Lost at School (38 page)

Some concerns arise because of misconceptions about the CPS model, and some arise in response to change in general. If people have misconceptions, providing additional information to clarify relevant aspects of the CPS model will often be helpful. It’s important, of course, for the additional information to be presented in a way that isn’t dismissive. Most of the following examples have been covered elsewhere in this book, but not in this context:

Concern:
Look, maybe there’s something to this CPS business, but I just can’t see myself doing it.

Response:
You can’t see yourself doing it. Tell me more about that.

Concern:
If I accept maladaptive behavior in my classroom, what sort of example does that set for the rest of my students?

Response:
There is absolutely nothing about the CPS model that has you accepting challenging behavior in your classroom.

Concern:
I’m not going to get jerked around by a kid or let him get away with disrupting my class.

Response:
What is it about the model that makes you feel that you’re going to get jerked around by a kid or let him get away with things?

Concern:
Anytime we capitulate to challenging kids, we let them know they have power over us.

Response:
The CPS model doesn’t involve capitulating. You’re still the authority figure. But you’re using your authority in a way that could be more productive.

Concern:
We do our challenging students no favors by protecting them from the consequences of their actions.

Response:
You’re not protecting them from the consequences of their actions. They’re still suffering all kinds of natural consequences for their actions. You’re just not relying on artificial, imposed consequences to teach them the skills they lack or help them solve the problems that are setting the stage for their challenging behaviors.

Concern:
Sounds like a new fad to me.

Response:
That kids with behavioral challenges lack important skills is well documented. This is no fad. Thirty years ago, kids who had difficulty reading were often thought of as lazy or dumb. Now, no one thinks of them in that way, and many people have the know-how to teach them the skills they lack. This is no different.

Concern:
I still think the kid is acting up for attention.

Response:
I wonder why he’s not seeking attention in a more adaptive way.

Concern:
So we don’t set limits on kids around here anymore?

Response:
Now that
would
be a recipe for chaos! Don’t forget, you’re setting limits when you’re using Plan B.

Concern:
What if I try Plan B and it doesn’t work?

Response:
I guess we’d sit down and try to figure out why.

Concern:
I don’t have time for this.

Response:
I hear you. It’s true, learning new skills is going to take extra time, but I’m thinking it will save time (and kids) once we’re good at it.

Concern:
How much can I really do at school when the kid’s going home to a mess?

Response:
I guess we have two options. One is to continue making things as messy at school as we think they are at home so the kid has consistent messiness across settings. The other option, if we’re convinced there’s nothing we can do to make things better at home, is to make things better here at school, so at least the kid has one environment in which he’s doing well. Better one than none.

Concern:
Things were going a lot better around here before we started doing this CPS.

Response:
It does feel that way sometimes, doesn’t it? However, we weren’t communicating very well before CPS, and we weren’t helping very many challenging kids, either.

Concern:
This is not how I was trained.

Response:
Yeah, me neither. But it does make sense, doesn’t it?

Overcoming the impediments to helping kids with behavioral challenges doesn’t happen overnight. But in all the schools, inpatient psychiatric units, residential facilities, and juvenile detention centers in which the CPS model has been implemented thus far, many of those who were resistant early on are now among the most ardent advocates for challenging kids and the model.

STRUCTURES FOR SUPPORTING AND SUSTAINING CHANGE

These days, many schools are organized by teams or learning communities. That’s because somewhere along the line we figured out that the challenges and problems faced by schools and teachers might be better resolved as a collaborative group rather than by individuals working in isolation. Some teachers who liked working in isolation haven’t been so enthusiastic about the trend, but my experience is that most have been generally receptive. Good thing, too, because working
toward a better understanding of kids with behavioral challenges and responding more effectively to their needs typically requires a collaborative group effort.

It is much easier to initiate change than to sustain it. Once people have begun implementing Plan B, they’re going to need a structure that permits them to achieve a consensus on the lagging skills and unsolved problems of individual kids, to review their initial and ongoing attempts to implement Plan B, and to figure out why Plan B didn’t go well, commiserate, express concerns, learn from others’ experiences, support one another’s efforts, and track progress. In many schools, team or learning community meetings are ideally suited to such activities. In the words of one junior high school principal, “My teachers have had enough one-day workshops…. I’m interested in providing them with help over the long haul.”

Early on, some proportion of meeting time will be spent learning the CPS model. As familiarity and comfort with the model grows, meeting time will be spent considering individual kids, reviewing their progress, and revising high-priority skills and unsolved problems. If you need help keeping track of all the crucial elements—lagging skills, unsolved problems, priorities, who’s doing Plan B on specific priorities, and what solutions they’ve arrived at—the CPS Plan and Plan B Flow Chart, available at lostatschool.org, should help. In addition to team meetings, many schools have found it necessary to carve out additional meeting time in which all relevant parties—administrators, clinicians, classroom teachers, and sometimes parents—meet (usually weekly) to discuss the “high priority” students about whom they have the greatest concerns.

