May

27

What’s to be done about kids killing kids?

Filed Under "At-risk" students, Behaviour Management | 6 Comments

It’s happened again- a kid killing a kid. On Wednesday, May 23 2007 , a 15 year old kid was shot to death in a hallway in the middle of the afternoon in a Toronto school. That’s scary for kids, for parents, and for teachers. Parents send kids to the safety of school to learn the three “R’s. Kids go to school, albeit sometimes a bit reluctantly, to learn the three R’s. Teachers go to school, I go to school to teach the three R’s. No one expects anyone to get killed in school. Why are kids killing kids anyway, in school or out of school. What’s going on? How can we stop it? These are puzzling questions that need answers. One answer I see is : it all depends on who you ask. Ask different people; get different answers. Ask some people; get no answers.

I’ve been following this story in the local media where questions around the shooting are being raised. The answers given by the various players in this tragedy like the family of the victim, the friends of the victim, the administration of the school that the victim attended, the police, the politicians, and the experts in the area of youth violence remind me of the answers given in the story about the six blind men who are asked to identify something by touching different parts of it. The something happened to be an elephant. The story goes something like this

Six blind men who touched different parts of an elephant were ask to describe what they thought it was.
The first blind man touched the trunk of an elephant and said “It’s like a snake”.
The second blind man touched the body of an elephant and said “It’s like a wall”.
The third blind man touched the tail of an elephant and said “It’s like a rope”.
The fourth blind man touched the leg of an elephant and said “It’s like a tree”.
The fifth blind man touched the tusk of an elephant and said “It’s like a sword”.
The sixth blind man touched the ear of an elephant and said “It’s like a fan”.

Each of the six blind men described the elephant from his own perspective. Each description was valid given where each man stood. The problem is, of course, that because the men could not see the whole picture (well of course they couldn’t see the whole pictures, they were blind but you know what I mean) they could only describe their individual part thereby they failing to see the essence of the elephant. I believe that when we are asking the question “What is to be done about kids killing kids”, we get answers from individual players based on where they are coming from and consequently miss the essence of the problem and hence miss the essence of the solution.

The poor grieving mothers can never understand why someone would want to harm their children because they were such dutiful sons or daughters. Friends of the victims always talk about what wonderful friends and people the victims were. Everyone loved them. The police talk about the need for people who have information about crimes to come forward with information and tell police what they know. People who are in the know won’t tell because they are worried that they will suffer retaliation for ratting someone out. In this case, the incident happened in school, school officials talk about what they have done to make schools safe and then talk about what they are doing to make them safer like installing more cameras and installing more people to supervise the halls. The mayor talks about the need for tougher gun controls to stop all those guns from the United Stated entering into Canada. Experts on youth violence suggest that kids enter gangs looking for the emotional support their families didn’t give them. We should be giving them this support so they don’t join gangs.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s all the different parts of the elephant. These individual interpretations aren’t capturing the essence of the problem. The individual player’s interpretation of the problem and its solution is not going to make the problem go away by itself. It’s back to that village thing. You know the saying that it take a whole village to raise a child. Well it’s going to take the whole village to stop kids killing kids. Everyone needs to do what needs doing ,as unpopular as that might be. Or, we’re going to continue to read about kids killing kids and continue to hear the different members of the village interpreting the elephant of kids killing kids from their individual perspectives or agendas. We need to see the whole picture before we can get rid of the whole problem.

Some of the comments made by the media regarding my question of what is to be done about kids killing kids have been very insightful. An editorial in The Globe and Mail date May 25, 2007 notes that

It has been clear for some time that a large number of young people in the city’s toughest neighborhoods have guns and feel a sense of impunity in using them… There are many young men in (some of them boys,really) who, when challenged or insulted, will begin shooting. A bus shooting happened after someone asked a young man to stop swearing.

You know, I see that bit about violence stemming from a real or perceived challenge or real or perceived insult at school everyday. I was going to say almost everyday, but then upon reflection realized it was everyday. Just today in my class one kid said something that another kid took offense to, and I had to step in and verbally deescalate the situation. I couldn’t believe it. In a nano second they were both ready to throttle one another. I guess these kids have nothing but their honour and so will protect it at any cost. It just boggles the mind. So many of these kids get themselves into problems because they have poor impulse control and act before they’ve had an opportunity to think things through.

