Special Needs in Ordinary Classrooms

From Staff Support to Staff Development

Gerda Hanko

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138595866
• eBook ISBN: 9780429947889
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

First published in 1995. This book responds to the multiplying demands for support and training for teachers of integrated classes in mainstream schools. Such support through school-based development initiatives enhances teachers' abilities to meet the emotional, behavioural and learning needs of their pupils. This volume aims to assist school staff to further their efforts in curriculum content and delivery, teacher-pupil and classroom relationships and parent involvement.

PART I
Crossing Professional Boundaries

1
Bridging the Gaps

Those who are already working with teachers, either as special needs or pastoral post-holders on the school staff, or acting as consultants from the school services, confirm that teachers are troubled by the discrepancy between their actual response to many special needs and that required, that they therefore respond to a form of in-service support and training which succeeds in offering them knowledge and skill to reduce this gap, that such support can tap and maximise more resources than teachers are often given credit for, and enables them to use their insight and skills to work with and to help those pupils who give them special concern. There are, however, a number of obstacles which can prevent such support from developing. Those aiming to offer it therefore need to take account of the psychological and institutional difficulties which may militate against its acceptance or implementation, so that these may be resolved.

The possibilities for redeploying the skills of psychologically qualified professionals from the guidance and welfare network outside the schools and pastoral/remedial/special needs support systems within them have been elaborated in a number of accounts¹ since its early advocacy in official reports (Summerfield, 1968) and circulars (DES/DHSS, 1974). Leading experts (Tizard, 1973; Wall, 1973; Elton 1989) and practitioners (cf. Caspari, 1976; Cline, 1980) have urged them for more than a decade not to confine their attention to the few cases referred to them but to address themselves to the problems of teachers in ordinary classrooms which contain so many children in need of extra attention. At the same time, they reminded both teachers and special needs specialists that teachers are the only professionals in daily contact with all school-age children and have a unique opportunity to offer them new learning experiences which could help to meet their special needs. Warnings are now increasing about the bleak prospects for pupils with emotional and behavioural difficulties who “will become even more marginalized and excluded by National Curriculum pressures” if teachers do not get adequate support to deepen insights into how best to respond to such pupils’ needs (Mittler, 1990).

In spite of growing dissatisfaction, both in the schools and in the special support services, with such waste of existing expertise (Galloway and Goodwin, 1979; Gillham, 1978), more recent evidence (Hegarty and Pocklington, 1981; Desforges, 1988) suggests that most teachers still perceive the experts as inaccessible - in spite of these experts’ offer of an apparently ‘open door’ - except for occasional communication on the exceptionally severe cases which they have referred. There are many teachers who expect that the experts will not involve them or who view their skills as inapplicable to ordinary classrooms. Neither side seems to find it easy to change the status quo. The teachers do not know how best to invite those with special expertise to share it with them, and those who have the experience have doubts about how to offer it to their colleagues in the classrooms. As a result, both specialist services and the schools that they serve remain needlessly enmeshed in what have been called ‘tip-and-run’ arrangements (Mittler, 1985) and unnecessarily inadequate in each other’s eyes. When schools turn to the specialist services as a last resort, they clearly are not asking them for professional support when the special needs first show themselves, at the time when the special needs might be met by the teacher with support, before they become less tractable. Teachers who use the services only when convinced that the child is impossible to cope with may thereby imply that the problem resides in the child and, as Galloway (1985) argues, transfer responsibility to the specialist, thus absolving themselves from considering their interaction with the child or from looking for the precipitating factors in a crisis. Help is traditionally offered away from the situation in which the difficulty occurs and reaches only the referred child. It does not reach those with whom he interacts in the classroom, nor the many other children who could benefit from the kind of understanding offered to him. Children referred at the point of crisis are apt to experience referral as renewed abandonment by the teacher, which may or may not be the opposite of what was intended but which certainly adds to the difficulty of treatment. Lasdy, referral may suggest to parents that they have failed or may trigger off other fears they dare not face. They may then withhold co-operation or, if coaxed into accepting an appointment, may not keep it - children then becoming ‘referred-but-not- seens’ (Mearns’ and Kay’s (1985) RBNSs) - or may fail to return, thus leaving the teacher to cope without support until the child transfers his difficulties to the next school.

Traditional referral arrangements nourish the beliefs and myths of maladjustment as a distinct condition, salvation by experts, and ordinary teaching skills and resources as insufficient or unrelated to cases of special need. These perpetuate the sharp division between special expertise and ordinary teaching and can foster defensiveness between professionals who should be working as partners.

Teachers complain that they cannot obtain the kind of information which might help them to be more supportive to the child which they have referred; they deride the experts, who ‘only tell us what we already knew’, or ignore their written advice as impractical if they lack opportunities to discuss the issues with them. Perfunctory entries in school records that ‘Tom has been seen by the psychologist’ further suggest that the content or conclusions of the session were not deemed to be his teachers’ business or within their competence.

