Paul Swanson: Concerning behavior is the signal. It's the fever. It communicates that there's an expectation a kid is having difficulty meeting. That means that the behavior is good, not bad. The information that comes with them is telling you something that they did in a moment in response to a particular set of circumstances. It's not actually telling you about that child's identity. We've got to recognise the data is very limiting in what it describes. It tells us what happened then that doesn't have to dictate what happens now. You're listening to Data Talks, the podcast from Data in School, in association with Atlanta International School and the Mona Lisa Effect, and sponsored by Veracross and IntelliSchool. I'm Paul Swanson, Director of Innovation and Institutional Research at Atlanta International School and part of the Data in Schools team. And I'm Matthew Savage, Educator, Leader, Consultant. Ross Green, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and the originator of the innovative, evidence-based approach called Collaborative Proactive Solutions, CPS, as described in his influential books, The Explosive Child, Lost at School, Lost and Found, and Raising Human Beings. And the recently released Kids Who Aren't Okay: The Urgent Case for Reimagining Support, Belonging, and Hope in Schools. Dr. Green was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School for over 20 years. Now oversees the nonprofit he founded in 2009, Lives in the Balance, which advocates on behalf of kids with concerning behaviors and their caregivers and provides vast free resources on the CPS model. He is also currently adjunct professor in the Department of Psychology at Virginia Tech and adjunct professor in the Faculty of Science at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia. Tracy Campbell is the CEO and founder of Together Transforming Behavior. company providing consultancy, training and coaching to teachers and parents, helping them to understand and respond to children's behavior. So welcome to our podcast, place where data talks, we listen. So, ⁓ Tracy, ⁓ Ross, I'm a big fan of both of you, and I'm eager to learn even more from each of you about this thing we call behavior. I often call it the B-word in schools because simply what it's called seems to demand specific approaches. But enough from me. This episode is a chance to just hear from the two of you about where the data and behavior worlds collide and what happens when they do. Well start with you, Tracy. Your book title is ⁓ Will You Be the One? Which seems to put the caring adult at the center of pretty much everything in those relationships. And Ross, I understand your whole model to rest on the idea that kids do well if they can, not just if they want to, and therefore the opportunities, the structures need to be in place to enable them to be that student. I wonder for the two of you who have such fundamentally hopeful positions about behavior yourselves now. Was there at some sort of moment, at some point, perhaps, when you were a child in a classroom yourself, or when you were in your first classroom or f what's worst first worked with your first group of schools or your first group of kids, when which made you certain that this is true, that we need to start from a place of hope. And I I would say for me it it it kind of began in a corridor. And I I straight away when I think of that title, will it be the one I picture myself, you know, in my kind of school years kind of, you know, wreaking havoc as it were around my school as I did in both my primary and secondary years. And so for me there was a particular exchange with a teacher, my film tutor at the time, in a corridor. ⁓ a little while after quite a significant incident. in our form tutorial session. And I was kind of intercepted in the corridor because I should have been in a lesson and I was, you know, doing what I wanted to do. And she literally led me to her office and asked me a series of questions. And one of those questions was, Do you know what I spend my break times doing? And my form tutor went on to explain that she spends her break times defending me in the staff room and letting me know that the rest of her colleagues have basically come to the end of their tether with me. And she then began to kind of paint a bit of a contrasting picture between what her colleagues see and what her colleagues believe and what she believes about me. And what was astonishing about this conversation for me was this conversation is happening days after a major incident within our tutor session where I made this same teacher cry. She literally it's the first time I've ever seen her cry. And then days later, I'm expecting to get a, you know, part two of a dressing down, and I'm actually being affirmed, I'm actually being told. about the leadership capacity that I have, the leadership potential that I have, you know, while others are calling me a ringleader. So there was something about that exchange and what then the subsequent interactions after that exchange that very much spoke to me because it was a very distinctly different sound to the sound I had heard from other adults in school about my potential. And I just never forgot that. And I think what happened after that interaction was She almost then went on to prove that belief in my potential through our interactions. So I left school my school years, having had that kind of experience, you know, at secondary level, coupled with, you know, five fixed terms exclusions. So when you've had that interaction with an adult at a very significant time when you've got, you know, genuine legitimate challenges with your own behavior, it it shapes the way you entered a profession. So I came into teaching. you know, having had that experience and I was very clear about how it changed me and how much I wanted to kind of do that for myself and for and for colleagues. I love that story that you tell, ⁓ Tracy, because ⁓ well for many reasons, but one, because it star started with your experience as a kid and so many of the things that we believe about ourselves, about others, about structures and systems, start when we're really, really young. But I also liked the way in which it framed part of an opposite, being on the one hand, the commonplace, I want to say that cautiously, but the commonplace approach that many