I had another student tell me a month or so ago that he had been stabbed in his upper thigh. I was shocked, but then as the details unfolded the stabbing itself took on a less shocking light. This kid, my student had accidentally stabbed himself in the thigh. He explained that he had been carrying a knife in his pocket and forgot about it, and when he sat down, as fate would have it, the knife stabbed him in the thigh. Now of course ,he and his friends didn’t want any adults to know about this, so they tried to fix the wound themselves by buying some stuff at the drug store and bandaging the wound up. But as he told me, it was bleeding so badly the bandaids wouldn’t stick on his skin so they had to go to emergency room at the local hospital. He commented on all the blood and that his good jeans had a hole in them now. At the emergency room at the hospital, he told the story that he’d accidentally sat on a knife that had been carelessly left on a chair, and it stabbed him when he sat down. That explanation worked for him at the hospital and at home with his mother. I asked him why he was carrying a knife to begin with. He look at me incredulously and told me that everyone carried a knife to protect themselves, and some of the other kids in the class told me that you couldn’t leave the house without a knife for protection. Just think of what that means- a knife in the hand of a kid with poor impulse control and nothing to lose but his honour, or even better yet, a gun in the hand of a kid with poor impulse control and nothing to lose but his honour.

My school has cameras installed in the high traffic areas and many of the 20+ doors in the building are locked during school hours and unlocked in the morning before school to let kids in. You can exit all of the doors but enter only a select few during school hours. That is a major pain in the butt. I’ve gone to my car to get something after classes were over for the day and have to walk way around the front to get back in. The locked doors help keep intruders out of the school and the cameras act as a deterrent and catch kids committing crimes. They really do. A couple of years ago, one of my students who was expelled from school because he took a baseball bat to another kid at lunch over a gambling debt asked his friends, still at school,to say hi to me. Apparently, I was his favourite teacher. But, he was afraid to come into school because of the cameras. He would be in big trouble if he got caught on school premises. Same thing happened just last March. A student of mine who got kicked out of school and wanted to come to see me to say hi but was afraid to, again because of the cameras. He too would be in big trouble if he was caught on camera. So, cameras do work. I’ve got more stories like that, but I’ve made my point already. I’m starting to get spooked out thinking about all these kids. Fortunately, these kids are a minority or no one would want to be a teacher.

I’ve said before that I wouldn’t want our schools turned into jail-like fortresses. I don’t want bars and metal detectors in my school, and I don’t want my school board to have its own police force like they do in Boston. I’ve taught young offenders in jail and in an open custody facility and believe me the atmosphere was so oppressive. I hated the atmosphere. Ironically, the kids were better behaved in jail than in regular classrooms because they had only two choices. They could do what I asked in the classroom or the guards could escort them to their cells. It was their choice. I’m trying to remember. It was a long time ago, but I think that only one kid ended up going back to his cell. I couldn’t stand the guards in my classroom, so I had them removed. That took some doing. But, I had the support of my administrator who was responsible for the school in jail,and he made it happen. They installed a panic button in my classroom just in case something happened, but nothing did.

When I first started teaching in jail, I was a bit concerned about maintaining discipline because, well, the kids weren’t in jail for good behaviour. But what actually happened was this: when I first started teaching the kids kind of checked me out and gave me a few tests I had to pass, and when I passed them I was deemed OK. So whenever new kids came to class, they didn’t act out because the other kids had done some positive PR for me. I was amazed and quite honestly thankful. Sometimes I tell my classes at work that it’s easier to teach kids in jail than it is to teach them. They don’t believe it, and they have a hard time believing that I taught in jail. I tell them I was younger then and we all laugh.

The Globe and Mail article I quoted from earlier makes some good points I want to share

  • The money spent on metal detectors etc. would be better spent on social workers , psychologist and special programs that could reach these kids before they reach for knives .
  • Schools that looks orderly and well maintained are more secure.
  • Vandalism and theft can be almost as harmful to a school as actual violence because they can create a fertile environment for loss of control and community confidence.
  • If it appears that there is no strong adult authority intruders come and create problems

S o there are some lessons here. Ones we need to pay attention to. If the solutions to the problem of kids killing kids were simple, we would have would have implemented them long ago and ended kids killing kids. We, the villagers, need to get together, learn the lesson from the blind men and the elephant and get at an accurate picture of the problem so that we can develop the solutions that get at the problem and finally stop kids killing kids. At least, that’s the way I see it.

