Teaching your Schools Most Difficult Students

Often with our most difficult students who demonstrate behavior that is sometime difficult to understand schools ask the wrong questions? 

We sit around at various meeting writing behavior intervention plans and often handing them to someone else ( a teacher ) to do.  This mostly ends up frustrating all the adults involved rather than actually helping anything. 

Frustration leads to anger which can lead to "righteous rage" by all involved.

Do remember that all behavior makes sense to the person who is behaving that way and all behavior is a form of communication.

When we start with what is wrong we go down a road of “fixing and remediating” before we even have a good understanding of what is going on with-in this young person we are serving. 

Our systems continue to focus on using pessimistic labels of all kinds for these children. 

Depending on what system they are in we often call them…..Disruptive, Disobedient, Disabled, Dysfunctional, Delinquent, Disordered, Diseased, Disrespectful, Disturbed…. 

The list of labels is endless……

Each of these labels have various strategies associated with them… from behavior modification, to boot camps to medication!!! 

Each works from a deficit view of the young person and often many of our systems do not even spend much time getting to understand the perceptions, thinking, and feelings that lead to the behavior we see. 

I want you to know that there is not a shred of evidence that deficit based  strategies and thinking help build resilient kids.

THE QUESTION WE MIGHT INSTEAD BEGIN WITH IS …WHAT HAPPENED TO THESE CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS ????

YOUR MOST DIFFICULT STUDENTS ARE CHILDREN IN PAIN!!

WHAT YOU ARE TRYING TO MANAGE...IS PAIN BASED BEHAVIOR

Your most troubled and troubling kids are in pain. Know this…..  Nothing comes from nothing!

We need to begin to see underneath the students surface behaviors to the real root of the difficulty. All behaviors serve some purpose  even if they may also cause more problems….

For example:

Lamar prevents the pain of rejections by keeping people at bay with his hostility.

Mary avoids the pain of more failure by simply refusing to work.

Crystal silences the pain of shame by inflicting self-abuse.

Kevin conceals the pain of his emptiness by wild pursuits of pleasure and binge drinking.

ARE FIRST ROLE AS ADULTS INTERVENING WITH THESE YOUNG PEOPLE IS TO-  DO NO HARM!!

Sometimes the students who need us the most are the hardest to love. They seem to be at war with themselves and do everything they can to push us away. Their behavior is clearly self-destructive. Unfortunately, there are no simple solutions for breaking down the walls that some students build around themselves. Even so, it helps that to remember that there is something golden inside every student.

Michelangelo is noted for having remarked that inside every block of stone dwells a beautiful statue and the sculptor need only remove the excess material to reveal the work of art within.

Our challenge – a difficult one – is to be centered, present, and compassionate enough to recognize the beautiful work of art that is waiting to be discovered in each and every one of our students. Are we centered, present, and compassionate enough to work with the excess material that hides it?
--Pete Reilly “A Path with Heart: The Inner Journey to Teaching Mastery-

We must begin here..........  

Let me know what you think.