schools have traditionally taken, which is assume the kids aren't enough and prove, find evidence to prove that maybe they are. Whereas you're flipping that to an antithesis of that, whereby we assume the kid's already enough, unless any evidence comes along that says they're not. And even then We challenge that evidence from the student's point of view as their advocate. So I think it's powerful stuff. Ross, was there a moment when your more optimistic, more hopeful, ⁓ more kind of child believing approach was born? I can't say that my experience was personal. ⁓ I was well behaved or at least sneaky enough not to get caught. So my experience was more professional, and it actually started with ⁓ parents that I was working with. I was trained behaviorally, and I was therefore trained to focus. On overt behavior. I was trained to believe that overt behavior is the only thing that's objective. I now know that's not true. I was trained to believe that ⁓ behavior is the only thing that's quantifiable. That's not true. Not like we don't have other options, but we'll talk about that later. But I was also therefore trained in the behavioral tradition, which is behavior modification. And this is a critical, the linkage between what we measure and what we try to do something about is clear. If you are measuring behavior, you are likely to be trying to modify it. So early in my career as a behavior modifier, I started noticing that in my work with parents, even in my work with kids, I would establish a relationship with the kid in a therapeutic way. ⁓ I would teach the parents to positively attend to the kid's behavior in the first week, in the belief that if you overwhelm the kid with positive attention, they won't quote unquote seek out negative attention. But then would come the week, and I have things going swimmingly, but then would come the week that I would teach the parents how to do timeout. And in my office the next week would walk a kid who looked absolutely betrayed. And parents who looked absolutely exhausted because they had been holding their kid in timeout for a good part of the week. And they were asking me a question. They would say, This is going to get better, right? Well, based on my training, ⁓ I told them, yeah, it's going to get better. And then I started noticing that it, in many cases, was not getting better. ⁓ and that made me rethink because those people were hopeless. And what I was offering them was not giving them hope. It was making their lives worse, which is not hopeful. Then began the origins of me thinking of what would be an alternative here? What's really going on here? Because of course I was also taught, and this is not a very helpful vo view either, that the kids were attention-seeking, manipulative, coercive, unmotivated, limit testing. That's why they were. exhibiting those maladaptive behaviors. And their parents, they botched the job. They were passive, permissive, inconsistent, non-contingent, inept disciplinarians. Then I noticed something very important. This was a game changer for me. Most of those parents had other kids in their home who were well behaved. Huge. That began my actually relatively rapid ⁓ climb out of focusing on behavior and trying to modify it, toward instead focusing on the problems that are causing those behaviors and solving them. And I find that to be a much more hopeful way of doing things. That's beautiful. Thank you so much, Ross and Tracy, too. I think the there's tremendous substance to your The origin stories of your hope, and both hugely powerful ones that led to a pretty seismic shift in ⁓ thinking that many others in the profession still haven't maybe quite fully made. But that story just resonates for me as well. And it makes me think of ⁓ the first week that I was in education, I was ⁓ subbing a long term sub job and for an inclusion classroom. fourth and fifth grade students ⁓ in Indiana. And there was one student who was struggling with control his behaviors and things. And ⁓ at the end of the week, one of the other teachers asked him if he had been well behaved. And I'm looking at it and said, well, he tried to stab another kid with a pencil. I'm not sure if we would call that well behaved or not. And the consequence of that was that he didn't get to visit the principal's office because the principal was the male figure in his life that he connected with and looked up to. And that's what he had been looking forward to for many weeks. And he shot me that same look of betrayal that you're describing right there. Like how could I take That thing that was precious to him away. And it just when we think about this in the context of behavior, it it's a funny word. Like it w it seems like it's neutral, but in schools it's never neutral. You talk about, ⁓ there was a behavior. It's not a good behavior when someone says there was a behavior. At least in any of the schools I've been in, there's this instant assumption that a behavior is a negative behavior. And w we we sometimes we talk about I've ⁓ hear words like defr ⁓ infractions and people going to detentions, referrals, incidents, demerits, all these sorts of things. ⁓ Ross, you're arguing that this is we're we're measuring the wrong thing and that these unsolved problems are observable and quantifiable just like behaviors. And we need to be paying attention to that in addition to those behaviors. Tracy, you're also working with schools on how to shift that culture. So what does it cost a child when a school measures behavior but doesn't try to understand the problem underneath those behaviors? ⁓ I think it costs them everything that our schooling experience has the potential to give us access to. So if we start on a very basic level, it costs learning time and it's very interesting when you think about you know, the DFE themselves have done like a kind of whole national survey. You know, certainly there was a twenty twenty five survey looking at behaviour and it and they're looking at who's losing learning time. And often the focus is who is who are the people around that child who's le losing learning time. But actually no one's really focusing on that child, th the the lost learning time for them. So that that for me is a major the time you're spending sitting outside of a classroom, the time you're spending in detention, the time you're spending in