20,39 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Offers a detailed insight into how children's emotions affect their learning and delivers key lessons on how we can better connect with both the head and the heart during the teaching and learning process. How are we to think of the disruptive or destructive child? Drawing on over 25 years of working with children with challenging behaviour, Peter Nelmes argues that such children are members of a community who are possibly the least recognised, understood and accepted in society whose problems are often met with condemnation rather than understanding and support. Drawing on a diverse range of case studies, he sets out to answer the question as to why emotional difficulties grief, trauma and abuse very often diminish a child's capacity for learning. By explaining this phenomenon he gives anyone who works with such children a framework for understanding how emotions play out in the classroom and a way of thinking about how the heart and the brain relate to each other in practice. If you have ever struggled to teach or even just connect with a troubled child, then this book is for you.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Ähnliche
Contents
Introduction
For nearly 30 years I have worked in classrooms where the behaviour of the pupils has often been challenging, both in specialist provisions and in mainstream schools. I have witnessed probably more than my fair share of discord, strong words, strong emotions and flying objects. There have been times when the classroom felt like a place of chaos. And yet from the start of my career I felt drawn to this environment, despite the risks to my mental and, on occasion, physical health. Against the advice of my tutors during teacher training, who deemed such a choice messy or career death, I chose to work with the children who were the least suited to the rhythms of classroom life. This book describes the sense that I have since made of my experience.
Among the reasons for my career choice was the arrogance and idealism of youth. For reasons I can no longer recall, I reckoned I would be good at my job, and I wanted that job to be transforming children’s lives. Within weeks of starting my first post, all sense of arrogance – and even competence – had gone. I was floored by the pace with which the mood in the classroom could change from peace to strife, from benevolence to naked hatred and aggression. These early experiences left me dazed and confused. All my beliefs, whether about myself or about teaching and learning, were lost. I realised that if I was going to survive, and possibly thrive, I needed to strip everything back and find a different way of thinking and acting.
One of the mistakes I made was thinking that the successes and failures in my lessons could be neatly ascribed to separate elements in the interaction. Successes were down to me, whereas failures were down to the children in front of me. This way of thinking was not sustainable, however. I knew that I was at least in part responsible when things went awry. As I slowly came to terms with the often chaotic world that I had chosen, I realised that there are in fact three components to my – and, indeed, to every – classroom, which each need to be taken into consideration: the pupils, the teacher and the context in which the teacher and the pupils meet, which includes everything from the weather outside, the physical attributes of the space, the type of school the classroom is in, and the practices and ethos of the wider society in which the school exists. This book is an anecdotal study of how I made sense of the many different ways in which these three components interact.
In time, I learned that none of these components can ever be isolated when looking at the success or failure of the classroom as a place of learning. This is not a commonly held view, if the labels that we ascribe to the children who are diverted from the educational mainstream into classrooms like mine are anything to go by. We used to define children with challenging behaviour by their inability to accommodate to us (for example, using the label ‘maladjusted’), but we have thankfully retreated from such a stance of outright blame. We are now somewhat less harsh in our terms.
When I started teaching, my pupils were labelled as children with ‘emotional and behavioural difficulties’ (EBD), and this is the term I will use throughout the book, as the emotional and behavioural aspects are the focus of my exploration. Later on, the word ‘social’ was added to that epithet, and currently the recognised term is pupils with ‘social, emotional and mental health difficulties’.1 This move towards less-judgemental labelling is to be welcomed, but this book argues that none of these descriptors go far enough; we need a definition which locates the difficulty within the interaction between the pupil, the teacher and the context. As I learned very quickly, challenging behaviour is always contextual. At the start of my career, for example, the context of the children’s most challenging behaviour was often my own classroom. The blame I directed at them for the horrendous lesson they had just had with me would be undermined when I heard them working harmoniously with the teacher in the neighbouring classroom in their next lesson. Clearly, and to my shame, the context and the teacher played a role.
Another argument against these labels became clear as I understood that the children’s challenging behaviour had a cause outside of their control. I learned that these behaviours never happened without understandable cause, and such a consideration makes any label which suggests that the difficulties are with the child seem misguided, if not insensitive. If a child came to school crying because they were being hit at home, we would not say that the problem was the crying but with the hitting. If the child replaces the crying with a different action, such as inattentiveness or impulsivity, the problem still remains the hitting. As is related in this book, this was something that took me time to learn.
