are only concerned about how they fair.
The easy answer is this apparent selfish approach is malicious and they in turn deserve no compassion from you the teacher. But this would be wrong; this is one of the things that makes dealing with these very difficult kids so hard. It’s not their fault they were made this way by their abusers when they were infants. They need even more compassion.
So what to do? The first thing to do when dealing with these kids is to put in place a very structured environment that has a clear relationship between the child’s actions and the consequences that follow. Because they are so egocentric they will soon learn to act in a way that is best for them. Your structure needs to provide for this close link. And the consequences are not only negative but just as importantly positive outcomes for functional behaviour.
Behind all your work is the principle of parenting the child in a way that will allow them to develop a new set of psychological traits and so given time with structure along with positive relationships and expectation they can develop compassion and empathy and the satisfaction it will bring to their life. Your work in this field is so important!
Childhood abuse is a broad ranging term that covers attacks on the child’s sense of security; it should also cover the neglect of that child.
The balance all species is driven to maintain is their sense of safety, well-being and security, when we achieve this we are said to be in equilibrium, stress free. There are two pathways to achieving this homeostatic equilibrium; our sense of security. These are:
Our ability to protect ourselves from boundary violations; and
Our capacity to seek out resources from the environment.
It is when we are unable to protect ourselves we suffer abuse of some kind. Also when we are unable to acquire the elements we need from our environment we are in a state of neglect. Children who experience either abuse or neglect suffer elevated levels of stress and have a range of chemical actions washing across their central nervous system that will result in real brain damage.
Early work in this field has revealed damage to the frontal lobes and the hippocampus as was clearly demonstrated through investigation in the tragedy of the Romanian orphans. Further work has shown the cerebellum is also reduced in size. These wounds have a direct impact on the child’s ability to function in society, to regulate their emotions as well as their ability to learn and make memories.
Recent work done by John Gabrieli, of MIT and Silvia Bunge, of Berkley have shown that even growing up in a poor family can leave its mark on the development of the brain. Gabrieli and Bunge have demonstrated that the neocortex is thinner in laboratory animals that have been neglected as opposed to those who have not. Such an experiment with children would be out of the question and unethical but the use of a control group with animals allows for confirmation. However, studies of children who do live in poverty shows the same effect.
In reality scientists are showing these anatomical differences tied to poverty, neglect and abuse are having a great effect on the child’s ability to learn and develop functional behaviours. Importantly the earlier positive interventions can be made, the more able the extent of the damage can be reduced. One successful positive intervention included exposure to a rich and varied environment in which to develop.
In Australia the gap between the haves and have-nots is increasing and the numbers living in real poverty are growing; it is particularly evident in the aboriginal community. There seems to be neither little nor no appetite for political intervention to address this problem nor any real plan to provide the necessary rich environments so it will be left to schools and private providers to fill in the gap.
Dealing with children who suffer from abuse or neglect is a difficult task. Ideally these children should have access to individualized long-term psychological support but the negative correlation between support and poverty is undisputed. The availability of such support in the wealthy suburbs of the cities compared to the economic swamplands is in stark contrast.
What we do have available for these kids are schools and community programs. These need to be staffed by well trained personnel who understand the need for safe, secure and rich environments and the ability to manage these kids as they develop more functional behaviours. The task is to provide the training in both the impact of early childhood abuse and/or neglect and the provision of procedures to facilitate healing these children.
One of the dangers of working with very needy students is the danger of them projecting their feelings about important relationships on to the teacher. This projection of a ‘quality’ on to another is a crude definition of ‘transference’. The student projects their existing, or desired beliefs and feelings relative to a previous relationship on to the teacher.
Some students who have generally been starved of the healthy, supportive childhood will see the teacher as a support and an object of attraction. This substitution can be a positive thing in the short term. It allows a relationship to develop. However, if the teacher ‘reminds’ the child of an abusive past they will project this negativity on to the teacher and the teacher is seen as ‘the enemy’ and an object of rejection.
We all know how important relationships are and the phenomena of transference makes clear how the quality of that relationship impacts on the children.
Another danger is that some teachers project their own, unresolved issues on to the students. A teacher who suffered neglect in their own childhood is vulnerable to look at a similar student through their own emotional attitudes. This is known as counter transference.
Transference is a difficult issue for teachers. For the struggling child the fact that they project such qualities on a functional adult may well support that child at the beginning of their recovery. However, the teacher must be really awake to the dangers of blurring the boundaries with these children. They must maintain a professional ‘distance’ from the child.
