Lost at School

Praise for
Lost at School

“No one in America has thought more deeply about the problems of disruptive children in school than Ross Greene. In his brilliant new book, he goes inside the minds of children and school personnel to explain why old-fashioned school discipline and zero-tolerance policies have failed. Then he offers original and tested new strategies for working with the most behaviorally challenging children. Every teacher and administrator who has ever felt that traditional discipline isn’t working should read
Lost at School
.”

—Dr. Michael Thompson, school consultant, coauthor of
Raising Cain,
and author of
Best Friends, Worst Enemies

“We cannot ignore difficult student behaviors any longer. Dr. Greene’s book is a timely contribution to the literature on how schools must support
all
students, and his approach fits well with Response to Intervention (RTI).”

—Rachel Brown-Chidsey, Ph.D., NCSP, associate professor, School Psychology Program, University of Southern Maine, and coauthor of
Response to Intervention

“A positive and practical approach for teachers who want to work redemptively with kids whose classroom behavior is an impediment to academic and social success.”

—Carol Ann Tomlinson, Ed.D., Curry School of Education, University of Virginia

“Accessible advice for parents and teachers concerned about children with behavior problems.”

—
Booklist

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SCRIBNER

A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas
www.SimonandSchuster.com

New York, NY 10020

Copyright © 2008 by Ross W. Greene

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Scribner trade paperback edition October 2009

SCRIBNER
and design are registered trademarks of The Gale Group, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, Inc., the publisher of this work.

Designed by Kyoko Watanabe
Text set in Sabon

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008012479

ISBN 978-1-4165-7226-8

ISBN 978-1-4165-7227-5 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-4165-8367-7 (ebook)

Excerpt from “Across the Great Divide” by Kate Wolf copyright Another Sundown Publishing Company, used with permission.

Many people have teachers they remember fondly as the ones who believed in them and helped them reach their fullest potential. This book is dedicated to Marshall Stearns, my sixth-grade teacher at North Miami Elementary School in 1968.

Contents

Introduction

1. School of Hard Knocks

2. Kids Do Well If They Can

3. Lesson Plans

4. Let’s Get It Started

5. Bumps in the Road

6. Filling in the Gaps

7. Meeting of the Minds

8. School of Thought

9. Lives in the Balance

Assessment of Lagging Skills and Unsolved Problems (ALSUP)

Sources

Books Cited and Other Recommended Reading

Acknowledgments

Index

I hope that someday we will learn the terrible cost we all pay when we ignore or mismanage those people in society who most need our help.

T
HE
H
ON
. J
UDGE
S
ANDRA
H
AMILTON
, P
ROVINCIAL
C
OURT OF
A
LBERTA
, C
ANADA

The finest hour I have seen

Is the one that comes between

The edge of night and the break of day …

It’s when the darkness rolls away.

K
ATE
W
OLF (SONGWRITER), FROM
“A
CROSS THE
G
REAT
D
IVIDE
”

Introduction

The wasted human potential is tragic. In so many schools, kids with social, emotional, and behavioral challenges are still poorly understood and treated in a way that is completely at odds with what is now known about how they came to be challenging in the first place. The frustration and desperation felt by teachers and parents is palpable. Many teachers continue to experience enormous stress related to classroom behavior problems and from dealing with parents, and do not receive the support they need to help their challenging students. Half of teachers leave the profession within their first four years, and kids with behavioral challenges and their parents are cited as one of the major reasons.
¹
Parents know there’s trouble at school, know they’re being blamed, feel their kids are being misunderstood and mistreated, but feel powerless to make things better and are discouraged and put off by their interactions with school personnel.

School discipline is broken. Not surprisingly, tightening the vise grip hasn’t worked. A task force of the American Psychological Association has recently concluded that zero-tolerance policies, which were intended to reduce violence and behavior problems in our schools, have instead achieved the opposite effect. A review of ten years of research found that these policies have not only failed to make schools safe or more effective in handling student behavior, but have actually increased behavior problems and dropout rates.
²
Yet public elementary
and secondary schools in the United States continue to dole out a whopping 110,000 expulsions and 3 million suspensions each year, along with countless tens of millions of detentions.
³

Behind the statistics, behind each expulsion, suspension, and detention, are human beings—kids, teachers, parents—doing the best they can with the tools they have. Dramatic changes are needed to help them. And my experience suggests that these changes won’t be as painful and difficult as many fear. We cannot keep doing things the way we always have and continue losing kids on a scale that is truly astounding. This book is about doing things a different way.

I interact with hundreds of challenging kids every year. These kids would like nothing better than to be able to handle the social, emotional, and behavioral challenges being placed on them at school and in life, but they can’t seem to pull it off. Many have been getting into trouble for so long that they’ve lost faith that any adult will ever know how to help them.

I work with hundreds of teachers every year, too. The vast majority care deeply about kids and devote massive amounts of time and energy to the kids they teach. But most readily acknowledge that understanding and helping challenging kids wasn’t a major part of their education, and that they could use some serious help with some of these students and their parents. And most are so caught up in the daily demands of teaching and all the new initiatives imposed on them that they simply don’t have time to reflect on how to better help the challenging kids in their classrooms.

I also work with hundreds of parents of challenging kids every year. Most are eager to work with school personnel in addressing their kids’ challenges in an effective and compassionate way, but they aren’t exactly sure how to make it happen.

Ten years ago I published a book called
The Explosive Child
that was primarily geared toward parents. Since then, the model I described in
The Explosive Child
—called Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS)—has been implemented not only in thousands of households but also in dozens of inpatient psychiatric units, residential facilities, systems of juvenile detention, and general and special education schools. It’s become clear that a book delineating how the CPS model is applied in schools is sorely needed.

Now you know why I wrote this book and for whom I wrote it. So let’s talk a little about the how.

Helping kids with social, emotional, and behavioral challenges is not a mechanical exercise. Kids aren’t robots, adults aren’t robots, and helping them work together isn’t robotic. The work is hard, messy, uncomfortable, and requires teamwork, patience, and tenacity, especially as the work also involves questioning conventional wisdom and practices. This book contains lots of material and examples to help you better understand challenging kids, how to implement the CPS model, and how to work collaboratively toward the common goal of helping these kids more effectively.

But there’s also a running story about some challenging kids, their teachers, their parents, and the leaders of their school … and their messy, uncomfortable, collective attempts to make things better. The running story helps accomplish several goals. First, it moves the book rapidly from ideas to pragmatic reality. Second, it helps bring to life the challenges, pressures, stressors, doubts, obstacles, and anxieties of each constituency. Third, it provides readers with the actual words to use under various conditions. So often people say, “I understand the CPS model, but I need to know what it
looks
and
sounds
like in action!” or “I need to get a feel for the
language
of Collaborative Problem Solving.” And they ask, “Is it truly realistic to think that an entire school could do this?” Toward this end, the story is abundant with real-life examples and dialogue.

All of the characters are based on educators, parents, and kids I’ve known and worked with, the actual challenges they tried to overcome, and how they did it. Some characters are composites, and names and details have been changed to protect identities. I could have presented the characters in the best possible light, but then they wouldn’t have been very authentic. So the principal in the story isn’t
every
principal, she’s just the principal of the school in this story. Same deal for the kids, parents, teachers, and other characters. They aren’t stereotypes, nor are they intended to be representative … they’re just the characters I chose to help me demonstrate the difficulties and complexities inherent in transforming the disciplinary culture in a classroom and school.