Hanging In

trategies for Teaching the Students Who Challenge Us Most

Jeffrey Benson

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781416617617
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Many students arrive at school with unique mixtures of family histories, traumatic experiences, and special needs that test our skills and try our patience. In Hanging In: Strategies for Teaching the Students Who Challenge Us Most, veteran educator Jeffrey Benson shows educators the value of tenacity and building connections in teaching the students who most need our help. This essential guide includes

* Detailed portraits based on real-life students whose serious challenges inhibited their classroom experience--and how they eventually achieved success;
* Strategies for how to analyze students' challenges and develop individualized plans to help them discover a sense of comfort with learning--with in-depth examples of plans in action;
* Recommendations for teachers and support team on how to gain skills and support and not lose hope through the ups and downs of the work; and
* Specific advice for administrators on constructing systems and procedures that give all our students the best chance for success.

Just as teaching the students who challenge us is among our most frustrating experiences as educators, sticking with students until they finally "get it" is among our most rewarding. In

Hanging In, you'll find the inspiration and field-tested ideas necessary to create a patient and supportive environment for even the most demanding cases in the classroom.

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Chapter 1

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Toni: Absolutes and Teachable Moments

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Schools embody particular minicultures. That is a good thing—when we enter a school, we want to feel that we are in a special place, that we have stepped from the street into an environment that offers students opportunities that they don't experience elsewhere. The confluence of the staff, the community, the history of the program, the physical characteristics of the building and grounds, and the regulations from the government create a unique school culture. That culture and the special opportunities that it generates are secured by the school having predictable rules and expectations, and the adults having predictable emotional responses to student activity. This story centers on a student, Toni, whose needs bring into question which elements of the school's culture are absolute and which can bend.

Challenges for Toni:

• Trauma history
• Substance use
• Learning disabilities and diminished skill set
• History of school failure
• Lack of trust
• Racial isolation
• Explosive outbursts

Challenges for the adult team:

• Maintaining caring when verbally abused
• Not holding grudges
• Rethinking absolute school rules
• Maintaining school safety
• Being alert for teachable moments
• Carefully measuring responses
• Developing reliable plans
• Acknowledging student emotions and frustrations
• Communicating as a team

The Capacity to Trust

When Toni came to the therapeutic school for her initial intake appointment, she was too scared to be alone with us, and so was accompanied by her state-appointed social worker. Toni was not a likely candidate for success. The toxic combination of her learning disabilities, her many gaps in basic academic skills, her post-traumatic stress disorder, her persistent marijuana smoking, and her difficulty in trusting others might never allow her to take the healthy risks necessary to succeed. But there was something in Toni's willingness to hang in that was compelling. During our initial conversation, she flashed an occasional bright smile and gave serious consideration to what she was hearing. Her testing reports revealed a keen intellect, now muffled by her many difficulties. Most importantly, her relationship with her social worker hinted at a lingering ability to connect; if she could trust one consistently caring adult, she might trust the school staff and the other students in the school community.

Above all else, the foundation of schools that hang in with challenging students is building trusting relationships—relationships that allow these often overwhelmed young people to try again. Atwool (2006) notes that for students like Toni, success in school will be "unlikely to develop … without a relationship with at least one … adult in which they feel worthy and loveable" (p. 322).

Toni would need from us the fundamentals we provided all of our challenging students—namely, the six essential elements of hanging in shown in Figure 1.1.

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Figure 1.1 The Six Overarching Elements of Hanging In

