Much has been written about the significant relationship between learning outcomes and trust. Trust across all levels of the schooling system whether that is between the community and the school, the system and individual schools and most importantly between the teacher and the student(s).
Dean Fink, from Ontario in his article ‘Trust in Our Schools: The missing part of school improvement?', gives an excellent summary of research that shows that across the developed nations PISA results correlate strongly with the social levels of trust. Statistically, high levels of trust result in better learning outcomes. He points out that when policy makers introduce easily measured testing regimes and insidious compliance tasks the level of trust contracts. He goes on to suggest that the Australian "federal government's recent school improvement efforts are heavy on low trust strategies." This observation explains the emerging dissatisfaction experienced by teachers across the system and the exodus of young teachers from our profession.
This significant relationship, between trust and learning is more critical when dealing with those students with severe behaviours. Their developmental history almost ensures a natural distrust of the authority at school.
Erik Erikson, the German-born American developmental psychologist points out that psychosocial development including basic trust occurs in the first two years of development. A child raised in a predictable and affectionate home with caregivers who are reliable and competent will have the confidence to trust the rest of their environment. That is, they are optimistic about their future and teachers and schools are afforded trust.
Conversely, and generally the children with severe behaviours are raised in homes where the opposite conditions apply. That is their environment is chaotic, attachment is at best marginal and there is no foreseeable individual success; why would these children have any trust?
The thing is, trust is the belief something will happen following a given set of circumstances. At school, these insecure students will at best predict an unpleasant outcome but more likely will have no idea what will happen. It becomes critical that their teacher must develop the child’s confidence in the future before any meaningful learning can take place.
There are steps in developing trust in students. These are:
Provide a predictable, caring environment where the boundaries between the teacher and the student are well defined. Providing a structured set of expectations allows the student to develop the sense that it is their behaviour that initiates adverse outcomes, not the belief they have an inherent incompetence. This separation of the student's sense of worth from the mistakes they make will slowly have them accept corrections from the teacher without destroying the relationship.
Students with a history of abuse and neglect are locked into the present moment as they tried to survive the situation in which they find themselves. Eventually, they will be able to project into the future by trusting the advice given by the teacher despite the lack of any evidence these things will happen.
They will come to believe that putting in an effort will pay-off despite there being no real understanding between their efforts and some future reward. So often we teach students subjects that, in all honesty they really would find it difficult to connect to some future but because they trust us they learn these lessons now without a guaranteed pay-off.
This last point is huge for these challenging students. When they have developed real trust, they are risking their vulnerability, having faith that we will not exploit this exposure. Never underestimate the core levels of fear these kids live with. In early childhood, their abuse and neglect was linked with dying and this experience has imprinted overwhelming feelings of fear that normal children would never associate even with low-level rejection or mild threats. For these children to expose themselves is an enormous level of faith in the teacher. Eventually, this trust could be generalized and they could begin to trust the world.
Developing trust in these children is a gift from you. Any teacher who takes the time to develop this level of trust is making an incalculable contribution not only to that child but also to their classmates, their school, and society. The real bonus is their success will repay you in a way that is your real, unmeasured contribution to education!
As mentioned in previous Newsletters your boundary is that place where you intersect with the outside world and in most discussions, we focus on how you can protect yourself from assaults. Although boundaries include physical threats, in this context we are really talking about social attacks. However, in this work we will include a discussion on our responsibility to not violate another’s boundaries.
This work is specifically for teachers and school executives dealing with children but the principles apply to anyone who supervises others.
One of the determining factors regarding relationships and how negotiations take place is the relative position of power. Where students are concerned the teacher enjoys a definite power advantage. They are the official representative of the school, the education department and government when it comes to dealing with kids. If they make a request the students can assume that request is backed by all those who support the teacher.
Schools are a place of learning and teachers rightly challenge kids to acquire an understanding of that academic material. At that time, the teacher has studied that material at a tertiary level while for the child it is their first exposure. It is easy to dismiss their attempts if you are more interested in inflating your ego then supporting that child’s emerging understanding of the work you present.
From the perspective of the students that position of authority allows you to be part of the ruling faction in the school. The fact that you are part of the ruling elite gives you a type of status that infers more power and authority.
