Tag: inclusion

Encountering Distress and Violence in Specialized School Programs

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The Constrained Psychology of Educators Part 3: Distress, Behavior, and Violence

In my experience in schools, school staff working in specialized programs desperately need to talk about encountering severe distress and being subjected to violence. At the same time, outside of quiet and personal conversations, almost no one wants to talk about the challenges they’ve experienced. Shame, fear, and stigma bring school staff to feel that they can’t or shouldn’t talk about their work. 

This doubly constrains the practice and development of school programming for students with significant social, emotional, and behavioral challenges. My previous two pieces (part 1, part 2) described how the comforting illusion of easy explanations and solutions constrains the thinking and effectiveness of school staff and cuts off the opportunity for deeper understanding and relationship-based therapeutic work.

School staff must protect the privacy of the students and families they work with. This does not prevent discussion of best practices, trends, and more generalized experiences.

The hush-hush tendency is pervasive in all forums, including social media forums otherwise used by professionals of all stripes. It is also evidenced by my book with Laura Balogh being the only book dedicated to the topic, despite the proliferation of “therapeutic programs” (or similarly titled) across thousands of schools nationally and internationally. This is a sad state of affairs and we would much prefer our book to be in conversation with other emerging literature specific to the topic.

Just imagine taking on such an incredibly complex and difficult job, and not discussing it with other professionals. The hush-hush culture stifles development and innovation in programming to the serious detriment of children with significant social, emotional, and behavioral challenges who are being served in schools. 

Within programs supporting students with significant social, emotional, and behavioral challenges it is not unusual for student distress to be expressed through violence toward staff. With unclear laws and regulations regarding physical intervention to maintain safety, and pervasive fear of “getting it wrong” in high-stakes situations where staff is charged with keeping everyone safe, school staff mostly do not want to talk about it outside of quiet conversations with their closest confidants at work. Again, these conversations do nothing to further safer and better practices in the professional field, despite the commonality of the problems faced across school districts. They also do little to slow the destructive high turnover rate for staff in specialized programs, which robs the program and the children of stability. 

While the administrators I am currently collaborating with support my efforts, these same problems are usually present at the administrative level. I’ve known administrators who, surely feeling constrained by pressures of their own, insist that responses to violence are simple and that the laws and regulations are clear. These same administrators do not implement any system for tracking violence against teachers. 

Given the lack of clarity, data, and professional conversation, the trend I observe within specialized programs in schools is the normalization of student violence. This is a huge disservice to everyone associated with the programs, especially the students. We can be compassionate, understanding, and deeply attuned to the distress of students, without normalizing violence. Our society is not accepting of people who express themselves through violence toward others, and we are doing no favors for students by acclimating them to a culture where violence is normalized. 

Here are two effective and important ways to undo these trends: 1. Keep data on violence of any kind. This includes violent threats, attacks, attempted violence, and destruction of property. Keeping this data goes a long way toward preventing a mindset where violence becomes an expected and normal part of the culture. (I have developed a simple system for doing this and I’m happy to share it with you.)  2. While maintaining the privacy of your students and families, seek professional conversation and collaboration with others doing similar work. You likely talk to your direct colleagues – now include people working in other school districts, and even people in different parts of the country and world. While the absence of discussion and development is discouraging, the good news is that the potential for connection and development is immense. 

What Kind of Teacher Doesn’t Know the Answers?

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spoiler: sometimes not knowing the answers is what makes an educator great

The Constrained Psychology of Educators Part I

I’ve had time to observe many of the psychological pitfalls of being an educator in K-12 schools. The effect is one of constraint, where educators experience a limited scope of what is possible in the classroom. 

My work has been primarily with students in special education programs due to significant social, emotional, and behavioral challenges, and their educators. The intensity of the issues presented by these students bring school culture concerns into clearer focus, but many of these issues are pervasive throughout schools.

The layers of these constraining problems are built on a foundational idea about school: teachers have all the answers. What a reassuring idea! In some parts of school life, it’s true. Your second-grade math teacher has in fact memorized the multiplication tables, and more. 

It can be largely true in more complicated situations as well. Your special education teacher may be able to administer assessments and know quite confidently what reading intervention is likely to be effective. Special education teachers are often amazing.

And then we encounter a student who is really struggling emotionally. This emotional distress is showing up in their behavior and interfering with their access to education, and to some degree even interfering with other students’ access to education. The usual incentives and disincentives for “good student behavior” are ineffective. We have reached a point where we educators no longer know the answers. 

This is a frightening crossroads for many, cutting to the heart of the teacher identity. What kind of teacher doesn’t know the answers?

Blocking out this troubling question, educators seek quick answers, hoping to return to their regular knowledgeable position as quickly as possible. Someone administer an FBA! (Functional Behavioral Assessment) 

Educators are increasingly taught that the answers lie in data. Let me be clear, data is a fundamentally good thing – more information is better than less. But, educators fall prey to the comforting illusion of easy and understandable answers. They feel the pressure of the expectation to be an expert, and an expert teacher (or school counselor) must know the answers. Welcome to perfect storm conditions for imposter phenomenon. 

Children, their families, and classroom groups are complicated. An individual child can’t entirely account for their behavior, thoughts, and feelings. -Nor can we do it on their behalf. We can’t even entirely account for our own behavior! Have you ever done something you intended not to do, or not done something you intended to? Why do you keep doing that?

However, we can move toward deeper understanding together. Part of what Laura Balogh and I advocate for in our book The Therapeutic Inclusion Program is shifting the classroom culture toward curiosity, wonder, and collaboration. We can think about it together. The more we do that, the more we will understand, but we still won’t know all the answers.