Maryville School Counseling
November 2017
November Guidance
November Guidance will take place the week of November 20th and the 21st. Since it is a short crazy week to begin with, we will just shove 15 guidance lessons into two days as well! I have yet to decide what the focus of this guidance lesson will be, but it may be a review of the discipline referrals or it may be on Patience.
If you have any specific suggestions, please let me know. You can sign up for guidance here:
ABRI/ PBIS Data
PBIS and ABRI data
Following Fall Break we started our mentoring program again. Students from all grade levels were selected to check in with a mentor several times a day. The mentor works with these students to create a positive relationship that will, in turn encourage the children to come to school and follow expectations. Students who struggle with positive attendance habits were selected for this group, but we also looked at students who are struggling with their behavior as well. Students who have already received multiple referrals have been given a mentor to check in with daily.
Secondly, we have created a group focused on bus behavior. Students (mainly younger students) who have earned one bus referral this year already will receive an information slip on a bus behavior group. These students will meet several times to review bus expectations. The goal is to combat and proactively prevent more referrals from occurring. Mrs. Esterle and myself have also scheduled a meeting with the bus drivers to review problem areas and determine focus points for encouraging positive behaviors.
Each bus driver will also receive "Awesome Bus Rider" tags. When they distribute these to students, the students may go to the front office to receive their "Awesome Bus Rider" sash. This sash can be worn the entire day and lets everyone know they do a great job with bus expectations.
Here is a more in depth look at our data from this year:
AUGUST 2017-NOVEMBER 2017
(This school year is represented by the much higher purple line.)
(During the month of October fifth graders did not earn a SINGLE referral. I don't know if this has EVER happened before!)
(The positive thing is that most students have only earned 1 referral. . .if any. . .but two students are showing they need serious, individualized interventions already.)
Mystery Rewards
Check out the class reward system pictured above. On a poster board, create secret rewards for your class. You can sprinkle the poster board with multiple rewards, ranging in size. Cover the rewards with post it notes for activities or achievements your class can accomplish (perfect attendance, everyone on green or higher, helping another classroom, receiving a compliment for another staff member, etc.) When your students accomplish one of the goals, they can pull off that post it note. Once a full reward is uncovered, the class can "cash it in." Think of it like Sink My Battleship!
Trauma in the Classroom
by Caroline Miller
We tend to think of trauma as the result of a frightening and upsetting event. But many children experience trauma through ongoing exposure, throughout their early development, to abuse, neglect, homelessness, domestic violence or violence in their communities. And it’s clear that chronic trauma can cause serious problems with learning and behavior.
Trauma is particularly challenging for educators to address because kids often don’t express the distress they’re feeling in a way that’s easily recognizable — and they may mask their pain with behavior that’s aggressive or off-putting. As Nancy Rappaport, a child and adolescent psychiatrist who focuses on mental health issues in schools, puts it, “They are masters at making sure you do not see them bleed.”
Identifying the symptoms of trauma in the children can help educators understand these confusing behaviors. And it can help avoid misdiagnosis, as these symptoms can mimic other problems, including ADHD and other behavior disorders.
In brief, the obstacles to learning experienced by these children include:
- Trouble forming relationships with teachers
- Poor self-regulation
- Negative thinking
- Hypervigilance
- Executive function challenges
Trauma and trouble forming bonds
Children who have been neglected or abused have problems forming relationships with teachers, a necessary first step in a successful classroom experience. They’ve learned to be wary of adults, even those who appear to be reliable, since they’ve been ignored or betrayed by those they have depended on.
“These kids don’t have the context to ask for help, notes Dr. Rappaport, a school consultant and associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “They don’t have a model for an adult recognizing their needs and giving them what they need.”
Many of these children haven’t been able to develop secure attachments to the adults in their lives, adds Jamie Howard, a clinical psychologist and head of the Trauma and Resilience Center at the Child Mind Institute. They need help to let other adults into their lives. “Kids who’ve never developed that early template that you can trust people, that you are lovable and that people will take care of you,” Dr. Howard explains, “need support to form that kind of relationship.”