There is yet another problem with the way in which children have been labelled during my time as a teacher, which is that although the children have been said to have both emotional and behavioural difficulties, it has clearly been the behavioural aspect which has prompted their removal from mainstream education. Children who are in emotional pain yet do not project that pain onto other people through aggression, damage or disruption have rarely made it through my classroom door. Perhaps this can help to explain why, for the first two thirds of my career, my clientele was at least 95% male. It seems that there was little ability or willingness to identify emotional problems in girls. I did not see children of either gender who had emotional problems but no behaviour problems, and I have never met a child with behaviour problems who did not have underlying emotional problems.
Therefore, when describing the children I have taught, I tend to use the term ‘troubled children’, to emphasise that for all that they do in the classroom or home – all the disruption or upset they may cause – they are still, by definition, mainly beings to whom something is being or has been done. This book is about how we can understand and teach all such children, not just the punchers, the kickers, the exploders, the flounce-off-ers, the chair-throwers and the otherwise actors-out. It is about how we can relate to any child who is troubled, howsoever they respond to that trouble. Any behaviour which impedes a child’s learning and development needs to be understood and addressed, whether or not that behaviour is detrimental to the people around the child.
The concept at the heart of this book
Challenging behaviour, and how emotions affect the learning taking place (or not), is best understood by looking at the transaction between the teacher, the learner and the context in the classroom, and especially at what is created by the interaction between the three components. The concept at the heart of this book, therefore, is the product of this interaction: namely, shared meanings, those joint understandings that we create (or fail to). Examining this element of the process of teaching and learning can lead us to understand how emotions play a role in the learning of all children, and indeed adults, whether or not their behaviour is challenging, and whether or not they are troubled.
Shared meanings happen when two people think together, and can be represented pictorially thus:
The creation of shared meanings, I will show, is vital if teaching and learning is to take place. In order to fully understand how shared meanings work, we need to consider their emotional as well as cognitive dimensions. Education is, it is often said, about hearts and minds, but it seems to me that we have a lesser understanding of the role that the heart plays in learning. I set out to redress that imbalance, by explaining how hearts and minds – or emotion and cognition – work in a transactional relationship. If we fully understand this relationship, we become much more able to help troubled children to thrive and learn.
I explore shared meanings by describing the pupils I have met, what it has been like to be their teacher, and how context has played a role too. I interrogate the factors which promoted or hindered the meanings we tried to generate together. I first started to explore these factors with questions – such as, ‘How can that boy be a right little sod for me and get so much praise for his work experience at the shop down the road?’ When I had answered that question, other questions hove into view, and this book is testament to the journey (sometimes slow and often painful) towards enlightenment that I have been on. I aim to pass on the understandings I have come to in a way that can be taken and used as a model for anyone – be they teacher, other professional or, indeed, parent – who seeks to help troubled children and wants to understand how to help them learn.
This book is about unconventional people in unconventional classrooms. It is necessary, therefore, to do some scene setting before we get started. The rest of the introduction is devoted to this, beginning with a look at troubled children and the role of their teacher. Then it highlights the extent to which underachievement is so often a feature of these children’s lives, before addressing you, the reader, by giving a brief warning about the content and language that you’ll encounter as you read on. It also asks you to consider your own views of children and childhood, as this will inform your interpretation of the text. First, however, I explain why the unconventional nature of the subject matter necessitates an unconventional analysis.
How this book is written
The aim of this book is to present a theoretical concept that is firmly grounded in and illustrated by the nitty-gritty of practice, but I don’t consider this to be a strictly academic text. I draw on stories involving many of the children whom I have taught over the years, which has some significant implications for how the book is written. I am writing about the meanings that I believe were made and shared in my classroom, and while I try to represent these children as fairly as possible, I am necessarily presenting my version of events. These stories are therefore partial in the sense that they can only present my interpretation. Also, if the meanings that are generated in my classroom are a result of the transactional relationship between myself, my pupils and the context in which we met, I clearly played an active part in creating these meanings as well as identifying and recording them. Thus I am aware that the stories I relate say much about me, as well as about the children whose behaviours and lives I describe.
