A Psycho-Education Skill Building Guide for Teachers
Social Problem-Solving
Carmen Y. Reyes
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Copyright 2010 by Carmen Y. Reyes
Discover Other Titles by Carmen Y. Reyes at Smashwords.com
Persuasive Discipline: Using Power Messages and Suggestions to Influence Children Toward Positive Behavior
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/20643
A Psycho-Education Skill Building Guide for Teachers: The Cognitive-Emotive Method
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/20179
A Psycho-Education Skill Building Guide for Teachers: The Child Guidance Approach
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19992
All Behavior is Communication: How to Give Feedback, Criticism, Corrections, and Reprimands that Teach Appropriate Behavior
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19966
Emotional Communication: Healing Children’s Troubled and Angry Feelings with Empathy and Rapport
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19894
A Psycho-Education Skill Building Guide for Teachers: Therapeutic Listening
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19824
**Contents**
--Social Problem-Solving Steps
--Describing the Conflict
--Teaching Children the Steps to Problem Solve
--Guidelines for Teaching Social Problem-Solving
--What to Do if the Problem is Not Solved
Teaching Assertiveness Skills to Troubled and Anger-Prone Students
--Assertive Approaches
**Introduction**
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 affecting 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 in 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 model that blends psychological, sociological, biological, and educational theories and research.
How Habitually Disruptive and Acting-Out Students Benefit from a Therapeutic Model
Psycho-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 students change dysfunctional behavior, this therapeutic model contains a mixture of affective (emotions), cognitive (thinking), and behavioral (behavior) elements, so that acting-out students 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 Difficult and Acting-Out Students
Focusing 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 socio-emotional 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 take an active role throughout this process in their own emotional and behavioral improvement.
A therapeutic model is deeply rooted 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 manage their own emotions and behavior. The therapeutic teacher develops an accepting and trusting relationship with the difficult student, seeing the child’s disruptive and acting-out behaviors 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 Possible
And
All Students Can Learn Behavioral Self-Control
Now You Can Develop Child Guidance Skills
To learn 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 manage their own 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 student’s behavior problems by applying therapeutic techniques based on psycho-educational 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.
**Social Problem-Solving**
Most schoolchildren never learned how to handle problems or conflicts in a constructive and assertive way. As a result, students’ way to deal with problematic situations is by resorting to aggressive behaviors, arguing, and/or fighting, making the problem worse. Students who lack proficiency in coping with problems or conflicts using problem-solving techniques show more behavioral problems than their more proficient peers do. For these reasons, one of the most important things teachers can do to decrease conflicts between students in the classroom is to give children a tool for resolving social problems. Teachers too benefit from analyzing students’ most challenging behaviors, and exploring solutions for disruptiveness and conflict, using general problem-solving techniques.
As with most therapeutic techniques, the problem-solving process is based on talking. Throughout the problem-solving steps, children are trained to verbalize the conflict in a descriptive and positive, not confrontational way. The therapeutic teacher helps the students reframe the problem or conflict at hand as a manageable challenge, and guides the students through the steps by asking questions and coming up with possible solutions. This way, troubled, anger-prone, and acting-out students learn that problems are a normal part of life, and that problems may have more than one solution.
In terms of our teaching, teachers feel challenged and energized when we perceive our students’ disruptive behaviors as actions capable of change, and believe that our most difficult students are capable of learning new and more positive behaviors. The social problem-solving approach is a behavior management technique that teachers can easily incorporate as an integral part of their behavior management system.
Informally, we can start teaching a student to problem solve by asking questions like, “What do you think you need to solve this problem right now? Okay, what is the first thing you need to do to make this happen? And the second thing you can do?” When we regularly question children this way, we are teaching them how to think to problem solve, without giving them the answers or solutions; in other words, we teach children how to think, not what to think. With this valuable problem-solving strategy, we help children focus on solutions, teaching them the important lesson of seeking their own solutions to problems and conflict.