All children are dependent. The journey from early childhood on to graduation from the schooling system is marked by a steady decline in that dependence. Therefore, the younger the student the hungrier they are for validation and affection. Affection reinforces their needs to belong in the group and validation confirms their value to that group. These are necessary building blocks for a strong and robust sense of self for the adult you.
The core of our work has always had as its main focus helping and dealing with difficult students. Like all children, students who have been subjected to abuse and neglect hunger for affection and validation. For these children, the age they are is not as important as the position they find themselves on the development of a strong sense of an authentic self. I have seen children in their mid-teens who crave for affection and validation, a time when for normal development this need would be diminishing.
This desire for approval make these children easy to disappoint and the failure to provide appropriate affection and confirmation of their worth is a covert form of abuse.
How do you check that you are not violating the student’s boundaries? The following questions of self-examination will help you decide:
1. What needs are being met by your action?
When you are concerned about what you are doing, the best thing to do is examine the drives you are satisfying by that behaviour. Just as you experience levels of stress when others are coming up against your boundary you will, or should get the same feeling sensation if all is not going well at the frontier of yourself. That’s the time to examine just what is going on.
2. What are your responsibilities?
In your role as teacher it is incumbent on you to deliver consequences for behaviours. This is at the heart of your professional role and so your interventions regarding the behaviour of others should only be within the domain of your responsibilities.
3. What are others’ responsibilities?
Just as you have a defined area of responsibility so do others, including the students. It would be wrong if a child misbehaved and you did not deliver the appropriate consequences, perhaps you thought someone higher up the school hierarchy should do that work or you didn’t think it was your job to correct the child. The fact that the child did not get a consequence does a great deal of harm to the development of strong boundaries in that child.
4. How would you like others to judge your behaviour?
The final question is really, would you behave that way if it was in full view of others. The disapproval of our peers is a most powerful motivator. Rejection, in a world sense is life threatening and so when under the public spotlight the drive to act in acceptable ways is extremely powerful. When you are in a position of power and away from the public view it is easy to forget your responsibilities, and take short-cuts to get kids to confirm. The real question is ‘am I doing the right thing?’
A good way to protect yourself is to refer to the following ‘check list’:
Act as if everything you do is under complete scrutiny
Act with complete fairness – have no favourites
Keep everything available for review – keep records of your behavioural interventions
Do not use personal emails with students, beware of social media – this is an extremely dangerous area for a teacher. Remember when you push that ‘send’ button, your message is potentially all over the world, for all time and you can’t get it back
Get consent for one on one meetings and hold them in school and in business hours – never take the chance of interviewing students in areas or times that others can misconstrued or the student can make allegations you can’t defend.
Treating others’ boundaries with respect is a difficult thing to get right all the time and despite these suggestions above there is no real, set in concrete rules. For example, should you ever touch a student? Of course, there are times when it is really appropriate and professionally proper to support them when they are hurting but that touch must be appropriate. Eventually it comes down to your professional judgement and if you have the best intentions you will learn to be that real ‘significant other’ students rely on as they make a safe transition into becoming their adult, authentic self!
A recent publication from the New York Academy of Science (2017) has examined the literature that reviews the connection between socioeconomic disadvantage and the development of attention, learning, and resilience. They considered the evidence of over a century particularly with tests that measured cognitive functions, language development, and attention and this has shown a difference between children of low and high socioeconomic status (SES). The children from families with high SES consistently scored better than those from underprivileged families.
Studies in neuroscience also identify the link between the stress related to poverty and the neurological development of these children's cognitive landscape particularly in the limbic system, that area that modulates reactions to threats, the formation of memories and access to the executive functions of the brain, the prefrontal, and frontal cortex.
The following characteristics of a low SES community that create these adverse conditions are:
1.Chaotic Environment
Growing up in poverty has commonly been associated with conditions that trigger elevated even chronic levels of stress. Low SES families are more likely to live in chaotic households where living arrangements are haphazard; the home discipline is unpredictable, there is a lack of routine and access to healthy diets.
Research has shown increased levels of stress-related chemicals associated with the physiological adaption of the body in response to threat including surges in the erosive chemicals catecholamine and cortisol. Continued exposure of these conditions increases the size of the amygdala, which makes the child vulnerable to stress and reductions in other significant parts of the brain including the hippocampus, the frontal lobes, the corpus colossus and the cerebellum.