suspension, exclusion. There's lost learning time. There's also a lost opportunity for early intervention. There's lost opportunity for you to get the resources, the support that you're needing at that early stage. In addition, you know, I think it's the beginning of a trajectory that often leads to you literally falling out of love with learning. And when I think about my schooling experience, I mean, I'm sitting here now, kind of 50 plus, and I've got friends that I'm still that are still in my circle from school. you know, kind of forty odd years worth of friendships. You you know, many of these students they're falling out of love with learning, they're falling out of love with education. And you know, when people talk about the the school kind of to prison pipeline, it's real. You know, there was a there was a study done in the Ministry of Justice in the Department for Education in twenty twenty two and eighty seven percent of young people who found themselves within the criminal justice system had either a a diagnosed or an undiagnosed S C N D. So that correlation for me is without question. So the cost is humongous. When I sit here and think about my school experience, you know, how formative, you know, how much of a launch pad that was for the very things that I'm doing in my life now, you know, it it it can cost the student everything. Learning time, it can cost them a love for learning, it cost them all the relationships, secure relationships with adults that school gives you access to. So I don't think the issue around what is lost can be overstated. And and you mentioned like almost the loss of freedom. We're talking about the criminal justice system. If this is handled wrongly, then the child is gonna lose their freedom and everything that depends on that freedom as an adult. I don't know, Ross, whether there's been similar research within ⁓ schools in the States. I know you don't so much have an education department anymore, but that's a separate discussion entirely. But has have similar trends been seen in the States as to what happens when behavior is Described and counted and measured in these sorts of ways? Well, I wouldn't say that it's a roar. But if the question is, what are we losing when we focus on behavior? See, this is the interesting thing. When we say behavior, as Tracy was describing, it has a negative feel to it, right? Behavior doesn't have to have a negative feel to it, right? The truth is. I don't know if we're getting rid of measuring behavior anytime soon. I mean, would I rejoice if we started ⁓ stopped measuring behavior tomorrow and started instead identifying the expectations kids are having difficulty meeting? Once again, unsolved problems, just as quantifiable, just as observ as observable. But the problem with behavior is that it's viewed negatively. I, believe it or not, think we can change that. Here's what I've been saying about concerning behavior lately. It's good. Because of what it communicates. Concerning behavior is a is the signal. It's the fever. It communicates that there's an expectation a kid is having difficulty meeting. If all change is incremental, and if we're not going to get rid of measuring behavior immediately, then at least let's help people change their mentality about what the behavior is telling them. It's telling them that there's an unsolved problem, an expectation a kid is having difficulty meeting, right? That means that the behavior is good, not bad. And as I'm always saying to parents and educators, you want to know that, right? You want to know that there's an expectation a kid is having difficulty meeting. The problem is because we've been viewing behavior as bad, we've been trying to extinguish it through timeout from reinforcement. through planned ignoring, these are all interventions that flow from the behavioral tradition. Those aren't problem-solving strategies. So somehow or another, we've got to move beyond the behavior, see the kid who's still, that's the biggest thing we lose. So Tracy was saying this in so many words, when all you're focused on is behavior. And when that simply leads you to modifying a kid's behavior, you miss the entire picture. But what you miss especially Is what the kid is struggling with because you are consumed with how the kid is communicating that they are struggling. Wrong focal point. What I find is that when we help parents and schools change that mentality on behavior, it's not bad. It's actually good because of what it communicates. And because of what it communicates, we can completely transform the role that caregivers play in the lives of kids. Problem solver, not behavior modifier. Solving problems with kids, especially when you do it collaboratively, meaning the kid is an integral part of the process, is about as relationship and communication enhancing as it gets. When all we're focused on is the frustration response, the concerning behavior. I use those two terms interchangeably, or distress response. Also great. When all we're focused on is the frustration response, we miss what's getting in the way for the kid and we miss tons of opportunities to actually help them. We've been focused on the wrong thing. Your school measures more than any one person can see. Attendance in one system, assessment in another, well-being in a third, built by three different companies. Each holds part of the story. IntelliSchool brings them together into one governed foundation and connects the AI your school chooses. Staff ask questions in their own words and see only what their role allows. Nobody's professional judgment gets replaced. It just gets better informed. IntelESchool.co That reminds me of ⁓ Adichi's essay on the single story. Now I know she writes that in relation to the single story of of individual peoples and civilizations, etc. But it has a kind of ⁓ an alternative here. There seems to be about ⁓ about some of the students that we're referring to here, a single story that has developed around them. They are this defiant or disruptive kid. They have these problem behaviors they need dealing with in this way. Whereas we're missing out on all the other multiple stories that that child carries with them. It also got me thinking back to when my own kids were young. Now my daughter was diagnosed as autistic at three. And leading up to that period, there were all sorts