Lost at School (37 page)

“Then we wonder why they won’t talk to us,” observed Dr. Bridgman. “They’d be a whole lot more receptive to addressing our concerns, without being forced, if we were equally receptive to addressing theirs. Of course, that’s why the first step of Plan B is Empathy. We want the kid to know we really are invested in taking his concerns into account.”

“I get it. But I still don’t get what I should do if he doesn’t care about the other kids in the class feeling bad.”

“Well, he doesn’t have to care deeply about the other kids to work on trying not to make them feel bad. He just needs to take your concern about the other kids into account.”

“So I should just go back to Plan B and see what solutions we come up with?”

“Exactly. And keep me posted.”

The next day, Mrs. Franco wrote a note to Travis asking if they could talk again. She noticed him lingering when his classmates were on their way out to recess that afternoon. He waited until the last kid was just out of sight. “You don’t have to give me notes anymore if you want to talk to me.”

This news took Mrs. Franco a bit by surprise. “Oh, OK.”

“How many more times do I have to talk to you?”

“Um, I’m not exactly sure.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“I just wanted to finish the conversation we started the last time. You know, about how kids are treating one another.”

“How ’bout after school today?”

“That’ll work.”

Travis beat a path for the door.

“Thanks, Travis,” Mrs. Franco called after him.

During the day, Mrs. Franco thought she saw Travis looking at her a few times. After the class was dismissed at the end of the day, Travis reappeared at the door. He announced his time line. “I only have five minutes.”

That’s more than the last time, Mrs. Franco thought, suppressing a smile. “Five minutes it is. Shall we get down to work?”

Travis nodded.

“So, last time we talked, I learned that you got bullied in the first grade and had to learn how to bully kids so they didn’t bully you. I think you said the best offense was a good—no wait, it’s the other way around—the best defense is a good offense.”

Another impassive nod from Travis.

Mrs. Franco continued. “I understand that you don’t want to get bullied. The thing is, no one else in our class wants to get bullied, either, and we have some kids in our class who are feeling pretty badly about how they’re being treated.”

Travis nodded yet again.

Mrs. Franco had arrived at the Invitation. She took a deep breath. “I’m wondering if there’s a way for us to make sure you don’t get bullied—so you don’t feel bad—and also make sure the other kids don’t get bullied—so they don’t feel bad, either. Do you have any ideas?”

Travis appeared to be considering the question, though, given his blank look, it wasn’t easy to tell. Finally he spoke. “The other kids look up to me now. I don’t want to lose the friends I have. I don’t want kids to start bullying me again.”

Mrs. Franco digested this information. “You’re worried that if you stop giving kids a hard time then they wouldn’t look up to you, and the kids who are your friends now won’t be your friends anymore, and you might start getting treated badly again.”

Travis nodded. Mrs. Franco waited for more. When Travis said nothing, Mrs. Franco wasn’t sure what to do next. Then she remembered that solving the problem wasn’t her job, it was
their
job. “I wonder what we could do about that.”

Travis shrugged.

“This is a tough problem, Travis,” said Mrs. Franco. “What do you think? How can we help you keep your friends and keep you from getting treated badly but make sure other kids don’t get treated badly, either?”

Now Travis was rubbing his forehead. “I can’t ease up unless I know kids are going to treat me OK, too.”

“Yes, I understand. It’s going to be hard for you to feel comfortable treating the other kids nicely without knowing if they’ll return the favor.”

“Yep.”

“I’ll be perfectly honest with you, Travis. I’m not sure how we’d do that. I think I need to think about it a little. Unless you have any ideas.”

“Why don’t you talk to the other kids about it, too? Not just me.”

“I heard that in Mrs. Woods’ class, they talk about this stuff all together, so everybody’s working on it at the same time,” said Mrs. Franco. “We could do that in our class. Do you think that would help?”

Travis shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know yet.”

“Do you think the other kids would want to talk about it?”

“I don’t know.”

“I wonder if we should try it with the whole class and see how it goes. What do you think?”

“I guess.”

“At the moment, I’m having trouble thinking of any other ideas. How about you?”

“No. OK, are we done?”

“I think we are. Thanks, Travis.”

As Travis said, “Yep,” and got up to leave, Mrs. Franco noticed the slightest smile on his face. I think I just did Plan B, she thought, allowing herself a fleeting moment of exhilaration. Then she started thinking about the hard work that lay ahead.

CHAPTER 8

School of Thought

We’ve come a long way. In the seven preceding chapters, we reviewed the lagging cognitive skills and unsolved problems that set the stage for kids’ challenging behavior, covered how to identify and prioritize these lagging skills and problems, considered why traditional school discipline programs don’t teach skills or resolve problems, covered the ins and outs of doing Plan B, and described how to go about using Plan B to teach skills, solve problems, and reduce challenging behavior with individual challenging kids and in an entire classroom. Now comes the really hard part:
changing the culture and practice of discipline in an entire school.
This is no small undertaking.

School systems and individual schools are so vastly different—in terms of personnel, leadership structures, organization, job responsibilities, schedules, populations served, existing disciplinary practices, unions, and so forth—that no fixed template can be applied to all schools mobilizing for and embarking on this challenge. But there are some key components that do cut across all schools:

•
Individuals
who create the impetus for change, who have a sense of a school’s readiness for change, and who have the capacity to
respond to and help colleagues who are uneasy about or struggling with change

•
Structures
that foster the communication and teamwork needed to facilitate and sustain change, including those that would help parents and teachers “reach across the aisle” to work together more effectively. If these structures do not presently exist they must be created.