The following outlines the way counter transference can arise:
Either consciously or unconsciously the teacher will be affected if the student projects attraction or rejection on to the teacher. It will cloud their judgment.
The teacher’s personal history will blur their understanding of the student’s behaviour. The student may represent an unresolved issue such as an inability to deal with aggression and the emotional memory of their personal hurt will affect their reasoning.
They will have a predisposition towards a range of students based on whether they are attracted to them or repelled by their presence. This will result in an inability to maintain a sense of objectivity both positively or negatively. Furthermore, they will be deterred from engaging with those students whose traits expose their own histories.
The following situations are a strong signal that the teacher is transferring their own unresolved issues onto their students. These indicators are:
Having a need for the student to be dependent on them, they fulfill the teacher’s needs.
They need to be liked by the students. This threatens their ability to deliver inappropriate consequences for misbehavior.
Wanting to feel like the expert in front of the students. They can devalue their colleagues and the students.
They need to exert inappropriate control over the student. This will hamper the student’s independence development.
Show too much interest in the student’s personal life. This is crossing professional boundaries.
Being aggressive and confrontational with students or reacting negatively to students who are assertive or aggressive.
Being uncomfortable with certain types of emotions such as anger or tenderness. They suppress these if students display them.
Over-identifying with students who have problems that reflect their own. They ‘know how they feel’ and become too close.
Support some student’s defiance against authority. This is particularly a problem for younger teachers.
Idealizing students and investing their own perhaps unfulfilled goals in the student.
Patterns to Watch Out For
Dreading or eagerly anticipating a certain class
Favoring one class over the other, better preparation, quicker marking of papers, etc.
Thinking excessively about students outside work hours. These can involve sexual attraction.
Not being consistent dealing with students in behaviour management.
Being too bored to put in an effort in teaching a student or class or being angry for no specific reason.
Overly impressed with students or classes. This may reflect unfulfilled ambitions. Things like a frustrated musician being unduly impressed by a student with musical talent.
Being hurt by student’s criticism. This brings up past issues of being subjected to anger.
Rescuing students by doing their work for them or ignoring their lack of compliance in assessment tasks.
Healthy teachers understand their own flaws and adjust their understanding about the management of situations they face. Their actions/reactions are appropriate to the immediate problem they face and not just a product of the history of their internalized world.
The key to dealing with the potential of transference affecting your work is to have very clear professional boundaries and clarify these boundaries with the students.
We continually reinforce the importance of the relationship built with the students, particularly those with dysfunctional behaviours. These relationships are very much based on an emotional connection and rely on how we feel/think about the child, how they must be feeling and thinking as we interact. This ability to ‘put your self into their shoes’ is explained by what is known as Theory of Mind. Individual development of Theory of Mind begins when a child first develops a sense of separation from their primary care giver, a sense that they are a distinct identity.
Up until about age three children feel they are part of a combined consciousness, they think that whatever they know everyone else knows, that all minds are in a sense connected. They slowly come to terms with the fact that only they know what they are feeling, thinking, what are their desires, etc.; others can’t possibly ‘know’. Ultimately they realize their thoughts are their own and there is an advantage if they can deduce what the other is thinking.
This ability to recognize the mental state of the other and therefore predict what will happen next becomes more sophisticated over time. Just watch how older children manipulate their juniors and how parents and teachers do the same. This ability to anticipate what the other is thinking is a skill in which successful adults, including teachers excel. But thinking you know what another is thinking remains a ‘guess’ and for teachers of children with a toxic sense of shame, an incorrect ‘guess’ can have devastating outcomes.
There has been a lot of research into this ‘mind reading’ with varying results. Initially mirror neurons (see an essay on this topic in the resources page) were seen as underpinning this ability. Mirror neurons are activated in your mind when you see another person performing an action. How they are activated depends on the anticipated purpose of that action. Therefore our own brains anticipate, predict what the other is going to do next. In recent times the importance of these neurons in predicting other’s behaviour has been questioned but remains a possible explanation.
Rebecca Saxe, in her popular TED Talk claims to have located the part of the brain, the right temporopartietal junction, and area just behind the right ear that specializes in thinking about both our sense of self and thinking about others’ thoughts. She has demonstrated this through manipulation of the magnetic field in this area and through the traditional study of people with injuries in this area and the impact these have on their functioning. Like mirror neurons this gives a clue but not a definitive explanation.
