Tag: mental-health

Process as Counterweight to Reactivity in Schools

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A blog entry about why organization, structure, and process is so important – without mention of Tolkien’s ents. 

Think of process as the antidote to reactivity. 

Reactivity is always available. It doesn’t require any planning or preparation. The student’s habitual stress response is set off. They act out. This sets off the teacher’s habitual stress response. The teacher’s reaction could be an in-the-moment response that they later regret. Or, maybe their reaction is deciding that this student simply can’t be educated in this setting.

A meeting is called. -Teachers, counselors, and administrators gather in some combination. The gathering is a reaction, so the reactivity continues.

This is meeting student reactivity with staff reactivity. This is the opposite of meeting reactivity with process. Reactivity is logistically easy, emotionally difficult, and ineffective at improving any student’s or teacher’s school experience.

Process receives reactivity and slows it down. Process moves at its own pace. The process receives the intense initial distress, slows it down, and disperses it amongst the collaborative adult team. Reactivity arrives at any time, and this uncertainty fuels anxiety. Process is predictable, and your staff’s consistency will earn a sense of security.

What does process look like? 

Process in this context consists primarily of three things:

  1. Regular, scheduled meetings.
  2. Clear expectations about communication.
  3. Clear decision-making processes.

We do see some of these structures taking root in school districts, with regular data meetings and processes for determining interventions for students. However, I don’t reliably see these structures where they are needed most – in programs designed to support students with significant social, emotional, and behavioral challenges.

The elements listed above are all worth talking about at length and in detail. Here, I will touch upon each very briefly.

Regular, scheduled meetings – These dictate the pace. Knowing there is a regular time to discuss and sort out challenges has a tremendous stabilizing effect on the staff. A staff member may be in a reactive space and feel that an issue needs to be resolved right away. With a dependable meeting time, -say, on a Tuesday – they will just have to hold tight until Tuesday, when everyone will get together and talk about the issue along with other concerns. In the meantime, everyone involved has a little time to stop, think, and adjust to the pace of the process.

Clear expectations about communication – The way that information is shared should be routine, clear, and understood by everyone on staff. There should not be any guesswork in determining whether and whom to share information with. Leaving these routines and expectations unclear is a recipe for interpersonal trouble. A lack of clarity adds extra burdens on staff who must not only confront a difficult situation, but also figure out whether, and whom with, to share information about it.

Clear decision-making processes – Disagreement among staff is inevitable. Disagreement among staff is also functional. A staff in constant agreement is not much use to each other in terms of deepening understanding, seeing from multiple perspectives, and rich collaboration. But disagreement is also uncomfortable. We have varying degrees of tolerance for it. Having a process for decision-making is a relief to interpersonal discomfort. When everyone has had a chance to say their piece and the conversation has stopped developing, we can move on to the decision-making process, and then on to the next concern.

Reactivity lives at the core of human nature while establishing and maintaining these structures and processes goes against some basic human tendencies, and there lies the challenge.

If we meet regularly, we will have more difficult conversations and disagreements. People tend to avoid difficult conversations and disagreements. So, many people would prefer not to meet. You may find that meetings are regularly missed, and people start to arrive late, or that meetings end early. If someone does not assume the role of maintaining the meeting and holding expectations about attendance and timeliness, these phenomena will almost certainly develop.

Similarly, staff may avoid communicating about something that they know will be contentious and difficult to talk about. The temptation may be to keep it to one’s self, or to tell only the most sympathetic ear. And lastly, people don’t naturally rely on established processes to make decisions. People tend to revert to more habitual and less organized group patterns, and groups often get stuck there.

The effort required to establish and maintain organized processes is worthwhile. Regular meetings and processes will provide practice in confronting challenges and lead to a greater sense of predictability and security, which will reduce anxiety. This predictability and increased security will infuse the staff’s work with students, and create a better learning environment. It will also decrease staff burnout and turnover, greatly benefiting program staff and students.

Be a Tolkien Ent: Responsiveness vs. Reactivity in Education and School Counseling

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Our students are reactive. As educators we are called upon – not to be reactive, but to be responsive. 

A responsive educator posture doesn’t always come naturally, especially when we are confronted with the reactive crisis-sense of a student, or a staff member for that matter. The sense of emergency is contagious. We are deeply attuned to it as fellow humans. Much in the same way that people will react to a snake before they are even consciously aware that they have seen one, we will react to others’ sense of crisis and emergency before we’ve paused to think about the nature of the issue. It is a healthy group survival response, but it is not conducive to developing self-regulation and maintaining a learning environment.

Deliberate responsiveness is the term I use to describe process-oriented, attuned, and thoughtful responsiveness. It is an over-arching theme to nearly everything I advocate for at the intersection of education and mental health. It requires significant practical planning and conceptual reframing to maintain a responsive position. Dr. Jacob Ham describes “learning brain vs. survival brain” in this popular video. To maintain conditions that support students being in learning brain, the adult staff group has to maintain its own collective version of learning brain.

Tolkien provides us with a fantastic and clear example of this with the behavior of the ents -Middle-Earth’s tree-like giants. Tolkien’s ents serve as a model of practicing deliberate responsiveness.

In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Frodo’s companions Merry and Pippin find themselves on a side quest recruiting reinforcements for the battle against Saruman’s armies.

They have the good fortune to encounter Fangorn, a tree-like giant. A battle is brewing, and Merry and Pippin’s compatriots are vastly outnumbered. They entreat the powerful Fangorn to help them in battle and to recruit more ents. Fangorn listens carefully, sometimes responding “Now don’t be hasty.”

Fangorn listens and explains at a pace we might associate with “mindful eating.” After much of this slow listening and explaining, he agrees to consider the hobbits’ request. However, he is not going to consider such an important question on his own. He calls a meeting (an entmoot) to consult and decide along with other ents. By using this special name, entmoot, Tolkien signals that this is an established process, not a reaction. The entmoot goes on for three days before they reach a conclusion. 

When reactivity meets process, everything slows down, and crisis-energy is dissipated. 

Tolkien was really on to something, both about human nature and the nature of trees. Real trees live for hundreds of years. They have a system akin to the human nervous system, though one difference is speed. Their electrical signals travel at the slow rate of one inch every three seconds (Wohlleben, 2105, p. 8). Peter Wohlleben’s popular The Hidden Life of Trees describes tree behavior, including their ability to communicate with each other through the air and fungal networks underground. Between their long lives and their rates of internal and external communication, trees are on a very different time scale than humans. Trees are active, but so slow relative to us as to be unrecognizable without special attention and effort.

As educators and school counselors, we can learn from trees and from Tolkien’s ents. Our students will turn to us reactively, frustratedly, and as desperate as Merry and Pippin begging Fangorn for assistance. We will likely feel activated to join them in their reactivity. But, we can strive to be as different from our students in our response as ents are from hobbits, and as different as trees are from people. 

We can welcome the student’s crisis into the safe, secure, and slow speed of thoughtful adult consideration. We can listen, long and engaged, like Fangorn. We can even use his “hm, hoom” sounds of considered acknowledgment. We can stop and think. And we can tell our students that we will continue to think about the issue they have presented, and we will consult with the other school staff about such a significant challenge. And yes, it may take a while to give this all the thought, consideration, and collaboration it deserves. But, like Fangorn again, we will dependably follow up and follow through.

References 

Tolkien, J. R. R. (1954). The two towers: the lord of the rings part two. Ballantine

Wohlleben, P. (2015). The hidden life of trees; What they feel, how they communicate. Greystone

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.