Insights into the Modern Classroom: The Getting of Wisdom for Teachers

By John R Frew

This book of essays follows Johns previous publication, The Impact of Modern Neuroscience on Contemporary Teaching, and is a more practical guide to working in modern classrooms with a focus on dealing with students who present challenging behaviours.

The essays track his journey over forty years of teaching; a significant amount of that time was spent working with children who displayed severely dysfunctional behaviours. Working with these extremely difficult kids allowed John to develop a philosophy around education that differs from the mainstream in that it is inclusive of problem children. It has also allowed him to acquire a set of techniques that will help all teachers manage difficult behaviour in their classrooms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Aug 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543402940

John R Frew

John R. Frew has worked in public education for over forty years, the last twenty-four as a school principal. In 1988, he established a unit for students with emotional disturbances and severe behaviours. Two years later, based on the success of the unit, he became the founding principal of the first school in New South Wales, Australia, dedicated to dealing with students with severe conduct disorder and oppositional defiance. John has written numerous books and programs on behaviour management. He has published numerous articles nationally and internationally. He has also presented at numerous conferences across Australia and internationally. He has also had a successful career in sport, which produced two books, The Art of Coaching Kids and Training Drills for All Team Sports. In his time in coaching, John wrote two columns for local and national papers.

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Journey to Self-Actualization

Of all species, humans are born with the fewest survival skills, yet we dominate in an evolutionary sense. It has taken millions of years for our species to achieve this position of superiority, but the evolution for each individual is a personal journey that takes place in a single lifetime. This requires exposure to the right parenting lessons at the time in life when they are required.

From the moment I held my first child, I was overwhelmed by his helplessness and the huge responsibility I had to care for and protect him. By the time his sister arrived, I realized that kids are a bit tough, and she could survive my clumsy attempts at parenting. But they both needed to develop the skills for success in life and to become, in the words of celebrated psychologist Abraham Maslow, a pioneer in the study of human motivation, self-actualized humans.

I apply the term self-actualized—used by Maslow and others, including Kurt Goldstein and Carl Rogers—in the sense that I would want any child to realize his or her capacity to harvest all that the world has to offer. I want to understand a child’s self and have the skills to meet all of his or her needs in a way that makes a positive contribution to the world.

Raising kids is a very complex issue. What are we raising them for? This is a question rarely asked by parents. Who really sits down and defines what qualities they want their children to possess as adults? In this essay, I try to belatedly answer this question in the context of self-actualization. I pose the idea that society should ask the same question and let its answer define what skills we want our children to possess. The answer should be at the heart of every school’s curriculum.

For me, the primary goal of individuals should be to become truly self-conscious—truly aware of their own qualities and characteristics. Recognition of these characteristics allows individuals to take charge of their lives and realize their goals and aspirations. Kids are not born with these abilities, and many are not born into families who are even aware they are needed. So it becomes society’s responsibility to support all children while they make their journeys.

Of course, in the first instance, it is the parents’ task to teach their babies how to become adults. This starts with the initial attachment to another, and this is predominantly with Mum. Later, their intimate others—dads, sisters, brothers, and grandparents—move into their inner circle. As they develop, their interactions with the world increase, first with school friends and then on to the broader community. At each step, they need appropriate exposure to these others and the lessons that will allow them to successfully integrate themselves in their ever-expanding world.

After much thought and lots of searching, I have come up with a model that, in a broad way, explains the journey every one of us must take to reach self-actualization. The traits I use refer to a person’s character and are not relative to their physical, primary needs. Of course, everything in the brain is connected, so I concede the limitations of the model, but it is impossible to describe a completely detailed representation across a single brain, never mind all persons’ brains. Any discussion about human development has to be made in very broad terms, because human personalities are so complex and unique that any model offered could only be an approximation.

The way each child’s journey ends depends on the lessons learned in early childhood. Our evolutionary advantage is our ability to predict what will happen if we act in a certain manner. In a perfect world, all children would be provided with the necessary stimuli and the ‘correct’ consequences for their behaviour to build towards an optimal neural structure so they could behave in an actualized way in every situation. Unfortunately, the world is not perfect, and too many kids are either denied the required stimuli or learn to associate societally dysfunctional actions with desired consequences. That is, these kids are either abused or neglected. Either will have a damaging effect on the development of their characters. But there will be more about this problem later.

The model describes five characteristics that need to be developed for a child to become a self-actualized adult. These are the following:

Relating Skills

Children begin this journey from a position of total dependence. The first lesson a child learns is to recognize his or her primary caregiver’s face, and for the first months, the child is very much attached to that face and other intimate people in his or her very small world. So much has been written about this attachment and the problems in development if this attachment is unhealthy. This is where the first step into mastery of these relating skills is taken.

Next, the child will develop a wider, but still relatively confined, group of friends and learn to associate with them. The responsibility to teach the child how to be a good friend and how to be an affiliate of others falls not only to parents but also to an expanded group of adults, including the parents of other children and teachers.