It seems both accounts explain the intent of the behaviour but we really can’t know what another is really thinking; it is impossible. There is as much chance of ‘knowing’ how another thinks or feels as there is in answering Thomas Nagel’s famous question ‘what is it like to be a bat’? We can have no idea, bats navigate with sound, they can fly; this statement demonstrates just how impossible that would be. So why does this strong belief we know what others are thinking, this belief that underpins our ability to empathise, to have compassion, to care about others holds us together as a community? The answer is in predicting behaviour in particular situations.
The one ability we do have is that of pattern recognition. This is the foundation of our sense of self and how we fit in our environment. We learn about life through repetitive actions and consequences; that is we learn the pattern of behaviours in particular circumstances. And this seems to be effective in helping us negotiate with others. After all, these others come with an almost identical genetic profile and have the same process of developing their ‘sense’ in a ‘human’ environment. We don’t develop a bat sense in a bat environment!
It is an examination of this last point that explains the risk of believing you can read others’ minds. Throughout the work of our consultancy we have focused on the dysfunctional behaviour of children who cause us difficulties in the classroom. In the overwhelming majority of cases these kids not only have been raised in ‘dysfunctional’ environments, the result of their early abuse and/or neglect has left them with substantial brain damage in the parts of the brain that control behaviour.
The impact ‘cerebral difference’ has on our sense or the sense of others, is described by Jane Joseph, who examined the brain of an elite climber, Alex Honnold. Honnald is famous for climbing the sheer faces of steep mountains and cliffs without any safety equipment; any mistake would be his last. What Joseph wanted to know was their any difference in the climber’s perception of fear. She did this by placing Hannald in a fMIR machine and examining his response to very emotive and disturbing photographs that in a normal population light up the amygdala, the seat of our emotions especially fear in our brain. When examined Hannald displayed no increase in activity in this area. It is obvious that the performance of his brain was markedly different to the normal person in a fear evoking situation and any prediction others made about how he would feel when threatened would almost certainly be wrong.
Amy Dowel from the Australian National University, who studied psychopaths, provides collaborating evidence for the particular difference in response to emotional conditions. The psychopaths had little trouble passing a test that is based on recognising the faces of happy, sad, angry, etc. individuals and their results in these areas were the same as the general population. But when the picture required the identification of someone who was ‘upset’ the psychopaths could not recognize this. The capacity to recognize distress in others was a particular blind spot in their ability to predict what was going on. This explains how psychopaths can be charming and engaging on most levels yet can treat others appallingly with no concept of their feelings.
Research into the area of ‘mind reading’ is becoming better at predicting other’s potential behaviour thanks to bigger data sets and more powerful computing techniques. In the area of suicide prevention the results are well above that of chance and in fact Facebook have installed a function that will alert users if they are presenting a pattern of ‘behaviours’ that indicate a risk of self-harm or suicide.
But the dependence on reading the other’s mind remains a problem for all of us but particularly for those working with damaged kids. We know these kids have damaged brains and as for their amygdala’s they have the opposite response to threat as that of Hannalds. These kids have enlarged amygdala’s and are overly activated when confronted with threatening situations. Their responses will be different from the climber’s and more importantly, for the sake of prediction the general population.
On top of this, the historical patterns the teacher relies on to predict what these children are thinking will be completely different than the patterns on which these children base their predictions. You can’t know what they are thinking. That is, you see the world through your history and they see it through a different history, they are not the same and so guessing ‘what comes next’ will not be the same.
So what to do? Well in the first instance interact with these kids in a compassionate way basing your responses or reaction on the behaviour they present not the behaviour you predict. This may cause some problems initially, when you want to intervene early and avoid problems but the more you delay your responses the more you can discover their particular patterns and start to understand why they behave in a certain way. Teachers have to reject certain dysfunctional behaviours but by doing so you teach them about your world and they can learn new patterns of behaviour. Understanding that you can’t really understand where their behaviour is coming from helps you remain compassionate about the child in the face of outlandish behaviour and supports the important relationship.
Understanding the problems that come with really knowing what students are thinking underscores the importance of structure in the classroom. The more structured the actions and consequences are, the faster the students will understand how their behaviour is connected to what happens to them. That is, they will develop a new set of expectations about their life and how they can take control.
The principals of the company have had long careers in education with a combined total of eighty-one years service. After starting as mainstream teachers they both moved into careers in providing support for students with severe behaviours.