2. Social Isolation and Deprivation
Children from low SES have fewer or even lack social interactions. They are less likely to attend preschool and miss that important opportunity to develop the skills to relate to their peers. This social isolation has been strongly associated with long-term health issues such as cardiovascular problems and sleep deprivation.
3. Maltreatment
Experiencing abuse in childhood can occur in all SES but research shows that abuse is much more likely to occur in the low SES areas. This variance indicates that the SES of the neighborhood can explain 10% of the child’s health and adolescent outcomes.
The Gonski Review revealed that schools in low SES areas reflect the conditions of neglect in these homes. These schools, despite herculean efforts of the teachers are often chaotic because of the characteristics of the children who attend. The accompanying lack of resources because of government neglect and the absence of wealthy P&C’s exacerbates efforts to improve conditions. There is a further concentration of these undesirable conditions through the exodus of children from higher SES households who send their children from the local school to either private schools or the ‘so-called' selective school, many of which are no more than a weak excuse from the government sector to combat the drift to the private sector.
However, this exposure to adversity does not condemn a child. Some do acquire a natural resilience that helps their development, but for others it is only through the experience of social cohesion and supportive relationships found at school that children can ameliorate the potential damage carried out in their home.
It is in the schools where the healing can take place, and it is up to society to provide the resources for schools that 'service' these areas. The real cost of continually ignoring the needs of these communities comes later when society is forced to deal with the unemployment, the mental health issues, the addictions and the continuation of the poverty spiral.
The rewards for effort in this area is not only for the children but also the long-term health and wealth of our society.
Teachers are continually frustrated at the beginning of lessons with the disruption of some students who take a long time to settle down. For some, it's just a matter of them calming down after the excitement of the lunch break or the ‘freedom' of moving from one classroom to the other and for this vast majority experienced teachers have no problems. But, for some students, those with severe behavioural issues this disruptive behaviour can be driven by elevated levels of anxiety, a consequence of the memories of previous unpleasant experiences in the classroom. If we look at particular interventions that have been traditionally used to deal with children who suffer from uncertainty and anxiety, we soon find ourselves examining the use of rituals.
Throughout ancient history civilizations emerged in relative isolation. One cause of anxiety, common in all communities was death and almost all developed intricate rituals to deal with the anxiety and sadness of this inevitability. To deal with this tribal communities developed rituals, funeral ‘services’ to ease the pain of grieving. The application of a set of prescribed activities somehow lessens the heartache of loss.
Other rituals developed to deal with the anxiety that comes from the uncertainty of the future. For example, when early communities made the change from being hunter - gatherers to a reliance on agriculture, they soon realized that the success of next year’s crop depended on a range of factors that were beyond their control. To ease the anxiety they developed rituals, including the sacrifice of animals or other humans to appease a supernatural force in the hope that this ritual would ensure next year’s crop.
It becomes evident that rituals are useful in dealing with occasions that are potentially ‘dangerous’ or where the desired outcome is marginally out of your control.
At a personal level, rituals can be any sequence of actions that may consist of words, touching objects or focusing on a particular object that is designed to reduce tension. These activities are developed by repeatedly performing the same act every time we are exposed to that uncertainty. It is the focus on the sequential activity that alleviates the anxiety of contemplating on the potential outcome of the task at hand.
The use of rituals is widespread in sport. As a coach, I used the same sequence of activities before every game no matter how important each was. For the 45 minutes before each kick-off, all players and staff were required to complete a set of tasks. Within each task players were taught to incorporate their own ‘rituals,' such as putting their left boot on first, listening to music or whatever within the framework of the team procedure. When it came time to take to the field, I had ensured they were ‘ready to play’; they had confidence in their ability to succeed.
An important fact is that both the players and I understood that the rituals in themselves had no magical powers but the use of a structured predictable (how often do I use the words structured predictability) sequence of events helps reduce anxiety and focus on the task at hand.
Now returning to our challenging students, they have a sense of self that is associated with academic failure. As teachers, we need to be prepared to deal with their understandable anxiety. Remember, whenever they have come into a classroom, they have come face to face with the memories of past experiences, most of which are recollections of failure and embarrassment. In fact, to ask these kids even to try to do academic work puts them in an extremely vulnerable position. Furthermore, to invite them to do their best, risks potential ridicule or rejection if they fail. Better to be a 'bad' kid than a dumb kid is a choice they make.