of behaviors of hers that the system was finding it hard to manage, you know? And To be fair, some of them we were seeing and we didn't know quite what to do. ⁓ and there was one point when she was around two years old, I think, and our second child had been born. Seemed like a good idea at the time to have them both so close, and it is now, but at the time, maybe not. but my wife was trying to get just a little bit of headspace each week just to be her. She couldn't didn't have to be the mother. She just wanted to be the her. And she th one way she could do this, this is going somewhere, I promise, ⁓ was by going to the ⁓ swimming pool twice a week and just having half an hour's swimming. It was a place where she'd be in the zone. She could go it was almost meditative in its repetition. But that involved putting Phoebe, our daughter, into the swimming pool's crash. And the problem there was Phoebe was not able to communicate in the ways that other kids. in that cresh were able to. So she often co communicated by taking a plastic toy and bopping another child on the head with the plastic toy, by which she was trying to say, Hello, can we play together? Or do you mind if I play with this, or would you like to play this with this with me? But obviously the Cresh saw that as ⁓ child is assaulting another child. And in the end, Phoebe has the fame of being excluded Permanently from the swimming pool crash. And when I was listening to you there, Ross, it made me ⁓ think of that being a single story ⁓ for Phoebe ⁓ as it was for all of the other kids we're talking about here. I don't know if that resonates and seems similar, but it's certainly what it made me think of. When I think of behavior data in schools, I reckon that it sticks to kids as well. If a child gets a certain score in a certain test at a certain age, it doesn't stick to them in the same way. Maybe another test they'll get a different score. Another year they'll have a different teacher and they get different scores altogether. But when a piece of behavior data is applied to a particular child, there seems to be a stickiness about it. In the way that they behave in a certain way on a certain day when they're this old. And suddenly that behavior data becomes attached to them, almost like a a label, a branding almost, that they can carry with them for so much further in the future. It becomes almost their biography. And I wonder through both of your work, and whether it's through yours, Ross, and ⁓ the role of diagnoses and labels. in relation to the unsolved problems you described, whether it for you, Tracy, it's about working with teachers who inherit the previous teachers' stories about a child's behaviour. Between you, how do we stop behavior data becoming biography? I'm gonna jump in, partly because I was so struck by that phrase. So when I when I heard that phrase, how do we stop behavior data from becoming biography? I absolutely loved that as a phrase. And let me say this as a bit of a as a bit of a precursor. I'm sitting here, you know, in my office and in a file kind of down here somewhere. I've got all of my school reports. So I I'm sitting here with somebody who has, I've I've, you know, this is this is this is my story, you know, very much the behavior data became my my it's become my story. And actually I've kind of learned how to use it in a way. That at the very least engages people in the conversation, you know, so kind of a behaviour barrier has now in some ways become a bit of a behaviour business, you know. But when people work with children and young people, we often say, no two days are the same. You know, it's part of the joy of the profession. And I speak as a former teacher myself. And I think in like manner, no two teachers are the same. And I've, you know, in my own experience and, you know, many colleagues that I've worked with, you know, you get a child who's calm with a, you know, a thick file. They come to the school and they're waiting for the issues to emerge. They actually they they never emerge, you know? So I think there's something about refuting this kind of toxic notion that would suggest that and I think it's a toxic belief in any relationship, that the other party just has no capacity to be anything other than what they've been in a particular moment. Or to respond in the exact same way to a particular stimulus. So there's something about that. Give yourself a chance as a practitioner, but also give that child a chance and recognize that the information that comes with them is telling you something that they did in a moment to a in response to a particular set of circumstances. It's not actually telling you about that child's identity. So that's there's something about recognition for me. Recognize the capacity that you have as a professional. recognise that the the the fresh opportunity that affords that child, you know, in a in a pit in a different context. And I would say I think the last one is, you know, ask better questions. Ask questions about the data. What has been tried? What have we learnt? What are we yet to discover? You know? And and there will be some who would argue, does the data need to travel travel at all? You know, can we not kind of start afresh? I have to be honest to say I'm on the fence with that one, maybe as a former teacher myself. There are some things that have been shared that gave me some insight into what works well with a student. I would I'm kind of going on the basis of that the data needing to travel. I think we've got to learn to ask better questions about that data. You know, have that posture of curiosity rather than seeing it as something that is fixed. We've got to recognise the data is very limiting in what it describes. It tells us what happened then that doesn't have to dictate what happens now. Thanks, Tracy. before I hand that over to Ross, that reminds me of an experience. We all have these, especially when you talk about behavior, we all have these experiences, either our own or our child we strongly remember. There was one school I started teaching at in the I think the third year of teaching, fourth year of teaching. ⁓ and they had a process whereby if you took on a class, the previous teacher was supposed to give handover notes. ⁓ and this particular teacher who had taught that English class before me gave me handover notes, which