Jan

4

My new resolution- think big, start small, act now!

Filed Under "At-risk" students, The Way I See It | 2 Comments

Happy 2008 to all!

The other day as I was preparing the scalloped potatoes for dinner it came to me: as a teacher I’m expected to make New Year resolutions twice- once in September at the beginning of the new school year and once in January at the beginning of the new calendar year. I have to confess though, I don’t make many resolutions for either new year anymore. My resolutions now are more like New Day resolutions. I make them as I need them. Besides, my memory isn’t good enough anymore for New Year resolutions.

Still it was New Year’s Day, and out of habit I was thinking that I really should come up with some New Year resolutions, but I was in no hurry. I was just enjoying my time away from work and the bells that ring every 75 minutes. To be honest, I didn’t want to think about the New Year. I just wanted to savor the moment. But, there were other forces at work.

You know how sometimes when you hear or see something, you just can’t get it out of your head? That’s what had been happening to me this past week or so before New Year’s Day. Two sayings “Think big, start small, act now”, and “If not you then who; if not now when?” just kept rolling around in my head popping up ever so often in quiet moments. Why these two sayings persisted in active memory when who knows how many other sayings I‘ve heard were forgotten, I really don’t know. But I do know that when I combined these two saying with my passion for teaching kids who are at-risk of not achieving their potential, it made perfect sense. I was being encouraged to think big about helping kids who are disconnected from school, from home and/or from society - me, not someone else; and now, not later. Wow.

I’m not used to thinking really big- I’m a classroom teacher after all. I usually have to think in small, subversive ways. Thinking really big means expanding my vision to horizons outside of my classroom. Talking about horizons, I live in a huge metropolitan area, and often I can’t even see the horizon for all the buildings and expressways that are in the way. Come to think of it, many of my students are like that about their self-worth and their potential. They can’t see it clearly because things are in the way so they don’t believe they can be something other than they think they are - losers doomed to some kind of lesser existence.

No matter how many times I tell them that they are not losers, no matter how many times I get them to do multiple intelligence questionnaires to show them that they have all kinds of talents and strengths, unfortunately often not the ones schools value, many of my students don’t believe me. Why? I have to conclude that it’s because their daily experience leads them to think they’re losers. I’m through telling them that they‘re not losers. There’s no point in that! I’ve been telling them that for too many years now. Instead, I’m going to help them reconnect to school, to family and/or society. How, I’m going to do that? Good question!

Now let me say right off, I can’t do this by myself. I’ll need all the help I can get. I’ll need support from like minded people who know that changes at school need to be made so that these kids who are disconnected from school, from home and/or society can gain a sense of belonging, feel needed, useful and reconnected.

Wow, all that from preparing scalloped potatoes? :) Seriously, I’ll be sure to keep you posted on how my resolutions are going. If anyone has any ideas that will help me achieve my goal, please don’t hesitate to share them now or at any time in the future. I’m thinking these goals may be really long term goals, but then you never know.

Before I close I’d like to thank Ms. Whatsit for the amazing Teacher Potluck Carnival: Winter Break that she hosted on her site. I went to the Carnival and found absolute treasures. You’ve got to go and see for yourself. You’ll want to participate in the next one.

Also, I’d like to thank Kathy Rollheiser, Matthew Needham , Michael Cruz Tracy Rosen , and Jason Jarrett for taking the time during this busy season to share their thoughts about what was said here. I appreciate the opportunity to have a dialogue.

Just an aside here, I’ve been listening to Jason and Karen’s podcast - A Buddhist Podcast for two years now and have learned a lot about Buddhism from it. Recently, I’ve been really enjoying the podcasts he’s producing of a book called The Buddha, Geoff and Me. I’m hooked. It’s actually kind of funny. I had no idea what to expect before I started to listen to it. I can hardly wait for chapter 12. If you have a moment, take a listen. If you have two moments, check out Jason’s very thought provoking podcast Bring Soldiers Home that played on CC Chapman’s U-Turn Cafe .