 
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May

24

Be successful on the job despite having learning disabilities

Filed Under "At-risk" students, Special Education | 2 Comments

I’ve been working on a unit for my grade 12 students that helps them prepare for the world of work. Many of them have learning disabilities and/or attention deficits and frankly have a harder time at school because of it. I just want stop here for a moment to comment about the terminology used in Special Education to identify kids who have a learning disability. Some people prefer not to use the term learning disabilities, and instead prefer to use the term learning differences. I can understand that. I been thinking about these terms myself for a long time and have been trying to decide which one more accurately describes the condition. Is it a learning difference or is it a learning disability. I’ve concluded that it is both.

A person who has a learning disability has a brain that is wired differently. So, the condition could be called a learning difference. However, since the brain is “wired” differently, it makes it more difficult for these students to do things that other students can do easily. Having a brain that is wired differently is not enabling. That’s for sure - at least the way I see it everyday at school. Students struggle to read, write, remember, think, etc. Their differently wired brain is in effect disabling them. It’s making things harder for them to do. When people having a physical disability that makes it harder for them to walk, we don’t say that they have a physical difference. We say they have a physical disability. I know that having a learning difference sounds much better than having a learning disability. I don’t mean to offend anybody. I’m not an expert on naming these conditions but since I use them I want to make sense of them. To be honest, I like SchwabLearning’s term for learning disabilities. SwabLearning uses the term learning difficulties. I like that term because if your brain is wired a certain way you do have learning difficulties.The term learning difficulties makes more sense to me than learning disabilities or learning differences because if your brain is wired differently then learning is difficult.

You know what, in the long run it doesn’t really matter what we call it -disability, differences or difficulties. Kids don’t want to be different; they don’t want to be disabled; they don’t want things to be difficult. It doesn’t matter what we call it. They’re not pleased either way. Kids want to be the same as everyone else, and they can be. They can be successful just like anyone else. I want to shout that out everyday. Kids or adults ,for that matter, who have learning difficulties can be successful at school and in their career. When I talk to kids I encourage them to focus on what they can do, not on what they can’t do. I encourage them to use their strengths to help them be successful. I tell them if they’re not good at math, it’s no big deal. Find someone else who is and get them to help you. There are all kinds of people who love math and can help. In turn, you can use your strengths to help other people who need help because your strength could be their weakness. It’s a case of “I’ll scratch your back and you can scratch mine”.

I’m always talking about how my students can be successful if they develop certain characteristics such as self-awareness, goal setting , self-advocating , perseverance, and emotional support. It doesn’t really matter if they have a learning disability. What matters is that they have the characteristics that lead to success. After talking about these characteristics, I have students do activities that help them develop these characteristics. One activity I especially like is one that helps them be aware of their strengths and weaknesses . I have them complete a self-check list to determine their multiple intelligences and thereby making them aware of their strengths and weaknesses. They then can use their strengths to begin to set career goals. I tell my students, if you suck at math , don’t plan on going into engineering. No matter how much you want to be a successful engineer, it isn’t going to happen. After my students become aware of their strengths and weaknesses, they are ready to begin to set SMART goals. A smart goals is one that is specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. Smart goals are ones that have a better chance of being met. I also have them complete a self-advocacy checklist to help them understand the concept of self-awareness and to determine what things they need to do to help themselves achieve their goal. There are many self-advocacy check lists on- line. Just type self-advocacy check list into a search engine and you’ll see plenty. I also talk about the need to persevere until you’ve reached our goal. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. I use the story of the Little Engine that Could to make my point, and I give them challenging tasks , usually a puzzle of some sort, to complete to practice their perseverance. Of course if they have problems with perseverance, they can call on others for support to help them. Finally, I talk about the need for emotional support and having someone there to celebrate during the good times and encourage us during the bad. I talk about how to develop and nuture friendships. I truly believe this unit helps the kids more than anything else I do. They come away more confident and know that just because they have learning difficulties it doesn’t mean they will be failures. They can use the characteristics of successful people, the very characteristics they have and can develop, to become successful themselves and be like anyone else- successful.

I was delighted to come across an article that supports the notion that people can be successful in their careers despite having learning difficulties. The article talks about people like Richard Branson, chairman of Virgin Group PLC who is wildly successful despite having dyslexia, problems recognizing and understanding written words, and Mr. James Cincotta, a program manager at an community resources centre who has dyslexia and dyscalculia, difficulty understanding or using numbers, as well as having an auditory-processing deficit. Why are these people successful? Because they know their strengths and weaknesses and get someone else to use their strengths to do what they cannot. They stay positive because they know that they don’t have to be able to do it all themselves. They only have to do the part that they are good at and pay someone to do the part that they aren’t good at.