really were a description of each of those kids' behaviors as he saw them. Their story was their behavior story. And he'd written them down on a ⁓ a register on my desk. And ⁓ a couple of weeks into my time in the school, one of the kids happened to see this document on the teacher's desk, which said. ⁓ what each of their behaviors was like. They'd seen this before I came into the room. I shouldn't have left it there, whatever the other kind of factors we could change. But they saw this biography of each of them purely through the lens of the challenging behaviors they had displayed at one or more points. So their data that their behavior data had become their biography. Which then being read by someone who for whom it was the first part of their story they read. Ross, what can we what what can we do about this? How can we enable each child's biography to be multiple stories and not just this single one that was written by someone else about one incident or a few incidents that happened? We have to remember that behavior is situationally specific. This is part of my behavioral training that is still useful to me. Behavior's situationally specific. ⁓ if we were to take a disorder like oppositional defiant disorder, it makes it sound like the kid has oppositional defiant disorder full time. No one has oppositional defiant disorder full time. Anyone di who carries that diagnosis has oppositional defiant disorder part time. When do they look like they have oppositional defiant disorder? When they are exhibiting the behaviors that are emblematic of that disorder. When does that happen? When they are frustrated or distressed. So they have part-time oppositional defiant disorder. Unfortunately, the label perpetuates the fact that behavior sticks, right? Kids with ADHD don't look like they have ADHD all the time. So most of these are part-time disorders, but when you hang the label on the kid, because we adults like to be efficient in how we communicate, it takes a lot longer to say, well, here's the conditions under which this kid does well. Here are the problems we didn't quite get to solving last year. Here's the problems we did get to solving last year. And to tell you the truth, we didn't see frustration responses in response to those problems because solved problems don't cause frustration responses, only still unsolved problems. Do. So this is sort of the mentality that we have to help people come to, but it starts with behavior is situationally specific. This kid doesn't look bad all the time. It also means, as we were talking about earlier, stop accentuating the negative. Every kid I've ever worked with, and we're probably into the 2500s at this point, we're meeting a lot more expectations than they weren't. We're behaving well more often. Then they weren't behaving well. This efficiency that we like to run, so easy to say, well, the kid has pediatric bipolar disorders, watch out, right? Or the kid has opposite. No, the kid only looks those ways under certain conditions when there's an expectation they're having difficulty meeting. It's so critical for us to recognize that concerning behavior is a frustration or distress response. That helps us start looking much more carefully. At when this kid is frustrated or distressed, those are things we can do something about without focusing on the behavior at all. Both of you are suggesting in a lot of ways that there's a certain intelligence to these data that if we approach it with sort of curiosity, that we're we're we're seeing these things happen. What's going on here? Why might what what are the other stories? What's going on beneath the surface? And that if we use that and connect our intelligence with that and our curiosity with it, then we can start to uncover ⁓ the deeper meaning and significance and and also complement some of those that superficial layer of this is what we observe as behaviors ⁓ that sort of pop to the surface and get recorded, but there's all of this going on underneath the surface as well. I I see a tendency in some schools, they and you were referring to this a little bit, Tracy, about this question of you know how do we handle this behavior as biography? And some schools just try to remove it from the equation. Well, we're just gonna start off with a clean slate every year. We're we're going to remove the possibility of better understanding where kids are based on what they've done. Because the risk of teachers reducing that to that single story is too high. Is it accurate to say that you both of you are suggesting that instead of reducing the amount of information that we have, we should be enriching that information to show a broader array of of what's happening beneath the surface? What are those unsolved problems? what else is going on in these kids' life? What are the sources of hope and strength that complement some of these things instead of just looking at them in isolation? Yeah, I think I think for me, what what you do with the data is really important. So there are certain there are certain things we are accountable for as school leaders. There's certain areas within which we have to be compliant, whether it when it comes to collecting behavior data, there's certain things that just are what they are. They're they're compliance exercises. And I think it goes back to the question we answered formally about what you do with that data. So certain things are compliance, yes, they are, but it's it's not a clinical assessment. And I think the issue arises when we conflate when we conflate those two things, when we take something that is telling us, and Dr. Ross has made it very, very clear that behavior occurs under a particular set of circumstances. So all the all all the data tells us is what happened in that moment in time. But I think when it's interpreted on occasion, it's interpreted as some kind of an assessment tool. That that's where it becomes problematic for me. It's people recognizing separate what you've got to do for accountability purposes, but have a parallel process that seeks to answer the why question and seeks to enable us to use your term, Ross, you know, to problem solve. Because often the way that behaviour data presents, it leaves you stuck. It just doesn't give you, you know, something that you can take and and move forward with apart from perpetuating these ideas