The Single Solution to All Problems in Education (Part 2)

         Typically, because schools are bureaucracies, they respond with such.  Enter all the programs for kids…we have programs to prompt their readiness, interventions while in school, and more remediation in place afterward. We recognize that they have low esteem, self-worth, and we try to build it up. We have lots of systems and programs.  Forms too.

         But what isn’t done often enough is just spending time with them, individually, or in a really small group.  A student that’s gone through years of a certain education system without success is probably not going to respond to more “system.”  They need attention—and even that’s really just the indicator that somebody cares about them, that somebody’s willing to sit and help them. If you have multiple children of your own, you probably know this intuitively.  Family time is great, but everybody needs some time with they are center stage.     

We’re hard wired for this, and again, if students are not getting it at home, the school can struggle mightily to try and make up the difference.  It’s not that teachers don’t care about each individual, they are doing as much as possible. On the other hand, the intent and how hard the teachers are working doesn’t matter to children…they just need to feel like somebody cares about them.  I suspect that being put in a remediation “program,” for example, feels more like be reshuffled or reclassified, more than it seems like somebody coming to help.

Schools do successfully help students like this all the time.  They do it one student at a time though, or in very small groups.  When a student sees somebody really cares—and the threshold is individual time quite often—they engage, and that is when we able to help them.  That emotional void must be filled before they will go on.  Take a look back and Harry Harlow’s research for some grim confirmations of this.  

My student- teaching experience was in a pretty high needs environment.  I left that experience with the realization that high needs kids make you work a lot harder to win them over, but once you do, they will give their all to not let you down.  Over time, I came to believe that this is because they are used to people quitting on them, individually or in a group.  When teachers persist, students eventually realize they somebody really cares about them.  Even where I work now, the most effective interventions we have are really just those that don’t overwhelm the adult with unmanageable caseloads, and it’s the ones like that where we hear the kids saying, “She's like a mom to me.  She really cares and she wouldn’t give up on me.  She helped me every day and that’s why I realized that school is important.”  Quotes like that are great as it is, but when they are accompanied by better behavior, grades, attendance, self-control and respect, all the better.  But that quote came from a student that benefitted from an intervention where the teacher had a lot of time to invest in her due to a small case.  Scaling that up to serve lots of student without losing the individuality is a greater challenge, and given the above it’s likely going to require a lot more labor.

When it comes to effectively helping students, no matter what the problem, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an intervention that worked because it was some great innovation or discovery.  There’s no shortcut or substitute.  Humans need the caring guidance of others who care about them as individuals. Though many are looking for a much more exciting solution than, “Somebody needs to start paying direct attention to these children.” I’m not sure one is available.  Until we reach a utopian society, there are always going to be children in need, and we can’t afford to wait for some perfect, easy-to-implement solution to come along.  The positive side is that each of us, in our roles as educators, parents, family members, or friends, are able to help—no special training required.