Q&A with Ross Greene, author of Lost at School
Many children with social and emotional problems – ADD, ADHD, depression, bipolar disorder – are walking into school every day. Those children, regardless of their varying diagnoses, have one thing in common: They lack the skills to behave adaptively, according to Ross Greene, a clinical professor in Harvard Medical School’s department of psychiatry.
Greene describes these children as easily frustrated and chronically inflexible. In his book, The Explosive Child, he offered strategies for their beleaguered parents. His new book, Lost at School: Why Our Kids with Behavioral Challenges Are Falling Through the Cracks and How We Can Help Them, is aimed at helping teachers and administrators deal with hard-to-manage children.
Greene’s model, collaborative problem solving, is being tested at several districts around the country, including Massachusetts’ Newton Public Schools. Managing Editor Kathleen Vail participated in a telephone briefing with other education press reporters and editors with Greene recently. The following interview comes from that briefing.
Why did you write Lost at School?
We have a major problem with how we understand kids with social and emotional problems in school, how we treat them, and what happens to them when we don’t understand them. I wrote this book because not a lot of people are aware of how many challenging kids are in the school and what happens to them when we don’t understand their dysfunctions. We apply strategies that are not a good fit. There’s an unbelievable number of detentions and expulsions, all pointing in a clear but sad direction: We don’t understand our kids. We continue to apply interventions that don’t serve them well. We lose a lot of kids who come in on the short end of the stick in the capacity of dealing with life’s challenges.
How do they come to be challenging?
They lack the skills not to be not challenging. Conventional wisdom says challenging behavior is a way for kids to get something they want or to escape what they don’t want. Collaborate problem solving says these children lack crucial cognitive skills. Their challenging behavior is a learning disability of sorts. They lack crucial skills: flexibly, frustration tolerance, problem solving.
We tend to apply assumptions to them: manipulative, attention-seeking, limit-testing. Kids who have trouble reading have trouble with a skill. Kids with behavior challenges have trouble with the skills of behavior. That’s the beginning of how we start losing them. Reward and punishment is the foundation of the discipline systems in public schools.
How should we be responding?
There are three ways that adults deal with these kids and problems – Plan A, B, and C. Plan A is when adults impose their will. Plan B is when you do collaborative problem-solving. Plan C is when you drop the expectation completely. School discipline is based on Plan A. You can get away with imposing adult will on a less challenging kid. Plan A in a challenging kid causes challenging behavior. These kids don’t have the skills to deal with it. He will do something maladaptive. Whining, pouting, sulking, screaming, swearing, biting spitting, kicking, hitting -- all things kids do when they don’t have the skills to do what they are demanded to do.
What is collaborative problem-solving?
It has three ingredients. The first is information gathering and understanding. The adult takes the time to inquire about what the child’s concern are or what his perspective is on the unsolved problem. Number 2: The adult puts his concern on the table -- safety, loss of learning, or how the behavior is affecting other students. The third ingredient is brain-storming solutions. When concerns of both parties addressed, the problem is solved. It’s very hard work, but teachers are working hard with the challenging kids already.
What role can school board members play?
They can get the conversation going. Are leaders aware of the problem? Do they know what’s happening in the trenches? Board members will tap into frustration: Administrator frustration, parent frustration, and the frustration of the challenging kids themselves. It’s possible that people aren’t aware of the number of kids who aren’t receiving the care that they could be and are being deprived of an education.
Once they find out, yes, there are kids we are not serving, they’ll ask, now what are we supposed to do. Collaborative problem-solving works best if the entire school or district takes it on as a school mission.