If there’s no structure in your school providing regular meeting time, then staff won’t have an opportunity to commiserate, express concerns, figure out why Plan B didn’t go well, learn from others’ experiences, and support one another’s efforts, in which case your school has a problem to solve. It is impossible to provide high-quality help to a challenging kid when adults don’t have time to talk. That’s true whether you’re implementing CPS or any other effective model of care. It’s only the ineffective models of care that don’t require good communication.

The isolation of teachers is still ingrained in some school cultures,
so collaboration must be systematically embedded in the daily life of the school. Fortunately, there are numerous existing models for structuring and organizing the efforts of a group to solve problems collaboratively. One that has been tailored to schools in particular, and that has been adopted (to varying degrees) by many schools, is the Professional Learning Communities (PLC) model. While the primary focus of PLCs is academics, the structure and organization provided by the model are equally applicable to challenging behavior. For the unfamiliar, PLCs are composed of teams whose members work interdependently to achieve common goals and engage in collective inquiry into the best practice. Team members focus on finding answers to a variety of questions related to the well-being of students, teachers, and the school in general, including the following (parentheses added, for obvious reasons):

• How can we clarify and communicate the mission, vision, and goals of our school (as they relate to challenging kids)?

• How can we initiate, implement, and sustain a change process (so as to better understand and address the needs of kids with behavioral challenges)?

• How can we shape organizational culture and provide structures that support the culture we seek (so that our new ways of responding to challenging kids endure over time)?

• How can we create collaborative processes that result in both individual and organizational learning (so that no one feels isolated in his or her efforts to respond more effectively to kids with behavioral challenges)?

• How can we foster an environment that is results-oriented yet encourages experimentation (as it relates to the ways in which we work with challenging kids)?

As is clear from these questions, PLCs provide more than just an organizational structure for working toward improvement. The model also promotes a
mentality
that encourages a relentless focus on continuous improvement. PLC team members are dedicated to examining and questioning the status quo, seeking new methods, testing those methods, and then reflecting on the results. This is good, because
implementation of the CPS model requires the questioning of conventional wisdom and often draws attention to procedures, policies, and programs that are incongruent with a school’s emerging mentality and practices relative to challenging kids.

PLCs are also
action-oriented.
This is also good, because one of the biggest obstacles to school-wide implementation of CPS is the existing school discipline program, which is usually the embodiment of Plan A, and is usually codified in a document that lists what kids can and can’t do and what’s going to happen to them if they do or don’t do those things. CPS has prompted major revisions to the discipline code in many of the systems and facilities in which the model has been implemented. First, after seeing progress with Plan B, people usually begin to notice that the discipline code is both obsolete and no longer consistent with current beliefs and practices. Then a committee is usually formed to make proposed changes to the disciplinary code.

Members of a PLC are prepared to slosh around together in the mess, to endure temporary discomfort, to accept uncertainty, to celebrate their discoveries, and to move quickly beyond and learn from their mistakes. They realize that, even with the most careful planning, people will resort to old habits and things will go wrong. This is a good thing, too, because implementing Collaborative Problem Solving is, at least at first, messy and uncomfortable.

Reaching Across the Aisle

Another group of people—parents—needs to be included in the collaborative effort to improve things for challenging kids in a school. Parents often remark, “The folks at school don’t listen to me…. They don’t understand what we’re going through at home … and they don’t keep me informed about what they’re doing…. They just blame me when it doesn’t go well.” Of course, teachers may say, “Those parents don’t have the slightest idea what we’re going through with that kid. We can’t even get them to come in to meet with us … they just expect us to fix things when they send him to school.”

Kids who exhibit challenges at school typically evidence challenges
at home, too. On one hand, that’s bad news, because it means that the kid is struggling in multiple environments. But on the other, it’s good news, because it means that parents and teachers have something in common and it shouldn’t be too difficult for each party to come to the realization that there are shared concerns and frustrations.

As Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot notes in her insightful book,
The Essential Conversation: What Parents and Teachers Can Learn from Each Other,
great potential exists for productive collaboration between parents and teachers. Families and schools are overlapping spheres of socialization, and the successful learning and development of children depends on building bridges across them. Parents and teachers need each other and parent-teacher interactions can lead to new insights, deeper understanding, and mutual appreciation. When parents and teachers exchange highly specific information about the child—for our purposes, that initially means information about lagging skills and unsolved problems—the trust that is the bedrock of good communication between parents and teachers is fostered. Parents become convinced that they are being heard and that the teacher sees, knows, and cares about their child. Good communication also helps educators become convinced that parents are eager for information, eager to collaborate, and eager to help in any way possible. Both parties must do everything in their power to put children at the center of parent-teacher interactions.

Still, collaboration between the two parties is often loaded with emotion, especially when the topic is kids’ social, emotional, and behavioral challenges. Dr. Lawrence-Lightfoot writes of the subtle barriers that make parents feel strangely unwelcome in their children’s schools, almost as if they were trespassing on foreign ground, and of the natural tensions that exist in interactions between parents and teachers. Parents tend to be protective of their children, and entrusting their child to the care of a perfect stranger does not come easily to many. When things at school don’t go as well as hoped, as is often the case with challenging kids, some parents may blame teachers, question their qualifications, and attempt to impose solutions, while others may feel so helpless and so unable to affect the goings-on at school that they avoid contact with it completely.