about what a child presents. So consider what needs to be gathered to answer questions, but think about what you need to ask alongside that so you can actually begin to dig beneath that surface. All right. So here's the sequence of events. We place an expectation on a kid. Often we already know the kid can't meet it, which begs the question then why are you placing that expectation on the butt f For for whatever reason, we're placing a lot of expectations on kids that we already know they can't meet, right? That's not selling anybody short. It's just that for the first last 50 times we've placed the expectation on the kid, the kid has lost their mind and paid a very hairy price for it. Right. So I'm think we're on safe territory here, right? Behavior then occurs. How we view it is critical. If it's a frustration response, we get curious. What unsolved problem caused it? ⁓ I got a better idea. Don't wait for the behavior to occur. You know, you may have to do these side by side for the next twenty-five years, because I don't know if we're getting rid of behavior anytime soon. But eventually, if people are identifying unsolved problems instead, or in tandem, and solving problems with kids proactively, meaning not in the heat of the moment. A lot of intervention is heat of the moment when it's focused on behavior, because B.F. Skinner told us that the intervention has to be as proximal to the behavior as possible to make clear the link for the kid between the behavior and its consequences. Problems can be identified proactively, they're predictable, they can be solved collaboratively. And now I'm getting to the information we've been missing. When you're solving a problem collaboratively with a kid, The kid is helping you understand what's making it hard for them to meet the expectation that caused the behavior in the first place. I find that when we ask kids about their behavior, something lots of adults love doing, why'd you do that? They get the standard kid response, I don't know. And there's no information there. The better information we could be getting straight from the horse's mouth is what's making it hard for you to meet that expectation that causes, I don't need to even talk about it, but in parentheses. That causes that frustration response that we have been so busy trying to modify for all these years, completely blind to what's been sitting in front of us all these years. All those expectations you've been having difficulty meeting. Isn't this a shame? You want to stick with behavior? We may be stuck with that for 25 years. Let's start talking to kids. Let's start engaging them in the process of solving the problems that are causing their concerning behavior. That's where you really learn a lot about a kid. 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Now you can ask bigger questions and get trusted answers every time. Veracross.com, now trusted by 3,700 schools in over 70 countries. That's lovely. And it leads on really neatly to a question I really wanted to ask. But before I do, I just wanted wanted to share something else that what you've both said has brought ⁓ to my mind. Oftentimes behavior is measured against some sort of scale or rubric. And something has gone into this portrait of the well-behaved student, right? And even inspectorates and accreditation agencies, they all talk about this school's got the Students are very well behaved here, you know? So we've got this notion of well behaved, what it looks like, and the criteria, which are kind of like ingredients for the well-behaved child, you know, like some sort of weird cooking recipe. ⁓ and yet, oftentimes when I see those rubrics, I see the description, for example, of a neurotypical child. So ⁓ many of the neurodivergent kids with whom I've worked over the years, they are always going to be badly behaved. If being well behaved looks like that particular version. But about the student role in it, I'm also really fascinated in teasing that out a bit from both of you. Because in learning in schools, all the talk or lots of the talk is about student agency, whether it's authentic talk, whether we mean it and follow through on it, whether there are extents to which we will not go to enfranchise that learner. But there's a lot of talk about student agency, but we don't hear it in relation to behavior and behavior data. They can look at their report card. They can see their grades every time it comes home. But could they sit with an adult and look at their behavior record with the same sense of, you know what, I own this. This is my story. It belongs to me. I get it. I own it. ⁓ and I'm letting you take part in it ⁓ too. So I wonder what would it look like if that principle of like you said just now and also in your in your wider work that we look at doing things with the child rather than to them, what would that look like in terms of how a school collects and uses behaviour data ⁓ with its students? I think you start with the five, ten, fifteen kids who are struggling the most. You use an assessment instrument that we use in the collaborative or productive solutions model. It's called the assessment of skills and unsolved problems. It's free on the Lives in the Balance website, so I'm not pitching something here. What I'm pitching is information, not money in my pocket. ⁓ it gives you the information that's been missing about this kid. This is what the research has been telling us for 40 or 50 years. It's not motivation that is contributing to maladaptive frustration responses. It's skills like these are the global ones, flexibility, adaptability, frustration tolerance, problem solving, emotion regulation. Let's figure out what skills this kid is struggling with so that all of us have the right lenses on. And let's identify what this kid's unsolved problems are. Most of those unsolved problems are old, meaning the kid has been having difficulty meeting those expectations for a very long time. That's step one of what it looks like when I or my colleagues is working with a school. Step two, let's start solving problems collaboratively and proactively with those five, 10, 15 kids who we are in the midst of losing. And every school knows who their five, ten, fifteen kids are. Whenever I start working with a school, I say to them, make your list, and within two minutes, they are they know who they