These are dramatic times for teachers. In educating children, we have a difficult and demanding role. Like no other, our profession is responsible in ensuring that children develop emotionally, socially, and academically. As society evolves in complexity, so does our role. With so many social and emotional issues influencing directly a student’s potential for learning, we can no longer guarantee our success in educating children relying only on academic expertise. The fact is that, like adults, in coping with today society’s pressures and demands, children are paying a heavy emotional toll too. At alarming rates, more and more children and adolescents are experiencing all kinds of stress and trauma reactions, and at all levels of severity. This can turn into a chaotic scenario for teachers if it catches us ill prepared.
Since children’s affective and emotional status strongly influence how they perform in the classroom, it is imperative for teachers to become acquainted with how students develop and function socio-emotionally. If we are going to remain effective in doing our job –thriving rather than simply surviving—we need direct access to the current ideas and latest development in psycho-education, a therapeutic educational model that blends psychological, sociological, biological, and educational theories and research.
How Habitually Disruptive and Acting-Out Students Benefit from a Therapeutic ModelPsycho-education, a multidimensional model to the education and treatment of children with emotional and behavioral difficulties, trains children in understanding how feelings and emotions relate to their behavioral difficulties. To help change dysfunctional behavior, this therapeutic model contains a mixture of affective (emotions), cognitive (thinking), and behavioral (behavior) elements, so that students with recurrent behavior problems learn to recognize and understand how their emotions and way of thinking drive their particular pattern of behavior. This therapeutic model is based on the principle that behavioral change comes when children are able to understand the motives behind their behavior and are properly trained in productive and more positive ways of behaving.
What Therapeutic Teachers Do for Habitually Disruptive and Acting-Out StudentsFocusing on the unique socio-emotional needs of the acting-out child, a therapeutic teacher develops an adult-child relationship that is conducive to a new insight, and is growth promoting. The therapeutic teacher coaches children in finding alternative ways of meeting their socioemotional needs in a more effective and socially appropriate fashion. The teacher-student therapeutic relationship takes into full consideration the cognitive and affective factors that are influencing behavior, and involves the student in finding and implementing alternative ways of behaving. Students are actively involved throughout this process in their own emotional and behavioral improvement.
A therapeutic model is ingrained in the belief that all troubled behavior is determined by a multiplicity of factors in interaction, and that, to be able to change problem behavior, every aspect of the child’s personality -feeling, thinking, and behaving- needs to be taken into account. The therapeutic teacher explains psycho-educational concepts and techniques to children, and trains disruptive and acting-out students in how to self-manage emotions and behavior. The therapeutic teacher develops an accepting and trusting relationship with the difficult student, seeing the child’s disruptive and acting-out behavior as a challenge for both the teacher and the student to master, and a rich opportunity to help the student develop more productive ways of feeling, thinking, and behaving. The therapeutic teacher never gives up on the difficult student, perseverating in strengthening a mutually trusting relationship while implementing skilled child guidance techniques to help the child. The therapeutic teacher always uses a solution-oriented language, focusing on the possible and changeable when working with the student, and expressing to the child that…
Change is PossibleAnd
All Students Can Learn Behavioral Self-Control
Now You Can Develop Therapeutic Teacher Skills
To learn how to cope with stressful or troublesome events, build positive attitudes and effective life skills, and achieve their social and academic goals, schools provide the ideal environment in which classroom teachers and related services personnel with the adequate training can teach psycho-educational skills to children. Teaching psycho-educational skills to students relates directly with the role of schools in preparing children to function effectively and to deal competently with society’s demands. When we teach psycho-educational skills to students, we are giving them the ability to understand and self-manage emotions and behavior, and we are assisting them in developing resilience in coping with further troublesome events along the road.
Unfortunately, a great deal of this very much-needed information from the psycho-educational literature never reaches teachers. In this psycho-education skill-building series, we recognize and address this need. Now we can train teachers to resolve students’ behavior problems by applying therapeutic techniques based on psychoeducational principles. Grounded in the author’s strong psychological and educational background and expertise, the psycho-education skill-building series takes full advantage of current psychological and educational theory and research to train teachers in the child guidance techniques they need to become skillful behavior managers and behavior change promoters.