“What do you mean that you don’t want to be a ‘speddie’ anymore?” asked Ms. Brennan.
“I’ve been getting into trouble at school for a long time,” said Frankie. “It’s not like I’m trying to get into trouble. But no one’s ever helped me not get in trouble. All that happens is they give me detentions, or they suspend me, and then my mom gets pissed at me at home. It’s, like, pointless to even go to school. And now I’m stuck with a bunch of freaks who are way more messed up than I am.”
“So, you feel it’s the wrong program for you,” said Ms. Brennan.
“At least I had friends at my old school,” said Frankie. “Even if I was getting into trouble, at least I had friends.”
“It’s helpful for us to hear this,” said Ms. Brennan. “And your mom seems to be hanging in there.”
“That’s ’cuz you’re here,” said Frankie.
“Maybe so,” said Ms. Brennan. “But I think I can help you talk to each other without me. We’ll be practicing while you’re here. This conversation is the first step. Frankie, you have a lot to say, and I hope you’ll keep giving your mom the chance to listen. Because I know she’s going to try very hard to get better at hearing your concerns. These problems that are causing you to fight with each other . . . well, it’s going to take both of you, working together, to solve them.”
11
Unsolved Problems at School
As hard as it is to help a kid with concerning behaviors within a family, it may be even harder in a school. After all, there are twenty or thirty other students in the child’s classes, with a wide range of special needs. Like parents, most general education teachers and school administrators haven’t received any specialized training to help them understand and help kids with concerning behaviors, and those who have received training probably learned more about Plan A than Plan B. There are a lot of different people to get on the same page. And there’s a big dinosaur in the building: the existing school discipline program.
Fortunately, many kids who exhibit concerning behaviors at home don’t exhibit concerning behaviors at school. This pattern often reinforces the false belief that kids’ concerning behaviors are completely under their control. Of course, if you read the first few chapters of this book, you know that that belief comes from obsolete lenses. Here are a few alternative explanations for the home–school disparity:
THE SITUATIONAL FACTOR: As you’ve read, concerning behaviors occur when a kid is having difficulty meeting certain expectations. The expectations at home and school are often quite different. For example, because the school environment tends to be relatively structured and predictable, it can actually be more “user-friendly” for some kids than the home environment.
THE EMBARRASSMENT FACTOR: Many kids with concerning behaviors would be absolutely mortified if their classmates and teachers witnessed those behaviors, so they put massive amounts of energy into holding it together at school. But since the potential for embarrassment decreases at home, and since the energy can’t be maintained 24/7, the kids unravel the minute they get home. Most of us are better behaved outside the home than we are inside, so kids with concerning behaviors aren’t especially unusual in this regard. Of course, there are kids whose frustration at school blows right through the embarrassment factor.
THE CHEMICAL FACTOR: Teachers and classmates are often the primary beneficiaries of pharmacotherapy because kids with concerning behaviors may be medicated during school hours, but many medications wear off by late afternoon or early evening, just in time for the child to decompensate at home.
The fact that concerning behaviors aren’t occurring at school doesn’t mean that school isn’t contributing to concerning behaviors that occur elsewhere. Many things can happen at school to fuel episodes outside of school: being teased by other kids, feeling socially isolated or rejected, feeling frustrated and embarrassed over struggles on certain academic tasks, feeling misunderstood by the teacher. Homework, of course, often extends academic frustrations well beyond the end of the school day. So, schools still have a role to play in helping kids with concerning behaviors, even if they don’t see the kid at his worst.
This chapter is primarily focused on the kids who do have challenging episodes at school. Luckily, everything you’ve read in this book so far is as applicable to schools and classrooms as it is to homes and families. But implementation at school isn’t easy. Many (if not most) school discipline programs have a strong orientation toward Plan A; intervention for students with concerning behaviors occurs, all too often, in the heat of the moment rather than proactively; evaluations of teachers and schools are based primarily on the performance of their students on high-stakes tests, with precious little emphasis on the social, emotional, and behavioral gains of the most vulnerable students; budgets are extremely tight; time is short. In many instances teachers justifiably feel that they lack the expertise and are not being provided with the kind of support they need to understand and help kids with concerning behaviors. While educators deal with lagging academic skills all the time, they are often unfamiliar with the lagging skills that make it difficult for a student to respond adaptively to problems and frustrations. This is especially interesting in view of the fact that the majority of concerning behaviors that occur at school can be linked to difficulties students are having with academics.
And to make things still worse, misguided, ineffective zero-tolerance policies have driven many schools to use discipline rubric systems, which are usually comprised of a list (often a long one) of behaviors students shouldn’t exhibit and an algorithm of adult-imposed consequences attached to each behavior on the list. The research that has accumulated over the years is crystal clear on several points: zero-tolerance policies have made things worse, not better; standard school disciplinary practices generally aren’t effective for the students to whom they are most frequently applied and aren’t needed for the students to whom they are never applied. The school discipline program isn’t the reason well-behaved students behave well. They behave well because they can. We have little good to show for the millions of punishments—detentions, suspensions, expulsions—that are meted out every year to the kids who are having difficulty handling the social, emotional, and behavioral expectations at school. And yet most administrators’ standard rationale for the continued use of consequences goes something like this:
We have to set an example for all of our students; even if suspension doesn’t help Frankie, at least it sets an example for our other students. We need to let them know that we take this kind of behavior seriously at our school.