Those with special expertise, however, may notice only the teachers’ inadequate handling of the child prior to referral and may show concern that teachers seem to use them as a dumping ground. They may fail to appreciate how the demands of the school system can blunt teachers’ sensitivity to children’s emotional difficulties and to underestimate the obstacles (including the stress that teachers may be undergoing when working with difficult children in front of a class) which interfere with an appropriate response to them. The specialists’ advice may then imply criticism of the teacher and appear irrelevant to the classroom. Both sides frequently feel unappreciated and unfavourably judged by the other. This can make teachers doubtful about offers of support by ‘omniscient’ experts and increases the obstacles for specialists trying to reconstruct their service, to redeploy their skills and to include in their remit systematic, rather than incidental, support work to reach a maximum number of teachers.

Yet there are accounts which show that groups of teachers and those with special expertise in the field of exceptional emotional and educational needs can work together. This is in spite of a widespread view that ‘getting teachers to work together is a problem’ (Eavis, 1983) and that ‘professional pride is a major barrier to teachers sharing their anxieties and frustrations in attempts to tackle their difficulties’ (Spencer, 1983). Although such apprehensions are not unfounded, teachers are the first to refute them, once a way has been found to establish such groups. They are eager to deepen their understanding of pupils’ emotional and behavioural difficulties as part of their professional task and educational concern, as their own latent skills and resources are released. These resources may have remained untapped owing to mistaken beliefs about the separateness of educational and welfare functions and the extent to which teachers can make a difference to children’s special needs. Teachers may have been insufficiently aware of the significance of their observations and knowledge about a child’s situation to be able to identify the special needs underlying the observed behaviour and to adapt their teaching to them. Alternatively, they may have based even considered opinions on inadequate knowledge and understanding or on partial or distorted perceptions.

I shall first try to show, for the benefit of teachers hesitant about requesting support, how school-based support and training groups can deal with issues such as these, to encourage them to invite their own special needs support or pastoral colleagues to examine these issues with them. In the later sections, I shall discuss the role of special needs consultant and support staff, whether on the school’s staff or external, and examine the preliminaries necessary for establishing staff support groups and the skills required for their development.

Note

1 See, for instance:

Caspari (1962), Skynner (1974), Wall (1977; 1979), Gillham (1978), Daines et al (1981) and Dowling and Osborne (1994) (on the case for child guidance and schools psychological services staff); Lyons (1973) and Irvine (1979) (from the social work perspective); Wilson and Evans (1980), Garrett (1983) and Mittler (1984) (for special schools staff); Barrett (1985), Clunies-Ross (1984), Lewis (1984), Sewell (1982), Smith (1982) and NARE (1979; 1982) (for remedial teachers); Dunkley (1980), Fuller (1982), Fulton (1980), Longley (1980) and Sisterton (1980) (for the case of counsellors); Blackburn (1983), Bulman (1984), Button (1983), Taylor (1984), Mayes (1985), Ribbins (1985) and Stagles (1985) (for pastoral care, tutorial and middle management staff).

2
Examples of Case Discussions with Groups of Teachers

I shall try to show how the teachers who participated in these discussions increasingly felt that they managed to handle more appropriately the difficulties that they had with some of their pupils, none of whom I had met. This happened because they were learning how to widen their perception of the problems so that they could be translated into interaction terms, on the basis that the disturbance-producing situations and backgrounds were better understood. By taking into account the child’s likely experience of both the situation and its antecedents, using quite precise questions about the child and the classroom context, the teachers were helped to see for themselves how aspects of a child’s situation might have created the difficulties or might be maintaining them; the teachers discovered how they might, by educational means, improve the situation and those of other children with similar problems.

The children discussed are selected partly because of the range of problems described by their teachers, partly to demonstrate how work in the groups developed in a range of primary and secondary school settings, at different stages in the life of a group, and partly to show how the situations discussed and the solutions attempted are of equal relevance to primary and secondary schools (some groups contained teachers from both).

The discussions are described in sufficient detail to show the step-by-step development of issues as they suggested to the teachers workable solutions, both for the child under consideration and as part of the problem-solving framework that developed in consecutive sessions. As will be seen, no attempt was made to categorise the children, who could have been variously labelled as emotionally disturbed, socially disturbing, troubled or troublesome, gifted but difficult, work-refusing or slow-learning, with a range of symptoms, nor was there any attempt to classify their behaviour, to offer clinical diagnoses or to suggest a modified form of clinical treatment. In other words, no decisions were made for the teachers, and they were not encouraged to perceive the children solely in terms of their difficulties. Instead, we focused on the context of the concern and the disturbance; on the children’s differing reactions, on what these seemed to indicate about their expectations of others and their view of themselves, on the past experiences which can produce such expectations and on the new learning experiences which might favourably amend expectations and extend the children’s view of themselves and of others relating to them.

All names are fictitious, and identifying detail has been omitted.

