Beginning a New Year and a Different Focus

I am beginning a new school year working with students classified with emotional and behavioral disorders in a high school setting. Right now I don’t know what my day will look like. It could be a self-contained setting where I co-teach with another EBD teacher or it could look like a mixture of co-teaching with general education teachers, co-teaching with another EBD teacher, and a self-contained period where I am the only “teacher” in the room with support staff. I am waiting to hear from my new principal and/or assistant principal what my schedule might entail.

This week I am attending a weeklong training given by WAREA, Washington Re-Education Association, entitled “Effectively Serving Children with Emotional/Behavioral Disabilities. Yesterday we focused on what is Re-ED, the nine stages of Re-EDucation, and structure and predictability. Today we focused on effective instruction and conflict to coping skills.

My take-aways from day one include the importance of having a philosophy (district, building, and/or classroom) that guide an EBD program. A lot of the presenters working for WAREA also work at Renton Academy, which is a therapeutic public EBD school in Renton, WA. I have visited this self-contained school and their district and school have adopted the Re-ED principles as the districts philosophy and approach to dealing with students classified with EBD.

The twelve principles of Re-EDucation include; trust between child and adult is essential and foundational, life is to be lived now, competence makes a difference (children and adolescents should be helped to be good at something), time is an ally (work on the side of growth), self-control can be taught and students can learn to manage behaviors, cognitive competence of children and adolescents can be enhanced through skill development, feelings should be nurtured, the group is very important and should be a part of instruction, ceremony and ritual give order, stability and confidence, the body is the armature of the self, communities are important and benefits of community must be learned and experienced, and children should know some joy in each day.

The nine stages of Re-EDucation refer to the stages that a child goes through as they learn to manage their own behavior and make connection with adults, other students, and their school community. Here change looks likes child development stages, where students progress and regress as they move through stages like limit testing, active resistance, and beginning stages of trust. We spent the afternoon talking about preparing for our students, creating structure and predictability from the start, boarders or boundaries, that will help students move through the nine stages feeling more safe and secure.

Today, we spent the morning practicing and reviewing research based literacy and math interventions, emphasizing that our EBD kids have years of experience dealing with behavioral interventions, but less experience with teachers addressing academic deficiencies. Not a lot of surprises here, behavior is linked to past academic and/or school failure. Finally, we closed the day looking at the conflict cycle. Are we reinforcing the “irrational thinking” that leads kids to feelings and problematic behavior? Or are we interrupting the cycle and helping kids to interrupt their own thinking, maybe even help them change their thinking.

I felt like talking about the conflict cycle was a perfect opening for discussing cognitive behavioral interventions and cognitive academic interventions. If our kids’ deficits center on metacognitive deficiencies then work around thinking and evaluating information is a great next step.