1. Exquisite respectfulness: All students, parents, and educators must be treated with the greatest degree of human dignity and respect, in every room, every activity, and every interaction. This is not easy to do, and so exquisite respectfulness is practiced by all. If we should have a bad moment and speak sarcastically, angrily, or impatiently, we get back to the other person (whether teacher, administrator, parent, and especially student) and apologize. Respect is nonnegotiable. If a doctor's credo is "Above all else, do no harm," an educator's is "Above all else, do not shame the student."
2. Working from student strengths: For many challenging students, the hard circumstances of their lives have diminished the fullest range and expression of what they might have been able to do. While teaching these students the skills to manage what is hardest for them, we must recognize any and all strengths that can be building blocks of a successful life. Not every student in the world will reach mastery in trigonometry or Latin or essay writing, but all have strengths and talents. Students must experience school as a generative environment. The sum total of a day in school should not be an overwhelming reminder of what students cannot do. Ensure that all students have a school adult or activity that connects them to their best possible selves.
3. Opportunity for student reflection: "Aha" moments of learning are idiosyncratic. Challenging students come to school with jagged profiles of competencies and experiences. There are many lessons about school and life that challenging students have not been able to grasp yet. We should be consistently checking in with challenging students about what they are seeing and understanding. In those moments of conversation with a caring adult, students have the opportunity to crystallize a previously elusive notion, to say in many ways, "Oh, I get it now!"
4. Learning from errors: The path to competency, especially in the social and emotional domain, is filled with missteps. Students will make the same error more than once. We must make sure that consequences for their errors are not damning. Consequences for mistakes (including punishments) should be time-limited and offer a realistic way to regain trust. As much as possible, and as soon as possible after the misstep, offer ways for students to demonstrate and practice the replacement skill.
5. Allowing multiple interests to inspire diverse solutions: With challenging students, there is rarely one issue, one stakeholder, one obvious path. The students' struggles affect their educators, their peers, their families, the community at large, and most significantly, their own growth into adulthood. It is important to keep the multiple interests on the table and not get stuck in the trap that in order to satisfy one interest, the others must be sacrificed. The school community will grow by developing a rich menu of strategies.
6. Working as a team: No one effectively does the work of teaching challenging students alone for very long. Teachers and professional staff must have multiple venues to vent, ask for advice, brainstorm strategies, and celebrate successes. All educators bring to the work the experiences and skills that may be critical to the success of a single student and to the growth of the programs—make sure that meetings and other forms of communication access the full range of team input. Everyone who works primarily with challenging students should have an ally, a supportive supervisor, a coach.

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Toni Reacts

When Toni started at our school, she found the culture created by our six overarching elements disconcerting. As with many students on the verge of dropping out of school completely, she had tried a year or two of public high school and failed to bear up to its anonymity, stress, and the intense social cauldron. Toni often reacted explosively to situations she found stressful or scary. She could look menacing and swear like a sailor. This had gotten her into a lot of trouble at the public high school. At our school, no matter what Toni might say or do (in her case, academically more often not do), she was never shamed. Within such an emotionally safe setting, students have a shot at being reacquainted with their strengths and hopes. But could Toni?

Often we thought not. Like other students who have had hard lives, she experienced the staff's boundless friendliness as unsettling. "You all are too nice. I don't like you all saying hello to me every day." She might have been more comfortable if teachers held grudges and rejected her when she stomped away, muttering curses at them on those rough days when we would have to send her home early because she was refusing to comply with any school rules. Instead, the next day the teachers greeted her warmly, ready to start over on whatever lesson had scared her away the day before.

Toni faced other obstacles. She struggled with feeling isolated. Coming from a black and Latino family, she said, "I'm not used to being around so many white people. My perfect school would be all black." She struggled with homework, with required reading, and with math. But her willpower was enormous, and she had an innate ability to discern people's feelings and to attract people to her. She tested everyone with her abrasive language, impatience, her dark moods, and her approach-and-avoidance behavior when asking for help. For instance, a day after Toni flashed us her warm smile and showed us a dance step to a song we had never heard before, she'd burst into class with headphones on, singing loudly, and when asked to put the headphones away and settle into the task at hand, she'd explode: "This fucking school and its fucking rules. You just want to give students shit all day, don't you?"

Putting Behaviors in Categories

One of the key approaches for hanging in with students who display such unpredictable and explosive behaviors as Toni's is to identify which behaviors demand a rigidly consistent response and which behaviors suggest a more nuanced and context-specific response. Ross Greene (1998), in his excellent book The Explosive Child, describes three categories of behavior that we used to sift Toni's typical outbursts and to plan our responses: behaviors that are not to be tolerated, behaviors that the school can ignore, and behaviors we choose to respond to as teachable moments.

At one extreme are behaviors that are not to be tolerated, mostly because these behaviors threaten the safety or the integrity of the community. In this category for Toni was aggressively swearing at someone. Toni would be sent home for the remainder of the day if she was verbally abusive. The school team all knew the steps to take when Toni displayed intolerable behaviors. No one cherished the expectation to confront her at those times, but knowing that the teachers had each other's backs, and that the administration would follow through without any question, gave each one the strength to set that unwavering limit.