•
Leaders
who foster and encourage change and who cultivate a school climate that is geared toward continuous improvement

In this chapter, we’ll consider each of these ingredients as they relate to implementation of the CPS model, along with the manner by which Plan B can help make the journey a bit smoother.

IMPETUS FOR CHANGE

Appreciation of how challenging students are being misunderstood, treated in ways that are counterproductive, slipping through the cracks, and losing their futures does not happen through osmosis. Someone is going to have to get the ball rolling. I’ve heard it said that the impetus for creating this awareness and mobilizing people for the changes it brings must come from the leaders of a school or school system. There’s no question that these tasks are easier if administrators are on board, even if they’re not leading the charge. But my experience is that the impetus for change can come from many different people. It could be a teacher who has lost faith in the existing system of school discipline; a parent weary of seeing his or her child’s lack of behavioral progress at school; a school psychologist or social worker with an unmanageable caseload; a guidance counselor wishing to expose colleagues to some new ideas; a principal eager to turn things around in an entire building; an assistant principal who has come to appreciate the futility of the school’s existing discipline problem; a special education director or school board member intent on reducing the high cost of servicing kids who get lost along the way; or a superintendent trying to be responsive to teachers who have, for a long time, been pleading for guidance and support in dealing with kids who are disrupting the classroom process.

Some schools are more ready for change than others. In some schools, the staff and leaders have already come to recognize that their understanding of and approach to challenging kids need some serious adjustments, and are ready, perhaps even eager, to be introduced to the specifics of CPS. In other schools, staff and leaders aren’t yet familiar with the research providing compelling evidence of lagging cognitive skills in challenging kids, haven’t adjusted their views on the nature of these kids’ difficulties, and therefore haven’t begun to recognize the imperative to alter disciplinary practices. In these schools, raising awareness is often the first step, and it is often necessary to slowly get the ball rolling by quietly (or not so quietly, depending on your style) calling into question conventional wisdom and raising the consciousness of school staff about the tremendous harm caused when we fail to understand the difficulties of kids with behavioral challenges and fail to treat them in a way that is more enlightened and humane. This process can begin through conversations with colleagues (“I know Elena’s a pain, but I can’t help feeling that the way we’re treating her is doing more harm than good”), in team meetings (“This is the nineteenth time Hector has been suspended this year. It’s hard to imagine that more suspensions are going to fix what’s really going on with that kid”), and in faculty meetings (“I’ve been reading some interesting material lately about why challenging kids are challenging; material that would have major ramifications for the way we do things around here”). The goal is not to be adversarial, but rather to raise awareness, get people talking, and help people take off their “sunglasses” and focus on the glaring reality that the needs of a meaningful subset of students are not being well addressed. Thinking big usually involves starting small.

You may find it easier at first to reach people at a purely practical level—since the current way they’re approaching kids with behavioral challenges isn’t going swimmingly—rather than hoping to tap into a wellspring of empathy for challenging kids. That said, Pam Charles, a principal at a public school for challenging kids in New York, has commented that fostering empathy for kids with behavioral challenges among her staff was the ingredient central to helping the kids at her school and reducing out-of-school suspensions from several hundred each year to zero. “The primary thing we focused on was empathy…. We knew the histories of the kids in our school, what they’d been
through, one story worse than the next. We knew the brain research, why the kids were behaving the way they were. We wanted to be the place where empathy happens. We wanted to create something exceptional for kids who had no voice, to be the voice of the voiceless.”

When people are ready for the specifics of CPS, you’ll want to start by providing information about the lagging skills setting the stage for challenging behavior in kids, perhaps at a faculty meeting or an in-service. To help people sink their teeth into this material, it’s often useful to provide copies of the ALSUP, to consider each lagging skill on the list, and, when possible, to practice completing it. Notice that providing information about Plan B does
not
come first. If people don’t understand that lagging skills and predictable unsolved problems are setting the stage for challenging behavior, then Plan B won’t make a great deal of sense and there will be a tendency to view Plan B as just another technique that can be dispensed with if it doesn’t instantaneously reduce a kid’s challenging behavior. Understanding the
why
of challenging behavior is what brings people back to Plan B even when the going gets rough.

If, after learning about CPS and discussing options, people are now eager to move toward implementation, there are some important considerations.

• Should implementation begin as a pilot program with individual students and/or teachers?

• Should initial implementation occur in selected classrooms, grades, learning communities, or teams?

• Should participation in training occur on a voluntary basis or as a school-wide initiative?

• What are the best mechanisms for ongoing training and teamwork so as to ensure the sustainability of the effort?

These questions must be answered in each individual school based on its needs. There’s no right or wrong way to do this.

You’ll want to plan ahead for the eventuality that some people are going to struggle with and passively or actively resist change. Modifications of standard practice aren’t typically greeted with wild enthusiasm, and school discipline can be an especially thorny subject. Some people find the tenets of the CPS model to be incongruent with their
own thinking or training. Some people feel they’re already doing a good job with their challenging students and don’t see the need to change course, or may be somewhat resentful of anyone’s efforts to alter what they do in their classrooms. Others are “initiative weary,” and have difficulty envisioning how they’ll find the time to learn the skills or use the model. Still others believe that implementation of CPS will make the school less safe, or feel that helping kids with behavioral challenges falls outside the job description of educators. All are valid concerns, of course, and should be clarified and addressed.

How would one go about doing that? Well, clarifying concerns is something for which the Empathy step of Plan B is particularly well suited. The ingredients of Plan B are as important in adult-adult interactions as they are in adult-child interactions. Adults, just like kids, are more likely to participate in solving problems when they feel that their concerns aren’t being disregarded.