OK, not everyone is in the position to pay other people to do the part of the job they have difficulty with. There are other strategies you can use to help you overcome your personal difficulties . Just look around. Successful people are using strategies that help them all the time. Look and learn and then use them. Keeping organized is my personal challenge. I used a Palm Pilot for a while to help me organize my day and remember things. Although many people swear by it, I went back to my old paper planner. For some reason, I prefer using it to the electronic one. It doesn’t really matter. Use what works. I’ve seen very successful people use colour coded sticky notes to organize their day at work. Who cares what you use. As long as it works.

I guess my point is that a person can be successful despite having the challenge of having learning difficulties. The key to success is

  • having enough self-awareness to know that you can use your strengths to get around your weaknesses,
  • having SMART goals that are achievable,
  • persevering until you’ve reached your goals,
  • advocating for yourself so that you are in the best possible position to reach your goals,
  • having emotional support available when things aren’t going well and to celebrate with you when things are.

Really, the suggestions I’ve can be used by anyone, whether they have learning difficulties or not-at least the way I see it.

At this point I want to say that I like my new time line for posting podcasts. One every two weeks, give or take a few days, instead of once a week takes the pressure off. I am passonate about producing Teachers At Risk. Don’t get me wrong that’s not the problem. The problem is that I’m also passionate about doing other things as well. I can’t do all the other things I want to do if all I’m just doing my podcast. So, I’ve put it all into perspective and have decided to be relaxed about doing everything I love doing. Well, at least I’m going to try.

I want to thank Jason Jarrett from A Buddhist Podcast for helping me with my steep learning curve whens it come to the technical aspects of producing a podcast. Jason and Karen do such a wonderful job on the technical aspects of Buddhist Podcast but what is even better is the message that they send out. So much of what they say makes sense and is helpful for dealing with the vicissitude’s of daily life. I’ve been listening to it for a long time and look forward to every new show.

I want to thank Jason for helping me understand how to use some of the post production tools in Audacity. We talked on Skype, and he used the built in camera in his Mac to show me some hardware I might consider using. I found that so cool. There’s an ocean between us and yet we could talk to one another ,and he could show me the hardware as if we were sitting next to each one another. Then later he scanned some information and sent it to me via an e-mail attachment. How cool is that! I know some of you who are into all of this new technology might be yawning, but me I think it’s so cool especially when I remember I thought the Underwood portable typewriter my mom bought for me was so cool- except in those days it was neat. I still have that typewriter kicking around somewhere. Maybe I should see if a museum would be interested in it.

In my next podcast I’m going to revisit the topic of bullying and explore other ways that bullying can be stopped. Since only 15% of anti-bully programs are successful, we need to find other approaches that work.

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May

14

How effective are anti-bullying programs?

Filed Under Bullying | 2 Comments

If you’ve been following my posts you know that I’ve been doing a series on the issue of bullying. The series includes the following posts:

In these posts, I’ve looked at some of the whats, the whos, the whys, the whens, the wheres and the hows of bully. (I’m a teacher so of course I’m going to look at the 5 “w’s” and the how of things- that’s what teachers do. Ask any student.) Those of you who are listening to this as a podcast can come to today’s post at www.teachersatrisk.com and find the link to any or all of my six previous posts on bullying. To be honest, focusing this much on the topic of bullying is starting to get to me-all that negativity. I usually focus on catching kids being good, not on catching kids being bad. But we, that includes me need to focus on the issue of bullying and work together to stop bullying. I can’t pretend it’s not the, or it’s just what kids do. Right now I just want to find an anti-bullying program that stops the bullying and implement it ASAP- preferably next Monday morning. So my question is: What could we do to stop the bullying that goes on in schools and else where? I’ve used Dr. Ken Rigby’s report on bully interventions to help answer this and other questions.

We could educate the staff about bullying by first taking surveys to find out what type and how much bullying is going on. Then we could discuss the results at staff meeting so that teacher become more aware of the issue.

We could get parents and students more involved by discussing the problem and asking them for their support.

We could include anti-bullying content like social skills and anger control training, developing empathy, learning to be assertive and not aggressive, and conflict management and mediation.

We could increase supervision to try to identify and stop bullying during the times kids aren’t in the classroom.

We could encourage kids to tell us if they are being bullied or see someone being bullied.

We could develop a plan to deal with bullying when it happens.