So, if you have students like this, or even if you have kids that are extremely well adjusted the use of rituals will increase the early engagement and consequential success of your lessons. The teams I used to coach were of elite standard and played at a national level, and they certainly understood and benefitted from this structure. However, it is those damaged kids who will get the best out of this approach.
No one can ever predict the future with certainty. Most of us have a fair idea what will happen if we follow a specific course of action. These kids, who come from chaotic backgrounds, have no idea they have any influence on what happened to them. But, if the start of today's lesson is the same as yesterday’s and the day before, eventually they will get a sense of predictability and instead of being full of anxiety from the very start of the lesson they are at least available for the next step of the lesson.
Rituals are also effective for teachers who suffer from anxiety when facing a class. I’m sure we all had a level of anxiety when we began our careers and I’m equally sure there are classes that still cause us increased levels of apprehension. Having a ritual will help the teacher just as much as their students.
Early childhood trauma is well established as the major contributor to disrupted neurological and behavioural development in children. The inevitable outcome from the abuse and/or neglect that creates this trauma is a child whose repertoire of behaviours coupled with an adverse cognitive construction limits their ability to engage in our classrooms on an equal footing. Although there is a recognition that these children do suffer from a ‘mental health' disability there remains a reluctance to embrace these kids with the same compassion as those whose disability is more visible and less offensive.
But what constitutes trauma? (The term ‘trauma’ is also used in the medical field to describe an assault on the physical body, but for this work, we are discussing psychological trauma) The short answer is a deeply distressing or disturbing experience or a negative event that is painful and overwhelms a person’s ability to cope.
The three conditions where trauma can occur are:
Shattered Expectations – We all have a belief that things will be OK in the future. We live on an ideal beach with the surf lapping at our front door – then a tsunamis hits and your family has washed away; you're driving home from work and you’re hit by a truck that is out of control.
These events and countless other potential disasters, if experienced, force you to accept that a single person has no real control over natural forces. Most of us will never have to face such events but for those who do the resulting stress levels leads straight to trauma!
Human Vulnerability – All our life we wake with an expectation that we will live through the day and repeat this process over and over. We fail to see the fragility of our bodies and the tenuous grip we have on life. However, if you witness an unexpected death, a road accident, murder, industrial accident or perhaps the onset of a fatal disease you become fully exposed to the reality of death and how helpless we are to prevent it. If you have ever seen such an event, you will understand the trauma that surrounds it. Imagine working in an area such as a war zone or the scene of a natural disaster, this human vulnerability is reinforced time and time again. It's little wonder soldiers, police, rescue workers, etc. are highly likely to suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress.
The Human Capacity for Evil - History is full of major events that illustrate our capacity for evil. The holocausts, Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia and the countless war crimes reported throughout history all confirm that humans are capable of a level of ‘evil’ behaviour that is rare in any other species.
Such malevolent actions are not limited to these large-scale examples, go to any emergency ward in any public hospital, and you will see children, women and male victims who have been beaten for no reason than to satisfy some wicked person’s desire.
The reality that some humans do not share a capacity for kindness, tolerance and a fair-go shatters the belief system we depend on and when we witness extreme malevolence we become traumatized.
The types of trauma that tend to have the greatest adverse psychological consequences are those related to interpersonal or intentional trauma. These include childhood abuse and neglect.
But identifying these underpinnings of trauma do not appear to be relevant when discussing the trauma of young children. Their cognitive development would make any real comprehension of the conditions outlined above almost irrelevant. So, what are the conditions that traumatize kids?
This is a difficult area, what will traumatize an infant is different from say a two-year-old, this difference reflects the variation in their social/intellectual development. I have attempted to create a crude model that illustrates the differences. I have put these into stages. However, the underpinning feature is the shattered sense of safety.
Stage 1. Infancy
Traumatic factors will include frightening visual stimulation, loud, unexpected noise, being hurt or abandoned. The child's increased stress levels are a response to the fear of ‘death' even though they are incapable of that concept. For them, ‘death' is the removal of support.
Stage 2. Early Childhood
The initial conditions still apply, but now the reliance on relationships becomes a more significant factor. Children, who are abused by primary care-givers not only suffer the trauma of that abuse they also interpret that as a complete rejection from the very person they rely on for survival. Because they are intensely ego-centric that rejection must be because they are ‘bad’. This is the foundation of their sense of toxic shame.