A teacher facing a sudden disturbing change in a child’s behaviour

Teachers in any kind of school may suddenly be confronted with a child in turmoil and may be unsure how to react. It certainly worried Mrs. A. when she faced the changes in Tony.

Tony

‘Something terrible is happening in my class with Tony; can we - please! - talk about him today?’ was the first remark in the group session. As in other schools in this multiproblem city area, the staff of Tony’s school (a junior school) and of the adjacent infant school were meeting weekly to discuss, with me as an outside consultant, how best to work with those children whose behaviour caused them concern. This was their fourth meeting, and they had intended to explore another child’s case, but their colleague implored them to make time for Tony. In view of this urgency they agreed to try and discuss two cases in this session, giving about 45 minutes to each.

Mrs. A. briefly told the group that nine-year-old Tony had been a sound learner, most helpful with other children and a splendid member of the class. She had always found it easy to have a good relationship with him. She knew that he and his older brother were brought up by his father and paternal grandparents who seemed to be out of touch with his mother. The school had heard that his mother had been imprisoned many years previously and was full of admiration for the father and grandparents for the caring home that they provided and the very active, busy life that they led which gave the boys plenty of stimulation through many events and entertainments.

In the previous week, however, during the class’s news period, the children’s talk had turned from a news item on ‘Thieves Caught Red-handed’ to the question of whether such people should or should not be sent to prison. Tony had then suddenly got up, told the class that his Mum had been sent to prison many years ago, and that he did not know whether she was still there or whether she was dead. He then sat down, white and silent for the rest of the afternoon, but from the next day had turned into a ‘demon’ in class and playground, constandy interfering with other children. He was now an unmanageable trouble-maker, after having previously been ‘mature for his age’. The teacher, disturbed at this transformation, told the group how she had been trying to cope by keeping the whole class as busy as she could so that there would be no chance for anybody to mention what Tony had told them. As she was saying this, however, she interrupted herself, suddenly wondering whether her own frantic busy-ness was perhaps similar to what was happening at Tony’s home all the time, with everybody trying to keep the children’s minds occupied with other matters in order to ‘protect’ the children. She wondered what was the right thing to do? Should she just go on trying to manage Tony somehow, hoping that it would all eventually die down? What was Tony wanting her to do?

In the discussion which followed, the group was guided to focus on the stress felt separately by the child and by the teacher. Was it possible to share the stress with the child? He had, after all, been close to his teacher beforehand. Had the event not been a communication of something which nobody seemed able to share with him but which was bound to dominate his thoughts? Had his outburst also led to the loss of a necessity barrier, which he now did not know how to do without and perhaps needed to restore? Were his feelings and anxieties now complicated and intensified by having given away the ‘family secret’ to the whole world? Was there any way in which the teacher could show that she understood all this, without intruding any further, and in which the child could be left to make use of the teacher’s understanding? Would it perhaps be possible, eventually, also to convey to the father how important it was for children to be allowed to talk about a missing parent and to think well of her?

Mrs. A. was left with these questions in mind, and the group turned to their second case. She had found the discussion helpful and was relieved that others had been able to share her anxieties about Tony. A fortnight later she reported that, two days after the discussion, she had managed to find a good moment, after ‘another awful day with Tony’, to have a quiet talk with him. She had told him that she had noticed how differently he had been behaving lately, how difficult all this was for everybody, how it had all started after he had told them about his Mum and how worried he probably was about it all. She had said that she understood what he must be feeling, and that if he wanted to talk to her about it, she would always have time for him, but that if he did not want to, that would be alright, too. Since then, his troublesome behaviour had ceased. He had not accepted her invitation to talk, but was again relating well to her and to the other children.

We could have left it at that, had the purpose of the group been merely to give teachers an opportunity to get together to share their problems about dealing with specific cases. However, more is required if such case-focused analysis is to aid a training process in which insights gained about a specific case can be conceptualised to become part of a framework for dealing with similar problems as they arise. Such conceptualisation was attempted in this group by inviting the teachers to examine in depth Tony’s disturbing behaviour and its termination.

It was suggested to the group that the cessation of the boy’s troublesome behaviour, and his more relaxed way of relating to others afterwards, seemed to show that he felt understood and that he had needed his feelings to be acknowledged. It seemed that the teacher had managed to help him to ‘reach back over the gap of his breakdown and forward to renewed good relationships’, as has been described in other similar cases (Winnicott, 1965). Intuitively, the teacher had understood his aggressive behaviour as a sign of panic, and his interference with the work of other children - stopping them from functioning - as a message of distress. She was helped to see both as representations of ‘traumatic - unthinkable - experience at an early age’ (Dockar-Drysdale, 1973), triggered off by the stimulus of the news period on prisons. She had also realised, as she presented the case, how sheltering children from talking about troubling events such as the loss of a parent, as both she and Tony’s family had tried to do, may have more to do with the adults’ own ne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Introduction
• Part I Crossing Professional Boundaries
• Part II A Framework for Teacher Support
• Part III Providing Support: Guidelines and Tasks
• Bibliography