According to Dr. Rigby we could emphasize the

need for clear rules about how students should treat each other and the need to apply sanctions when rules were broken. The sanctions could include detentions, loss of privileges, and suspensions, the sanction depending on the seriousness of the bullying (see Olweus, 1991).

We could place

greater emphasis upon problem-solving approaches in dealing with bully/victim cases. These included the use of mediation between bullies and victims and the use of the No-Blame Approach (Maines and Robinson, 1992) and the Method of Shared Concern (Pikas, 2002).

OK, we could do all those things, but what should we do? What does Dr. Rigby’s research tell us is the most effective thing to do to stop the bullying that goes on.

With several exceptions, the interventions (above) were reported as successful in reducing bullying The scale of the reductions varied widely. Very few have achieved greater than 50% reduction. The average reduction in bullying after interventions was around 15%, arguably only a modest achievement.

The first time I read that research showed that interventions on average reduced bullying by just 15%, I was stunned. The average success rate of anti-bullying programs was 15%. Why that’s hardly anything. Surely some programs are more successful than that. Logically, the next questions for Dr. Rigby would be

Have some programs been shown to be more successful than others ?

The answer at this stage is ‘No’. The reported outcomes of well evaluated programs do not allow us to claim that the ‘content’ of some programs is ‘better’ than others. The most widely evaluated program in the world is the Olweus program. This has enjoyed some notable success in the three applications in Norway, but has not been successful elsewhere - for instance in Germany, Belgium and South Carolina, USA, the outcomes were disappointing. Quite different programs - ones emphasising problem-solving approaches - have yielded some success in England, Spain and Finland. (See Smith, Pepler, Rigby, 2004, for details)

Under what circumstances are interventions likely to be more successful ?

Reports indicate that success is more likely to be achieved when they are (i) applied with younger, primary school students (ii) are applied thoroughly. This implies that early intervention in addressing bullying must be a priority and thoroughness of application is crucial.

OK. So for a anti-bullying program to be more successful than that average 15%, the kids in the anti-bullying program need to be in the primary grades and the program needs to be applied thoroughly. But, the kids I teach are in high school, not in the primary grades. I want to know what we can do to stop teenagers from bullying. As for thoroughness, I think that could apply to the high-school setting. What does it mean to be thorough? Dr Ridley defines thoroughly this way


1. An anti-bullying policy and associated program is carefully formulated and is communicated to all members of the school community

2. Members of the school community accept responsibility for carrying out the program - and do so. In particular:

  • Work is done on bullying with children in classes, as part of a planned curriculum
  • There is thoughtful attention continually paid to how children relate to each other, especially when there are indications that bullying is taking place.
  • Action is consistently taken to deal with cases of bullying in accordance with an agreed policy

3. Thorough implementation is likely to occur when:

Teachers care about the problem of bullying (Hence the need for surveys and subsequent discussion)

Teachers are meaningfully involved in the development of anti-bullying policy and know what they are expected to do.

Leadership in a school produces a ‘whole school approach’ in which coordinated activities to address bullying actually occur.

Now, in this report Dr Rigby does note that the evaluations of anti-bullying programs are rare and consist mainly of anecdotal evidence and not the usual scientific experimentation with its control or comparison groups and calls for neutral evaluators who do not have a vested financial interest in reporting successful outcomes from a given anti-bullying program. Those are certainly good points.

If it is the case that anti-bullying programs are not as effective as we had hoped, what are our other options. . The Canadian Public Health Association published its Safe School Study- all 62 pages of it in 2004 and suggests that we need to look at bullying as a public health issue.

Bullying as a public health issue. What exactly does that mean? I’m not sure now, but you know what? I’ll read those 62 pages of the CPHA’s report and anything else I find on the topic and tell you next time. Next time will probably be in two weeks. I’m getting really busy at school with year end stuff and now that Spring has finally come to Mississagua my garden beckons.

I might write a blog post or two before I do another podcast. Writing and publishing a blog hardly takes any time, unlike a podcast, and I do have some things that I’m working on for my grade 11/12 Learning Strategies Class that focuses on how to be successful in your career despite having learning disabilities. I think that even if you don’t have learning disabilities or aren’t a high school teacher who might be able to use what I’ve created for my senior class, you might learn something that can help someone you know who has learning disabilities. A lot of adults have learning disabiliites and don’t know it. Something I’ve said may be helpful. You never know. So check out my blog in mid week and I should have that post up.

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