Nov

4

Help kids with extreme behaviour problems using the Collaborative Problem-Solving Approach.

Filed Under "At-risk" students, Behaviour Management 

As a special education teacher, I spend a lot of time listening to stories about kids whose behaviour disrupts the class to the point where effective teaching and learning can’t take place. I hear stories all the time about kids who are difficult, who are willful, who are unmotivated, attention seeking, physically or verbally abusive etc. Some of these kids have been formally identified as having oppositional-defiant disorder(ODD), attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Tourette’s disorder, Asperger’s disorder, bipolar disorder, non-verbal learning disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). These students who have been identified as having special needs are now being mainstreamed into regular classrooms. Today, teachers not only need to know the curriculum and be able to teach it to their students effectively, but they also need to know how to deal with the different emotional and behavioural issues presented by their mainstreamed students.

Many teachers tell me they have no idea how to handle the extreme issues that arise with these kids. They’ve not had any special training that would help them deal with these special needs kids, and the strategies they usually use don’t seem effective. Teachers are very frustrated because nothing seems to work with some kids. The detentions, the calls home to parents, the suspensions and expulsions don’t seem to work for the kids they are applied to. Some kids continue to behave badly despite these disciplinary actions. Why? This was the question that motivated me to attend the The Explosive Child seminar by Dr. Ross W. Greene, an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and the Founding Director of the Collaborative Problem Solving Institute in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital.

When I first heard about the Explosive Child, I wondered what an explosive child was. I imagined this explosive child to be exhibiting behaviours much worse than I’d ever seen and ever want to see. Actually, I have to tell you that at some level I found the idea of an explosive child to be frightening. Which is actually kind of funny given that I’ve taught in open and closed custody facilities and have seen some pretty maladaptive behaviour over the years, but for some reason now that I’m teaching special needs kids in a regular high school I didn’t think that a seminar about the explosive child would be of interest to me. I was wrong.

Just an aside hear. I wonder if some regular classroom teachers are afraid of the special needs kids in schools. Teenagers can be very large, and if they behave badly someone could really get hurt. I know when I talk to some teachers, they tell me they don’t know what to do with these students when they misbehave because the strategies they use usually don’t work with those kids. In fairness to the teachers, many of them don’t have any special training and really don’t know what to do with these kids and the maladaptive behaviour they exhibit. Who, when they train to be a teacher, expects to have to deal with the extreme behaviour of so many kids day after day in their classroom.

As I said earlier, I wasn’t sure if the Explosive Child seminar would be useful for me. But it turned out to be very useful indeed. Dr. Greene describes the explosive child as one who

exhibits intense temper outbursts, oppositionality, verbal and physical aggression. These behaviours have extremely adverse effects on family life and functioning at school. Research has shown that such children may also be diagnosed with various psychiatric disorders. Conventional reward and punishment approaches to treatment have been shown to be useful in the treatment of many explosive/noncompliant children and adolescents. However, such approaches have also been found ineffective for a substantial percentage of such youth.

Well, I’ve certainly seen intense temper outbursts, oppositionality, verbal and physical aggression in classrooms, hallways and cafeterias at school, and yes these behaviours have extremely adverse effects on the functioning at school. And yes, many students’ maladaptive behaviour does not change even though they have been punished by having to serve detentions, or being suspended or expelled. The question is why the conventional reward and punishment approaches are not effective in so many cases?

Dr. Green has an answer for this question. He maintains that the difficulties some kids find themselves in are due to lacking cognitive skills in the domains of flexibility/adaptability, frustration tolerance, and problem solving. He holds that these deficits are really like a type of learning disability that needs to be treated like other learning disabilities. Explosive kids need support to help them learn and develop strategies that will help them be successful in school and elsewhere. Dr Greene notes that good teaching is being responsive to the hand you have been dealt. To this end, he advocates a treatment model called Collaborative Problem Solving or CPS. He describes the Collaborative Problem Solving program in his two books called The Explosive Child and Treating Explosive Kids. The one day seminar I attended on Friday gave me an overview of Dr. Green’s Collaborative Problem Solving model.

Just another aside here, I thought I might find it difficult to sit through the day long seminar. I get a bit antsy when I have to sit for more than a few minutes, and I tend to need to move around a lot. I can empathize with students who are expected to sit in their seats for 75 minutes at a time. I can’t do that. It seems like I have this twitchy energy I need to get rid of, so sometimes I doodle while listening to things. Sitting still at the movies is really hard too, let me tell you. I tell students to doodle if they have trouble sitting still. I know it sounds weird, but it works for me and for some of the students I’ve shared the strategy with. I didn’t feel like doodling for hours on end, so I took my knitting to the seminar and sat knitting a sock that will be one of my mom’s Christmas presents while listening to Dr. Greene. I hardly fidgeted at all, although I got some second looks, but hey I figured Dr. Greene wouldn’t mind given his collaborative problem-solving approach. I had the handout of all the power point presentation slides and didn’t need to take tons of notes. Besides, I planned on buying the books.

I’m not going to be able to go into everything that Dr. Greene shared with us on Friday. But I hope to be able to give you the highlights of his Collaborative Problem-Solving Model because I think it worth exploring further. He challenges some prevalent theories about maladaptive behaviour.

  • It’s the parent’s fault that kids are misbehaving.
  • Kids have learned to misbehave to get attention or get their way.
  • We can get kids to do what we want by rewarding or punishing them.

He doesn’t buy these explanations at all. Kids do well if they can. That’s it. Pure and simple. If they don’t do well then it’s because the kids can’t meet the cognitive demands being placed on them in a given situation. Dr. Greene believes that lagging skills in areas such as executive functioning, language processing, emotional regulation, cognitive flexibility, and social interactions are at the root of the maladaptive behaviour and that we need to teach kids to identify the problems that precipitated the maladaptive behaviour and solve them and then identify the lagging skills that lead to the behaviour and bring them up to speed. There is no quick fix. There is no one solution fits all.

Dr. Greene suggests that maladaptive behaviour is a result of a learning disability and asks the following two simple questions: what’s going on in this kid’s head, and what’s not going on in this kid’s head that we wish was? He maintains that challenging behaviours are highly predictable and due to an unsolved problem or a lagging skill set. Consequently, our interventions for these kids would be to teach the lacking thinking skills and problem solving.

The key steps to collaborative problem solving are: 1) being empathetic to the concerns of all parties involved 2) defining the problem accurately and 3) inviting all parties in the problem to suggest a solution that each can live with.

Now there is much controversy about using medication to stop maladaptive behaviour. Dr Greene makes the point that over the years he has decreased the use of drugs in trying to help kids with problems, but that in some cases such as inattentive/disorganized thinking, hyper-activity-impulsivity, irritability/obsessiveness, mood instability, general anxiety, tics and sleep disorders medical intervention is appropriate.

Although I’ve only scratched the surface of the Collaborative Problem-Solving approach, I hope I’ve been able tell you enough to pique your interest so that you will explore Dr. Greene’s ideas further either by reading his books or attending one of his seminars like I did. I think he’s on to something. He cited research that supports his approach. I’m willing to be open-minded enough to implement the strategies he advocates. I urge you to further explore Dr. Greene’s Collaboration Problem Solving by going to www.thinkkids.org where you can find more information on the topic.


 
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Comments

2 Responses to “Help kids with extreme behaviour problems using the Collaborative Problem-Solving Approach.”

  1. Liz D. on November 10th, 2007 9:28 pm

    An excellent summary of Greene’s approach. Thanks for sharing this.

  2. Elona on November 11th, 2007 7:58 am

    Liz,
    Your welcome.

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