Another reason why I cannot claim to adhere to the conventions of academic writing is that I need to be able to explore all the factors that influence the creation of shared meanings when two people interact. Interaction is rarely, if ever, a solely rational activity, even in everyday life, and it certainly was not in my classroom. As we shall see, there are many factors relating to the emotions that influence the nature of the meanings made, and these do not lend themselves easily to rational analysis. My pupils bring into the classroom things which seem, to me at least, to defy logical explanation; the classroom can often appear messy, confused, a place of dark feelings or high energy and exuberance. I need to be able to explore and, indeed, celebrate all of that, even if I cannot accurately measure the impact these factors have on the shared meanings made. The meanings that we have in our own heads are often multifactorial, ephemeral, easily lost and very difficult to describe with a sense of objectivity. The meanings we share with others are no different.
Therefore, this book cannot and does not strive for objectivity. That is not such a disadvantage as it may at first seem. We all have an ability to know when we make connections with other people and when we do not. We know when we have established a rapport with someone, and, equally, can tell when we are struggling to find common ground. I am relying on the creation of shared meanings being such a universal human experience that you, the reader, will know what I am talking about.
Another reason for this book’s departure from traditional academic standards is that I cannot really define my terms. I do not want to get lost down the rabbit hole of trying to come up with a rational definition of the emotions, for example. I could spend chapters on such questions as ‘How does an emotion differ from a mood?’ or ‘Is anger a true emotion if it is always a cover for something else, such as hurt or shame?’ I want to be able to explore all that is connoted by the term emotion, from the feelings that come and go in an instant to our deeper yearnings which may only reveal themselves over the course of many years, and everything in between. Again, I am going to trust the reader’s knowledge and intuition rather than spend time trying to rationalise that which is not wholly rational.
Working with troubled children in the classroom
Who are these children?
As I have already mentioned, as soon as I started to teach troubled children, I realised that I had an inadequate understanding, both of my pupils and of what the process of teaching and learning was all about. It quickly became obvious that I needed to start paying attention to the emotions far more than I had assumed was necessary. For example, one of the first pupils I taught was Michael, a boy widely characterised by staff and pupils as a teenage thug. At 15 he was stocky and strong and feared by most of his classmates. He seemed to inhabit the role of school bully quite willingly. He took every chance available to sneer at his peers, denigrate them and, often, to hurt them physically. However, look beyond that behaviour and it was easy to see that in Michael’s head, anxiety ruled. Michael feared lots of things, water especially. His mother once told me that he was scared to get into a bath, never mind lie back in it, even if she put less than an inch of water in it for him. Neither she nor I thought to question why she was still running his bath for him at 15 years of age. In almost all his activities he seemed frozen, incapable of vivacity, interest or even just making basic decisions.
So as I, his English teacher, approached the task of improving his writing abilities, I knew that he was not going to be able to write anything, because how could he start making decisions about which words to put down on paper? Like many of my pupils, Michael saw paper as an instrument of torture, a means by which one’s shortcomings are turned into a permanent record. He would sit far away from my desk and well back from his own, his back against the wall both literally and metaphorically, his furrowed brow emanating threat, and his cheeks burning with shame and indignation. His hands would be balled tight, and there seemed little chance of getting them to pick up the pen. Even when he did, it seemed that deciding whether to use letters or digits to write the date was beyond him.
I used to write the beginning of the first sentence for him, in an effort to get him started. I narrated as I wrote. ‘The match took place last Saturday morning when the weather was …’ I would look at him and ask, ‘So was the weather sunny or rainy?’
Michael would grunt, ‘What? I dunno.’
I tried hard not to be cowed by the sense of sullen discomfort pulsing from across the desk.
‘Come on, you were there. What was the weather like? Did it rain?’
Michael’s gaze would sink down to the desk. If he did not engage now, he never would. I couldn’t think what else to do. I had let him write about his favourite sport, cricket, even though the other pupils were writing fiction. I knew better than to ask him to be creative, an abhorrent activity in his view. He could simply report facts. All he had to do now was add the last word of the sentence. This is a 15-year-old boy, strangled with anxiety in the face of both his fears and his hopes. When the captain of Michael’s local cricket club knocked on his door one Sunday morning, asking to speak to him because the first team was a player down and they wanted Michael to play for them – a dream scenario that Michael must have imagined many times – he refused to come out of his bedroom.