There is also the situation when they see their mother beaten. Mum represents life and when that is threatened the child suffers trauma. Some research contends that seeing mum beaten does more damage than being hit their self. Bizarrely, they will believe they deserve to be punished but not their mum. Seeing their siblings abused continues this trend of helplessness in the face of evil.
There was a time when people believed that because their ‘memories' had not developed that the children would not suffer long-term consequences from the abuse and resulting trauma. This idea that there is no impact could not be further from the truth. Early childhood is the most vulnerable time for children and those who visit abuse or neglect on children at this time in their life are creating the maximum psychological scar possible.
The dominance of male students who appear in suspension data or are attending special settings for ‘out of control’ behaviour, is a feature of all school systems. If you agree with us that most dysfunctional behaviour is formed in abusive early childhood environments, this reality is counter-intuitive as young girls are at least as likely to be subjected to abuse as boys. In fact, there is a strong case for inferring that girls are more likely to be abused when you consider that sexual assaults by adult males are most likely to be directed to females.
The simple answer to this quandary is that these behaviours are cultural and historically females have learned to stay quiet about how they feel and suffer in silence. There is some truth to this but I offered an explanation about these disproportionate numbers. This belief based on the work of the anthropologist Louis Leakey who hypothesizes that boys have evolved to externalize their actions. Once humans became the apex species the main threat to survival was attacks from another tribe. In the event of such battles males had a greater chance of survival if they act-out, fought the invaders or ran to safety; that is they took action. Such a response was not as effective for females and children. They were more likely to survive if they surrendered or dissociated. They would be taken as trophies.
Reasons that lead me to support this conclusion are that even in modern ‘tribal wars’ like those during the break-up on Yugoslavia in the 1990’s, the Balkans and Kosovo saw acts of murderous brutality against the male populations. The resulting mass graves were primarily filled with the bodies of potential opponent soldiers.
I believe this underlies an examination of the suspension data in our schools. Up to about age ten or eleven the suspension rate of boys is marginally higher than girls. When we look at the data for puberty and beyond the figure for boys explodes. I suggest this is when their adult disposition is initiated.
If you look at the most common diagnosis of dysfunctional behaviour that results from early childhood abuse the most common are Conduct Disorder, Oppositional Defiance Disorder and Dissociation Identity Disorder. The first two disorders are largely populated with boys; in the latter girls dominate the numbers.
In broad terms dissociation from the immediate environment is on a continuum ranging from mild detachment to a more severe isolation. It is a detachment from the reality rather than a loss of reality that occurs if the child is suffering a psychotic episode. The clinical description of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is a single person who experiences himself/herself as having separate parts of the mind that function with some autonomy. It manifests as a lack of connection in a person’s thoughts, memories, feelings and actions.
As stated above almost exclusively these people have documented histories of repeated, overwhelming and often life threatening trauma during sensitive developmental stages of childhood. At the time of the abuse when the child is faced with this overwhelming trauma and there is no physical escape, they go away ‘in their head’. This is a highly creative method of survival allowing them to endure in apparent hopeless situations. If the trauma is repeated eventually this develops as an automatic response to situations which have similar environmental characteristics, despite not being life threatening. That is if the stimulus presented has strong ‘reminder’ qualities of the original traumatic event(s) the child will dissociate.
How does this disability appear in the classroom? It does and is a real interference to the potential learning outcomes for these students. The problem for teachers is that these, mostly girls are quiet and compliant and pose no obvious challenge. The student’s ‘invisibility’ is intensified in classrooms where there is a core of students with acting out, dysfunctional behaviours. Teachers are so occupied controlling the obvious problems these girls are left to suffer in silence.
However, schools have a duty to support these students so they will learn. The following approach will at least create the conditions that allow the students to operate in an environment that will improve the student’s personal control. These include:
Creating a structured environment where the students learn to predict the consequences of their behaviour thus allowing them to regain a sense of control in their life
Developing a place that is safe and secure for the students
Developing strong boundaries for the students so that they can protect themselves against stimuli that has the same characteristics as the early abuse but not the same ‘real threat’
Presenting a program where the students get their needs met
Developing a cognitive framework for the students so that they can sort out how they think and feel, undoing damaging ‘self concepts’ and learning about what is ‘normal’
Hold the students responsible for their behaviour
The dissociated student presents a real challenge but along with the steps outlined above it is powerful to point out to the student that they have the right to participate and to get their needs met.
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.
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.
