Reflections: Literature as data

Greene, Ross. Kids do well if they can. Educational Leadership Vol/Issue: 68 (2), Date: Oct 1, 2010, Page: 28

The idea and theory behind Plan B may not be revolutionary, but each time a student and I are able to learn how to pinpoint a lagging skill and work together to find a viable solution, it is groundbreaking! I read this article, for the first time, last year during my inquiry project. I was and still am focused on using the relationships and attachments that I have developed with students’ to purposefully work with the student to identify and develop their lagging skill.

Since my first time reading this article, I have been to a Ross Greene three day workshop, joined an educational book club where we read “The Explosive Child” and have continued attempting to make Plan B a habit. I recently read an article written by Amelie Oksenberg Rorty called The Ethics of Reading: A Traveller’s Guide. I wanted to take my new understandings and use her strategies to reread and unpack an article that has been very influential to my practice. I concentrated my reading on trying to find what still remained vague, what challenged my views, and what new perspectives I might have when reading this article a year later.

One part that I connected to was the example “ Students with reading inefficiencies lack the skills required for being a proficient readers. Kids with social, emotional, and behavioural challenges lack the skills required for proficiently handling life’s social, emotional and behavioural challenges.” Some children will just learn to read on their own, some receive extra reading support at home, some need direct instruction, and some will still need intensive reading interventions. Challenging students are not challenging all of the time. They struggle when they are confronted with something that they lack the skills for. For most frequent flyers, “the skills they lack include crucial cognitive skills, especially in the domains of flexibility, adaptability, frustration tolerance, and problem solving.” If they had these skills, then they would use them. I feel confident in saying that no teacher would continue to give a struggling reader a novel that was far above their ability, and then just expect that they would miraculously become a proficient reader. Interventions like detentions, suspensions, or losing privileges simply do not teach the student the skills that they lack, and therefore the student will continue to look bad.

I have spent countless hours, in countless meetings, and the section that addressed actionable information challenged my views about how our school based team runs our meetings. Many of our “frequent flyers” come from “that” neighbourhood, have “those” parents or “that” diagnostic label. It is easy to become overwhelmed with all of the reports, evaluations, behaviour placements, functional assessments and so on. Greene goes on to say “These factors aren’t completely irrelevant, of course, but if you spend a lot of time in meetings talking about things about which you can do nothing, then staff members may come to the conclusion that they cannot help the student.” I think that far too often teachers try to be “mind readers” or have theories to that the difficulty could be, and then we implement adult directed solutions. If we as teachers hope to teach proficiency in things such as judgment, patience, social responsibility, flexibility and adaptability, then we must teach these skills directly and indirectly.