are. Over time, let's start to show that these kids are starting to do better. And let's extend it to other kids, by the way, who also have unsolved problems, but who may not have maladaptive frustration responses. Those kids sometimes get missed because their frustration responses aren't as big. But, Matthew, back to something you were talking about just earlier. We talk about developmental variability. We talk about it when it comes to academics. I don't know how well we do it. Differentiated instruction is supposed to be an effort to respond to the developmental variability that's walking in the door, but I don't actually hear schools talking much about developmental variability. We're too busy, at least over on this side of the pond, trying to get every kid over the same line by the end of the school year. That is not being attuned to the developmental variability that's walking in the door. We have high stakes testing over here, where we're telling educators that if their kids don't get over that line by the end of the school year, their job may be in danger, their school may be punished. That is so different from Meeting every kid where they're at. Having every kid be their own reference point for progress. When you're meeting kids where they're at, and you're doing it well, you're not getting those behaviors. If you're still getting those behaviors, this is gonna sound a bit harsh. That's on us. That's on us adults. If year after year you're still seeing the same frustration responses in the kid, we are screwing it up. Probably because we're only focused on the frustration responses and not on the problems that are causing them. Boy do we lose a lot of kids that way. It is tragic. Yeah, I mean I'm I'm sitting here nodding. I'm nodding I'm I'm I'm agreeing with you wholeheartedly, Dr. Ross. ⁓ and I think what I would add, ⁓ Matthew, just kind of going back to the question, you know, you took we we're talking about agency or certainly one of the things you're talking about is agency. And one of the things I've observed in my work is when it comes to let's just kind of use behavior or the management of behavior as an example, there it it's littered, it's laden with language. And whether it's agency, whether it's, you know, ⁓ restorative approaches, whether it's building positive relationships, it's de-escalation. And what I found is, you know, when you when you get up close to a team, we don't actually understand what The implications of that language in practice. And agency is just a case in point. Yeah. And so for me, the problem I see is I almost think when we talk about co-designing, it would it's such a radical is the word that sticks to me. It's such a radical idea. And and again, Dr. Ross, I don't know, you know, kind of what this looks like where you are, but certainly where I am and the regions where I'm I'm working. Just that. distribution of the power, you know, from an adult to a child where they've got real agency, would it just sound so radical because I think we we think we're co-designing, we think we're working in partnership, but when behaviour becomes problematic, when behaviour gets difficult, adults get desperate. And we agree things at policy level that get lost in practice when we're we're stressed now. And we're we're getting desperately trying to fix this issue. But it it's something that even as you were talking, I could feel my heart racing because it has the potential to create the shift that we're all waiting to see. But it's part of a bigger problem for me that we we know the language, we can speak the language, but we're not doing that thing in reality. And if I were just to take restorative approaches as an example, you know, a lot of schools. Treat restorative approaches as a conversation. Where for me, a restorative approach is a culture. I'm not waiting to be restorative when I'm having that conversation in that moment of time with that child. So if we're thinking about co-designing, you know, whether it's about, you know, rules, routines, sanction, rewards, systems, and structures, I would love to see that being like the threat. That runs through the culture of a school where we're not doing to people, we're doing with. And dare I say, you know, to what extent would staff benefit, you know, from having that level of agency and from from existing in a culture where where systems are co designed? I mean, it's it's radical, but it's doable and it's necessary. I gotta jump in real quick. Tracy, you were talking about heat of the moment. Us adults are at our worst and the heat of the moment. That's when we say things we wish we wouldn't say and do things we wish we hadn't done. A lot of this hinges on helping adults be proactive, helping them be early, ⁓ helping them get out in front of it. ⁓ so much of what we train educators to do teaches them what to do once a kid is already becoming or is already. Escalated. So much of what we're teaching kids to do these days is self-regulate. ⁓ What should you do, kid, once you are starting? That's not out in front of it, right? The earliest we can get is focusing on the expectations the kid is having difficulty meeting. Now we're out in front of it. We're not waiting for behavior to occur. We're not waiting for a kid to become escalated. It is much easier to give kids agency proactively, heat of the moment. By then it's pretty much a wash. Nobody's at their best. You're not solving any problems in the heat of the moment either. A lot of this hinges on getting away from all of these interventions that are based on what do you do when it's already late? And start focusing on what we start doing when it's already early. Yeah. And and the only thing I think I want to add to that, Dr. Ross, is we were talking earlier on about the behaviour lens being quite narrow, not only narrow in that often behaviour references are thinking about negative behaviour. For me, often behaviour references are only thinking about children. They're not actually thinking about the behaviour of adults, you know? And there's something about, I mean, I refuse to stand on a platform and not speak as much about adults' behaviour as I do about students. But there is there's something you've hit on there for me, and it's about the adult's capacity to own what happens in those heightened moments. So we talk about, you know, children