Michael was just one of many children to struggle to engage in my classroom because of their emotional state. Although there was a great deal of variety in the iterations of this struggle, I started to become aware that these children did have some things in common. Cooper, Smith and Upton’s list of commonalities between children who have been excluded from the classroom or school resonated with my own experience.2 It describes a life of underachievement at school, with few or no friends. Engagement in school is characterised by behavioural problems. Family life is often marked by trauma, abuse and violence. Social care is often involved. Low self-esteem is cited as a common factor, and I would also cite a sense of shame.
My thinking about these children started to gain some coherence, despite the frenetic, chaotic nature of my lessons, and despite the myths that circulated in the staffrooms of schools like mine. ‘You should only teach EBD for seven years or you’ll burn out’ was a regularly uttered axiom. Another was that the children were either mad, bad or sad. This description, I soon realised, was unhelpful. Perhaps it was a form of self-protection, a way of keeping a distance between the speaker and the subject. By using a judgement or a label one could impose a meaning on the child, rather than construct a meaning with them, which might expose the speaker to the child’s pain. And it seemed to me that these children were the unluckiest of the unlucky. Their backgrounds often featured combinations of negative factors that multiplied their misery exponentially. Children, for example, whose trauma in their early years had led them to be removed from their families, only to be put with foster parents who did not want, or were not able, to care about them.
I believe that I have never met a child who is intrinsically so disturbed as to warrant the descriptor ‘mad’. I have never met a child who is intrinsically ‘bad’, although I have seen children do things to others which are appallingly hurtful or cruel. These actions always have reasons which at least explain if not pardon them. And as for the word ‘sad’, well, while it fits, such a small word cannot really do justice to the misery and challenge in these children’s lives. I have never met a child whose challenging behaviour did not have a recognisable root cause, and perhaps sad is the best catch-all term for such roots, even if it does not communicate the depths of the problems that many of my pupils faced.
I have my own definition of what I mean by troubled children: they are people with a greater than average need to communicate and a smaller than average ability to do so. In other words, they come into the classroom needing to create shared meanings more than anyone else because they are lost and lonely, but they find this much more difficult than the majority of their peers do.
They usually arrive at school with paperwork describing some of the sadness that they have experienced. Incident reports from primary school, exclusion letters, safeguarding concerns, social services interventions, records of entries into and exits from a much higher than average number of schools. This all speaks of rejection, failure and probable disaffection. But the paperwork just records the chapter headings of their misery. It does not capture all the sentences in between or the day-to-day nature of their plight. Perhaps the most cogent understanding of their sadness comes from the feeling that you may get after spending even 15 minutes in their company. Your head may be filled with difficult feelings – such as anxiety, irritation or hurt – and it is a relief when you can get away from them. You may think, ‘My word! That was hard work, and somewhat unpleasant.’ You go off and, to regain your sense of well-being, find someone you can connect positively with – your friends, colleagues you like or your family.
But what does the troubled child do? Often they go on to reproduce those same negative feelings in the next interaction they have, and the next, and so on ad nauseam. Their ability to connect with other people is often severely impaired or skewed, and so they end up being marginalised by the rest of us. They are the children educated in the corridor because their presence in the classroom causes too many problems. They are the children who never get asked back for play dates or parties, or who get passed from one foster carer to another. They are vulnerability hiding in plain sight. Their dilemma is acute; they cannot live with people, nor can they live without them. Even though they may appear wildly antisocial, most of them abhor isolation. As a teacher, I soon learned that isolation could not, and indeed should never, be enforced upon them. They will fight it with all their will. They cannot be alone. Their hearts drive them again and again into the very interactions they struggle with. They are like incompetent gamblers, who – despite a lifetime of losing – feel compelled to come back to the table to roll the dice one more time, squeezing yet another final drop of hope from an almost empty reserve.
The role of the teacher of troubled children
There are many aspects to teaching troubled children and these are detailed throughout the book. For now, I just want to highlight some of the particulars, to give a flavour of what the job entails. Trying to interact and make meanings with children whose lives have so much trauma, loss and hurt in them is not easy. It’s even harder when they are not sitting calmly and telling you about their misery, but instead are manifesting it by telling you to fuck off or by throwing punches at their neighbour. Making sense of the role, and above all making sense with the children, necessitates the recognition that the role is not a wholly rational or conventional one. For example, I have never had the luxury, as teachers in other areas of the profession sometimes have, of being able to decide, as I plan my lesson, what meanings are going to be made when I deliver it to the class. The children in front of me were never going to look up eagerly at me, waiting to catch every pearl of wisdom I cast their way, and receive my lesson exactly as I had intended it to be received.