 
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Dec

16

Helping kids with learning disabilities change negative habits of mind

Filed Under "At-risk" students, Special Education | 10 Comments

The other day in my senior class we were talking about what it feels like to have a learning disability. Many of the kids who are identified as having a learning disability said they felt retarded when they were told about their disability. Some of them laughed about being in my class and called it the “retard” class. I’ve heard their peers also call it the “retard” too class and laugh and comment about it. No wonder some of them want the door closed so that no one can see them sitting in the class. When I think about it, it’s a wonder any of them talk to me in the halls when they see me given that I ‘m the person who teaches that class. But, they do. Although, I must say that recently I had a grade 11 student cover his face with his hands when he saw that I was coming to talk to him. One of the students who has been identified as being gifted and having a learning disability told the class “One year they told me I was gifted; the next year they told me I was retarded.” How does a kid deal with that? This kid wasn’t dealing with it very well, unfortunately.

What do you tell kids who feel retarded because they have to live with the label of LD? I’ve told them everything I can think of. I’ve told them that they are not retarded. I’ve told them they have average or above average intelligence. I’ve told them they have interpersonal intelligence, intrapersonal intelligence, musical intelligences, etc that they could be proud of. But of course their daily experience in the classrooms doesn’t support pride. Now, I’m going to stop telling them things, and I’m going to have them start doing things that I believe will help them become more proud of who they are.

This is my plan. From now until the end of January, the end of the semester(I know that’s not a very long time, but I just thought of doing this now), I’m going to help them become philanthropists giving of their time, talents and money to help other people. This is my thinking behind my plan. At our school it’s really cool to be involved in various fund raising drives. The gifted kids do it all the time. The students helped raise eight thousand dollars to build a school in one of the developing countries. Students have raised thousands and thousands of dollars for charity. Every week there is some kind of fund raising going on. I’ve heard my students say that they’re never part of anything like that because other people think that they’re not good enough. It doesn’t matter what I say, they continue to feel that way. So, I’m going to use my class time to first teach them about philanthropy and then give them the opportunity to practice philanthropy and social action so that with each philanthropic act they do giving of their time, talents or money they’ll themselves in a more positive light adding to the common good and not see themselves as “retards” with nothing to offer the world.

Given that most of the students in the class are strong visual learners and extremely weak auditory learners and dislike reading, I decided that I would use a video or a movie of some sort to anchor the philanthropy unit. The question was what should I show them. I had no clue. So, I do what I normally do when I don’t have a clue. I googled and to my delight, I found a site that was most helpful. The site is called Finding Inspiration In Literature and Movies or F.I.L.M. for short. It is perfect because it has lots of suggestions for movies as well as questions kids could reflect upon. I showed them The Ultimate Gift, and they absolutely loved it and were more than willing to compete the assignments based on it. We’re at the point where the kids are going to interview an adult and create a video montage much like the one they saw in the movie. I can’t tell you how excited I was that they were excited about doing the assignments, even the kids who hate to write a word were willing to do this.

Now, I have to tell you something about showing videos or films to my class. Many of the kids in the class have short term memory problems and can’t do two things at the same time. I have found that if I show a movie over two consecutive days , many of the kids have forgotten much of the content. I’ve tried having them answer questions as they watched the movie, but that didn’t work well because they got so interested in the movie they couldn’t stop to answer questions .

So this is what I do now. I get the kids interested in the movie by asking a question about life related to the topic of the movie. Before I showed the movie The Ultimate Gift, I ask questions like: have you ever inherited anything; what would it feel like to inherit a million dollars; what would you do if somehow you got a million dollars? We talk about it for a while and then I told them that a character in the movie is facing those questions. Then I invited them to watch the film with me to see what happens. I showed the movie in it’s entirety, had a graphic organizer to help support memory and then I show the movie again in sections so that the kids could answer the questions. I find that showing the movie that way helps make sure that everyone get to see it at least once in class. If a kid wants to, I lend them the movie to take home and cross my fingers that they remember to bring it back the next day. Sometimes they do and sometimes don’t, but that’s life. I don’t remember everything either.

This semester I am teaching one Advance Learning Strategies class. Next semester, I teach two Advanced Learning Strategies classes so I’m going to spend some time before then, and see how I can incorporate more films to achieve the desired outcomes for this course.

I want my students to change the negative habits of mind they have about themselves, and I think I have found a way to help them to start do this. I think that when they start giving their time, energy, and talents to projects for the common good they’ll feel that they have done something valuable, that they are valuable and not a “retard”.

 
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Nov

4

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

Filed Under "At-risk" students, Behaviour Management | 2 Comments

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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