QUESTION: What message do we give the other students if we continue to apply interventions that aren’t helping Frankie behave more adaptively?
ANSWER: That we’re actually not sure how to help our students with concerning behaviors.
QUESTION: What’s the likelihood that the students who don’t exhibit concerning behaviors will begin to exhibit concerning behaviors if we did not make an example of Frankie?
ANSWER: As a general rule, slim to none.
QUESTION: What message do we give Frankie if we continue to apply strategies that aren’t working?
ANSWER: We don’t understand you and we can’t help you.
QUESTION: Under which circumstance do we have the best chance of helping Frankie solve the problems that are setting in motion his concerning behaviors: when he’s in school, or when he’s suspended from school?
ANSWER: When he’s in school.
QUESTION: Why do many schools continue to use interventions that aren’t working for their students with concerning behaviors?
ANSWER: They aren’t sure what else to do.
QUESTION: What happens to students to whom these interventions are counterproductively applied for many years?
ANSWER: They become more disenfranchised and alienated and fall farther outside the social fabric of the school.
QUESTION: Isn’t it the parents’ job to make their child behave at school?
ANSWER: Helping a child deal more adaptively with frustration is everyone’s job. Also, we can’t escape the fact that the parents aren’t there when the child is having difficulty meeting expectations at school.
QUESTION: Isn’t it the job of special education to handle these children?
ANSWER: Actually, special education often has very little to offer many such students.
QUESTION: What usually happens to students with concerning behaviors when we apply a sink-or-swim mentality?
ANSWER: They sink.
Time for Plan B. But solving problems collaboratively in a school is no small undertaking. Here are some of the necessary components:
AWARENESS: Students with concerning behaviors are being ill-served by traditional disciplinary practices in many schools. Some educators know this already and are eager to learn new ways of understanding and helping these kids. Other educators still don’t know this and need to be enlightened.
URGENCY: Understanding and helping these students has to be a priority. However, since educators have so many different competing priorities, helping students with concerning behaviors often sits quite low on the list. But we’re losing a lot of kids unnecessarily because their concerning behaviors are misunderstood and mishandled.
EXPERTISE: Many schools have been using the same discipline strategies for decades, even though it’s quite clear that the “frequent fliers”—the students who are chronically in the office, in detention, being suspended, being paddled, and/or being restrained and secluded—aren’t benefiting from those strategies. Equally clear is the fact that those strategies don’t address the true difficulties (lagging skills and unsolved problems) of students with concerning behaviors. Some educators believe that the expertise necessary for understanding and helping behaviorally challenging students is well beyond their grasp. Not true. The expertise required is the same for everyone: identifying lagging skills and unsolved problems and using Plan B.
MENTALITY: It’s time to stop blaming parents for concerning behaviors that occur at school. Blaming parents is a distracting, counterproductive dead end, and it makes it much harder for school staff to focus on the problems they could be busy solving. Parents of kids with concerning behaviors get much more blame than they deserve for their kids’ difficulties, in the same way that parents of well-behaved kids get much more credit than they deserve for their kids’ positive attributes. While it is true that there are many students who come from home situations that might not be considered “ideal,” it is also true that most of those students are well-behaved.
TIME: Classroom teachers often feel that they don’t have time to help kids with concerning behaviors and that it is more efficient to simply let folks in the office handle things. The problem, of course, is that the folks in the office don’t really know much about the unsolved problems that are causing the behaviors that are prompting teachers to send kids to the office. So, the folks in the office have little to offer when it comes to solving problems with students. The folks in the office may have a great deal to offer when it comes to providing coverage for classroom teachers who have problems to solve with their students. While Plan B does take time, it also saves time. Time is almost always a major concern before teachers and administrators learn how to use Plan B, but those concerns fade once educators make it a priority to understand and help these kids and become skilled at Plan B. When do staff members in these schools do Plan B? Sometimes before school, sometimes after school, sometimes during lunch, sometimes during recess, sometimes during the teacher’s prep time. I’ve yet to meet the administrator who isn’t willing to arrange for coverage so that a classroom teacher can use Proactive Plan B with an individual student. Some schools have found it worthwhile to retool the entire schedule to create the time needed for helping kids who would otherwise become lost in the shuffle.