One of the challenges in giving that support is that when kids misbehave, our schools often use disciplinary systems that involve withdrawing attention and support, rather than addressing their problems. Schools have very little patience for kids who provoke and push away adults who try to help them.
Instead of suspending children, Dr. Rappaport argues, schools need to work with them on changing their behavior. When a student is acting up in class, she explains, teachers need to recognize the powerful feelings they are expressing, if inappropriately.
Rather than jumping right into the behavior plan – deducting points or withdrawing privileges or suspending — Dr. Rappaport stresses the importance of acknowledging the emotion and trying to identify it. “I can see that you are REALLY angry that Andrew took the marker you wanted!” she suggests. “If you’re wrong about what the student is upset about, he’s likely to correct you.”
Acknowledging and naming an emotion helps children move towards expressing it in a more appropriate way. Communicating that you “get” him is the necessary first step, she explains, to helping a child learn to express himself in ways that don’t alienate and drive away people who can help him.
Poor self-regulation
Traumatized children often have trouble managing strong emotions. As babies and toddlers, children learn to calm and soothe themselves by being calmed and soothed by the adults in their lives, Dr. Howard notes. If they haven’t had that experience, because of neglect, “that lack of a soothing, secure attachment system contributes to their chronic dysregulation.”
In the classroom, teachers need to support and coach these children in ways to calm themselves and manage their emotions. “We need to be partners in managing their behavior,” Dr. Rappaport explains. “Co-regulation comes before self-regulation. We need to help them get the control they need to change the channel when they’re upset.” They need coaching and practice at de-escalating when they feel overwhelmed, she adds.
Negative thinking
Another challenge to traumatized kids is that they develop the belief that they’re bad, and what’s happened to them is their fault. This leads to the expectation that people are not going to like them or treat them well. As Dr. Howard puts it, “I’m a bad kid. Why would I do well in school? Bad kids don’t do well in school.”
Traumatized kids also tend to develop what Dr. Howard calls a “hostile attribution bias” — the idea that everyone is out to get them. “So if a teacher says, ‘Sit down in your seat,” they hear it as, ‘SIT DOWN IN YOUR SEAT!’” she explains. “They hear it as exaggerated and angry and unfair. So they’ll act out really quickly with irritability.”
As Dr. Rappaport puts it: “They see negative where we see neutral.” To counter this negative thinking, these students a narrative about themselves that helps them understand that they’re not “bad kids.” And learning to recognize their negative patterns of thought, like black and white thinking, is a step towards being able to change those patterns.
Dr. Rappaport notes that children from abusive homes are sometimes unable to participate in classroom activities because they are paralyzed by fear of making a mistake, and that can make them appear to be oppositional. “A mistake that might seem trivial to us becomes magnified,” she explains, “if their experience has been that minor mistakes incurred adult anger or punishment.”
They need not only support to have incremental successes they can build on in the classroom, but help to see that in this setting, making a mistake is considered a necessary part of learning.
Hypervigilance
One of the classic symptoms of trauma is hyper-vigilance, which means being overly alert to danger. “It’s physiological hyper-arousal,” explains Dr. Howard. “These kids are jumpy, they have an exaggerated startle response. They can have some big, out-of-control seeming behaviors, because their fight or flight response has gone off.”
This can look like hyperactivity, she adds, leading kids who have been traumatized to be misdiagnosed with ADHD. Being chronically agitated can lead to difficulty with sleeping and chronic irritability.
In workshops, Dr. Rappaport coaches teachers on how to help kids to settle down when something in the classroom triggers an emotional outburst. When a child is escalating, the key, she says, is to “match their affect, but in a controlled way.”
The goal is to connect to their big feeling. “If you can connect with what they’re trying to tell you, they may settle. It can work even if you just make a guess — you don’t have to be right, they can correct you.”
November Dates
November 13: Bully Blocker Skill 3 begins
November 14: PLC/RTI
November 16: NeXt Meeting at Fund for the Arts at 3:00 PM
November 20-21: November Guidance
November 28: PBIS Coaches meeting at Central Office at 2-4 PM
November 28: ABRI meeting at 4:00 PM
November 29: Staff meeting
November 30: Elementary School Counseling Meeting (9-1 PM)
November 30: Detention at 4 PM (Doerr)