At the other extreme are behaviors that the school can ignore, even if other schools or programs wouldn't. Toni was allowed to wear hats and do-rags; in fact, the realization that such articles of clothing for her were not at all gang related but a safe and creative aspect of her sense of self led the school to reexamine all of its policies toward headgear. What Toni wore on her head provided opportunities for conversation and appreciation of her style. Her hats never interrupted the business of learning. Whether or not she wore a hat had no impact on the school's functioning.

Between the extremes of absolute rule adherence and ignoring is the largest category of behavior, those behaviors we choose to respond to as teachable moments. These behaviors occur in the vast gray area of context and relationships and so can be molded into opportunities to learn and grow. For Toni, these moments could be crucial in shaping her emerging capacity for self-control. When Toni turned away from teachers and muttered loudly, when she initially refused to follow a direction, when she slammed a book on her desk and declared the work to be "the stupidest thing I have ever been asked to do," the teachers did not have to immediately censure her. They did not ignore the behaviors; to do so would give Toni a false sense of how the world operated. Instead, they gauged each situation in choosing their responses: Toni's overall mood that day, the volatility of the peer group, their own relationships with Toni, the time available to engage with her. Through experience, teachers developed a handful of guidelines for addressing these behaviors; their accumulated wisdom from the decisions they made and the small successes with Toni were critical in Toni's development.

What worked best for Toni was when teachers gave her a quiet minute after her outbursts. The teachers stood close enough to demonstrate attention but not so close as to trigger Toni's fears. When they gauged that the moment was right, the teachers simply acknowledged and put into words what Toni was feeling: "Wow, that made you upset." The message to Toni was that the school was strong enough to weather her emotions. She might glare back, mutter more, walk farther away, but the teachers did not add to her escalating reactions. They let her safely simmer down. In various ways, again context dependent, the teachers would say, "Let's try that again, OK?" The goal was to communicate that she could move on, and that the staff would not hold grudges. Tomlinson (2012) describes this staff approach as "half pit bull and half Mother Theresa" (p. 88). It was one of Toni's strengths that she could recognize those attitudes in the adults.

We developed a form for sorting student behaviors into the three categories and deciding on responses. Figure 1.2 shows this form, which we call the "Specific Behavior Plan," filled out for Toni. The plan reflects shared team experiences and perspectives and represents a team consensus for how to respond. The form is a tool, not a set rule book, and should be reviewed and adjusted as the team gains new insights and the student develops new skills.

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Figure 1.2 Specific Behavior Plan

Behaviors that we are responding to as teachable moments:

• Toni shouts out when work is assigned.

What the teacher says or does to shape new behavior:

• Leave Toni alone for a few seconds.
• Say, "Can you tell me in a quiet voice what is hard about this?"

What student can be expected to do when given a prompt:

• Remain silent; no need to talk to teacher immediately.
• Ask for more time to cool off.
• Ask to go to her safe place.
• Talk to the teacher quietly.

Behaviors that demand one consistent response:

• Toni swears aggressively or is verbally abusive.

What the teacher says or does to interrupt behavior:

• "Toni, it is time to go to your safe area."

What is expected of student:

• To go to her safe area as quietly as she can.

Staff who must be contacted:

• The assistant principal, who will meet Toni at her safe area or come to the room and communicate to her the consequences to her actions once she de-escalates.

Behaviors that we are ignoring:

• Toni mutters under her breath.
• Toni puts herself down verbally.
• Toni scowls.
• Toni disregards headgear rule.

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The team also asked Toni to reflect on her own behavior, identifying situations that upset her, how she might avoid these situations, and how she might keep calm if she started to get upset. Toni and staff agreed on an escape plan for her, a safe place in the school where she could go to calm down if she lost, or was about to lose, control. Figure 1.3 is Toni's "Get Me Out of Trouble Plan."

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Figure 1.3 Get Me Out of Trouble Plan

Name: Toni

These things can really make me upset:

• Staff standing too close to me
• Not giving me time to stop doing one thing before I have to do another
• Feeling stupid

Ways I can avoid the things that upset me:

• Don't go into class if I am already pissed off
• Do my homework in study hall

Ways I can keep calm when things are starting to upset me:

• Ask to be left alone ("I want to be alone now")
• Listen to music

My escape plan—where I go in school to be safe when all else fails:

• Outside Sandy's office

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The Team Holds the Power

There is no way to overestimate the critical importance of adult teamwork ...