ASSESSMENT AND REFERRAL MECHANISMS: It will be necessary to achieve a consensus on the lagging skills and unsolved problems of each student with concerning behaviors so that the factors underlying their difficulties are well understood and the problems that need to be solved are clear. The ALSUP should be the standard pre-referral, triage instrument in every school. The information provided by the ALSUP should provide the foundation for writing functional behavior assessments (FBAs), individualized education plans (IEPs), and behavior plans. It’s crucial to go further than simply concluding that a student’s concerning behaviors are working at getting them something they want (for example, attention) and escaping and avoiding tasks and situations that are difficult, uncomfortable, tedious, or scary. A good functional assessment needs to explain why a student is going about getting, escaping, and avoiding in such a maladaptive fashion (lagging skills) and when that is occurring (unsolved problems).
PRACTICE, FEEDBACK, AND COACHING: Once mechanisms for assessing lagging skills and unsolved problems are in place, schools are ready for the next step: becoming proficient at Plan B. For most people, this is a process that will require practice and ongoing feedback and coaching. This can take a variety of forms in different schools, and a variety of resources are available for support (details, once again, at www.livesinthebalance.org). The aspects of Plan B that are challenging for parents tend to be the same for educators: drilling for information in the Empathy step; articulating why it’s important that an expectation be met in the Define Adult Concerns step; collaborating on solutions that are realistic and mutually satisfactory.
ONGOING COMMUNICATION: Because Proactive Plan B is far preferable to Emergency Plan B, advance preparation and good communication among adults are essential. The only models for treatment that don’t require good communication are the ineffective ones. To help out, another instrument, the Problem-Solving Plan, can be found at www.livesinthebalance.org as well. It was designed to help adults keep track of the high-priority unsolved problems that are currently being addressed with an individual student, to specify who’s taking primary responsibility for solving each problem with the student, and to track the progression of problem-solving efforts through the steps of Plan B. In schools (as well as in homes) there’s a tendency to work on the “hot” problem that precipitated a concerning behavior on a particular day. But since unsolved problems wax and wane, the “hot” unsolved problem that was addressed one day or week (but not seen through to a final resolution) is often replaced the next day or week by a different “hot” unsolved problem. However, the first unsolved problem hasn’t gone away; it’s just gone into “hibernation.” Since it’s still unsolved, it keeps coming back. The Problem-Solving Plan is designed to prevent that from happening by helping adults track unsolved problems over time until they’re durably solved. The need for ongoing monitoring means that the adults who are working with a given child will have to reconvene periodically to assess progress and revisit unsolved problems.
PERSEVERANCE: There is no quick fix. You’re in this for the long haul. Transforming school discipline is a project. It doesn’t happen overnight. But it needs to happen.
Naturally, there’s much more that could be said about each of these components. That’s why I wrote Lost at School, which was published in 2008 and revised in 2020.
This might be a good time to point out that Plan B isn’t limited to adult–child problem solving. The ingredients of Plan B are equally applicable to unsolved problems between two kids as well as to those that affect an entire group of kids. And Plan B has significant ramifications for adult–adult problem solving as well. For the remainder of this chapter, let’s see what Plan B would look like as applied to these different types of problem solving in a school setting. We’ll start with Plan B involving a teacher and student, move on to Plan B between groups of students, and finish with parents and teachers.
STUDENT–TEACHER PROBLEM SOLVING
As you’ll see, Proactive Plan B doesn’t look much different when the adult is a teacher rather than a parent. The ingredients are exactly the same though the topics may differ. Here’s an example between a teacher and
a thirteen-year-old:
TEACHER: Class, please get to work on your social studies projects.
RICKEY: I’m not doing it.
TEACHER: Well, then your grade will reflect both your attitude and your lack of effort.
RICKEY: I don’t give a damn about my grades. I can’t do this crap.
TEACHER: Your mouth just bought you a detention, young man. And I don’t want students in my classroom who don’t do their work. Anything else you’d like to say?
RICKEY: Yeah, this class sucks.
TEACHER: Nor do I need to listen to this. You need to go to the assistant principal’s office NOW.
Oops. That was Plan A, wasn’t it? Tricky author. Let’s consider our other options. Since this problem was being handled emergently, that would be Emergency Plan C or Emergency Plan B. Here’s what Emergency Plan C would look like:
TEACHER: Class, please get to work on your social studies projects.
RICKEY: I’m not doing it.
TEACHER: You’re not doing it.
RICKEY: Forget it. I can’t do this! Just leave me alone! Damn!
TEACHER: Rickey, you don’t have to do it. But hang on for just a second . . . let me get everyone else going, and then you and I can figure out what’s the matter and see what we can do about it.
And here’s what the same problem would look like if it were handled with Emergency Plan B:
TEACHER: Class, please get to work on your social studies projects.
RICKEY: I’m not doing it.
TEACHER: Tell me what’s going on, bud.
RICKEY: Forget it. I can’t do this! Just leave me alone! Damn!
TEACHER: Rickey, tell me what’s going on.
RICKEY: You know I have trouble with the spelling!
TEACHER: Yes, I do know that. That’s why I don’t grade you for the spelling.
RICKEY: But it still bugs me!
The Explosive Child Page 15