After perhaps a rather shameful number of mistakes, I learned that the teacher of troubled children needs to possess and practise certain basic skills and attributes:
An acute awareness of the level and nature of the pupils’ understanding of any subject
You have an extremely narrow window through which to connect with your pupils, academically speaking. You have to judge the size and shape of their current understanding. If your lesson is too easy, they will not learn anything, they will be bored, and they will kick off as a result. A smidgeon too hard and they will kick off as a result. Also, lessons have to be fun and immediately engaging. This is before you take the emotional dimensions of the activity into consideration.
Differentiate between meanings and words
You need to be aware that just because you have said something does not mean it has been listened to. Telling does not equal being told. Your words are rarely taken at face value. It is important for you to be circumspect about the words they use too. One of the mantras that has stuck with me throughout my career is, ‘Pay attention to what they do, not what they say they are going to do.’ And the reason for that is because behaviour is not just a form of communication, but is often a more honest form of communication than the spoken word. But even that needs a good deal of interpretation sometimes. Recently one pupil, Shaun, was asked to discuss his recent aggression towards some other children with me and a colleague. His first reaction was denial and flight. ‘I’m sick of being accused of things I haven’t done, and I’m sick of all you lot in this shitty school. I might as well just take off. In fact, that is what I am going to do, right now!’ And in so saying he marches to the main doors and then fades to the right, standing halfway down the corridor, still swearing that we have seen the last of him even though he is in full view.
Be prepared to interpret everything
Shaun’s talk is easy to see through, as long as you don’t react to it and push him into carrying out his threat. No matter how much he protests, the conviction is not there in his voice. What he is saying is a pretty poor indicator of what is going on inside. But his actions are only marginally more helpful. In fact, in order to make sense of Shaun, and his seemingly incessant need to hit and hurt, a great deal of skilful interpretation is needed, but it is possible, nonetheless.
Respect for the pupil’s ‘voice’ is not always appropriate
It would be lovely if every interaction with my pupils could be reciprocal and facilitative, but there are times when I need to take control over the whole process. This raises two risks. One is that your interpretation is rejected because the pupil has no sense of ownership (‘You’re not being fair, you’re just picking on me!’), and the second, perhaps greater, danger is that you come close to playing a god-like role in their lives. But the need to step in is so great that to not do so would be a form of neglect. For example, with a class of 12 troubled and potentially troubling children, there are of course times when I have had no choice but to prohibit certain opinions and actions. Everyone must keep their language respectful of others, for example.
I have to do what I believe is best, even if the child is in disagreement with my actions following a contravention, and strife may occur as a result. It’s worth the battle, because if I allow disrespect in my classroom then greater strife will ensue. Another obvious example is if there is a safeguarding concern and the child does not want what they have said to be reported. In such cases, the adults have to take over and act in the best interest of the child, regardless of their wishes.
The problems really start in less clear-cut situations. The children I teach occasionally seem so lost in their lives that it seems wrong not to step in and sort things out for them. Malky, for example, is a boy who is relentlessly cheery, who walks down the corridor demanding high fives from everyone, even staff who have their hands full of papers or equipment. The high fives are way too hard, and sting, but Malky just laughs when he is told this. His cheeriness grates on me, I have to admit. It is difficult to guide him away from this high-octane bonhomie thing that he has going on. It is not just the high fives, it is the sneaking up behind people and making them jump, and the constant commentary on himself and how he is a prankster, a laugh-a-minute guy, and even, as he simply throws a ball from one hand to the other, a magician. (‘How is that magic, Malky?’ ‘It just is. Hee hee, I’m so funny!’) I once asked him whether other people might see things differently, and whether, for instance, when he did the old trick of pointing to a pretend mark on a classmate’s chest and when they looked down, brought his hand up to catch them on the nose, they might not call him a laughmeister but a pain in the neck.
I should have behaved better, it is true. I cannot in all conscience not begin to challenge his attempts to frame all his interactions in the way that he seems to want to do so, but I need to be more professional than I was then. I know there are times when I can see the flipside of his enthusiasm for terrible jokes, when he looks exhausted and depressed. I know enough about his chaotic home life – and his worries about his ballooning weight and his problem with body odour – to see that here is a boy in serious need of help.