co-creating, children looking at their own stories and being able to explain the context. And I think in the 30 plus years I've been working in education, few adults are actually able to say, Do you know something? I can think of one adult I was working with her, I was coaching her, and I I made some observations and when I asked questions. She held her hand up, said, you know something? Something happened earlier on in the day. And she used this language, and I haven't forgiven him. And I just thought, wow, it was so powerful to hear her acknowledge, this is what you're seeing. I'm seeing this as an external person coming into the school and making observations about hyper-vigilance on this particular boy. And I'm just reflecting this back to her, said, You know something? This is what I saw happening. And to hear her own her behavior, for me, that that's a major. situation that we're in currently in the sector where we don't I don't hear that enough. Adults just let's just let's just get back to our humanity. You know, before we were professionals, we were just people who had good great days and great days. Let's just get back to some sense of common humanity where I can acknowledge I said some things, I got heated. Is that not part of this restorative approach that we that we talk about, you know? You're talking about power and How can we help share some of that power out? The power to be able to create a behavior ⁓ alert in the system, whatever system you're using, and say, I have the right to be able to make a note when I think that you are out of line. But you have no such power really to to do that for me. And and yet they do. They, you know, kids find ways. Kids find, you know, they're the And James Scott calls us the weapons of the weak, the ways of disrupting or blocking or you know expressing frustration and ⁓ th there's all sorts of things that kids do. I mean, some of the things that you guys are talking about are really quite revolutionary when you think about how what what the implications are. ⁓ and that's wonderful because we should be thinking big, but we also need to be thinking about What's a next step? ⁓ and obviously those next steps are gonna be different for different schools depending on where they're at. But for people who are working in schools listening to this, what are some high-leverage next step moves that you've seen schools take that are quite effective in terms of shifting that culture, as you were mentioning, Tracy? Hmm. What what have I seen schools doing? Sheesh. I think I think very incrementally, very slowly, I'm seeing schools really push pr practitioners towards a solution focused approach when it comes to behaviour. So you're not just reporting, you're actually trying to develop that posture of curiosity. I I certainly know you know, in some of the work I'm doing with behaviour leaders, in in the context of their role. And they're often the ones who are, you know, they're often the ones who are kind of set up on and expected to just listen to somebody rant and for you, for you as that person to be able to say, this is how you fix that. But the the what I've seen is individuals really using kind of some coaching techniques to move practitioners towards a more solution focused approach. So a part of the reporting and a part of the discourse must include some questions about what is this behavior telling us? And what can we do about it? But I would say for us, in my context, we're at the very, very early stages of that. It makes me think of ⁓ Michael Bungay Staniers' ⁓ mantra, stay curious longer. Dr. Russ, what would you say? The author Ken Wilbur distinguished between conscious incompetence and unconscious incompetence. Conscious incompetence is when you know what you're doing is wrong and harming kids. He wasn't talking about kids specifically, but when you know what you're doing is wrong and potentially harmful, but you're not exactly sure what to do instead. Unconscious incompetence is when you don't even know what you're doing is harmful. So we gotta meet people where they're at. often that's some PD in the beginning, right? For me, the basics are, you know, we've got a hu we've had a huge project going on in Ireland. Especially with their adult and child disability services, but they are now moving into schools. And I was meeting with my Irish colleagues about a month ago, and they said, Ross, if you could if you had one wish for what we could accomplish in the next five years, what would it be? Every adult in Ireland knows that concerning behavior is a frustration or distress response. And that that frustration or distress response is caused by an unsolved problem, an expectation that a kid is having difficulty. Meeting. That is a huge beginning. That can be accomplished in a PD. We want to get some people in a building good at it. We want early adopters. This is what we're doing in Irish schools right now. I'm not talking about one fell swoop. I'm not even talking about changing your assessment methodologies. I find that that comes. Once people start using the assessment of skills and unsolved problems, over time they find it to be so much more useful. Then collecting behavior data. Let's start doing the ASIP on those five, 10, 15 kids. Let's start with some five or six early adopters who get good at solving problems collaboratively and proactively with kids. And then let's see where we're at. So I tend to start small. There's too many embedded practices and structures for this to occur in one fell swoop. It has to occur slowly. But I find that. Even though I'm preaching it's gonna occur slowly, what a difference we can make in an entire school in a year, but by starting small. I think that's a great way to end this episode. Thank you both for so much for coming on, sharing your thoughts and wisdom. ⁓ I feel like I've already started to rethink how I will be talking about behavior in my next conversations and meetings later this week. Me too, and I've spent yeah, so I've learned so much. I've One of my favorite episodes so far this one, so it's been great to learn from you all. Thank you so much. Tracy, very nice to meet you. And Matthews, thanks for your patience and ⁓ with me. Likewise, Dr. Ross, an absolute pleasure. Tune in next time as we continue our data conversations with educators and thought leaders from around the world.