From there, the child will learn the important lesson of becoming an intimate partner to another individual. This is a critical lesson, and in an ideal world, the adults in the child’s life—parents, carers, teachers, and politicians—provide the example for becoming a healthy, responsible partner. Unfortunately, more and more it is the media that model how to be an intimate partner. They present their view of what they want adults to be, through advertisements, movies, and in very recent times, violent video games and pornography. I would argue that the examples offered on celebrity television or on pornographic sites are unhealthy. As parents and responsible citizens, we have to choose on behalf of our children.

If this part of the journey is successfully negotiated, our children will have achieved an appropriate degree of autonomy. They will be able to make the beneficial human connections required for all their social needs.

Comprehension

Of course, a child is born with some innate perceptions that are inherent. The child perceives what his or her senses relay to the brain. The task is to teach the child what the stimulus conveys, so in future he or she can access appropriate actions to deal with what the stimulus is telling him or her about the world. There is nothing like observing an infant watch his or her hands move across the crib. Eventually the infant masters the skill of getting the fingers into the mouth. The infant has learned that when you do this, you get that. This is the start of the journey, from this fundamental piece of knowledge on to having the perceptive skills to ask the big life questions, like ‘Why are we here?’

The task a society must undertake is to provide age-appropriate, stimulating environments in which the child acquires progressive challenges. This begins with fundamental toys and potentially ends with high-end research. It is the parts in between that are crucial. Educators need to be conscious that in order to get to the big questions, the children need a broad learning environment, not just numeracy, literacy, and now science. Approaching the big answers requires creativity.

Unfortunately, there is a move in some Western societies to standardize schools, teaching every child a prescribed set of patterns to be learned. There is a loss of diversity that will result in a loss of creativity, which is the lifeblood of human advancement. This is unfair to the individual child, as each has different talents and cognitive abilities.

The actualized position for comprehension is not so much what the adults know but how they interpret the stimuli presented to them and their ability to ask questions and evaluate the answers supplied. The truly actualized person will not only have the ability to ask questions but also have the curiosity and the desire to know more about herself and the world.

Decision-Making

No one would ask a newborn child, ‘What do you want to do?’ It is so obvious that newborns are incapable of making decision. Adults, on the other hand, will be asked to make extremely difficult decisions. That is a tremendous responsibility, because decisions may have consequences not only for the person who made them but also for everyone else. The task is to take children from a position where they should not be making decisions to an actualized state in which they will be equipped to address the difficult questions.

The secret is to allow children to take the responsibility for making decisions when they are capable of understanding long-term consequences of those decisions. There is an age appropriateness to the application of this process. A child should not decide what to eat until he or she is aware of the impact the food will have on his or her health. An example of how society is abdicating the age-appropriate responsibility of making the best decisions for children is seen in the rise of childhood and consequent obesity in Western society.

Fast-food companies that sell burgers and chips, pizzas, or fashionable soft drinks full of sugar target children through remarkable advertisements. As a result, when a parent asks a child, ‘What would you like for dinner?’ the child is programmed to ask for the latest takeaway food—the one with the best television advertisements. The parent should know that a diet consisting of processed fast food full of fat, salt, and sugar will have a disastrous effect on the long-term health of the child, but it takes courage to make the best decision for the child in these developing years. Children should not be given the choice of what to eat; parents should provide what they need. The same could be said for what they watch, which video games they play, where they go, and what they do.

This parental control is gradually diminished as children grow, and they should be progressively exposed to problems for which their decisions will result in consequences they can cope with. They will make mistakes, but parents should not protect them from the impact of these mistakes. The secret is to allow them decisions that will have consequences they can manage—small issues with small negative consequences. This will result in a realistic idea of control—and, as a bonus, facing failure builds resilience.

A fully developed adult will have the ability to consider the long-term impact of any decision they make on their own future and the future of others. It is our duty to see this skill is taught and ingrained in the child as they grow and that they are given appropriate responsibility so they can practise at the proper level.

Social Skills

A newborn child is totally egocentric. To use the example above as an analogy, it is said that when a child moves an arm in the room, she does not comprehend that her arm is moving but rather that she is moving the room. In those early days a child is, and should be, the absolute centre of attention.

But things change. People have to get on with their lives, and soon the child will have to develop behaviours that draw the attention back to him and his needs. Initially this is through crying: ‘I’m hungry’ or ‘I need to be changed.’ These are the early methods of communication. The baby’s first social or relating skill is usually just a smile at Mum.

Before long the child will move into a wider circle and start to interact with other children, siblings, and/or peers. This is when they must develop the skills to get their needs met through manipulation of others. This word manipulation has negative connotations, but that is because we see it as someone getting his needs met at another’s expense. In this context, manipulation is just behaving in a way that results in getting one’s needs met.

Of course we have a responsibility to teach our kids to get their needs met without degrading others’ lives. This is the meaning of compassionate relatedness. This does not just mean the nice thing to do; in a cold-blooded sense, there is a long-term benefit for supporting the other people in our lives. People who support others will receive cooperation in return, and the synergy this develops improves everyone’s lives.

A fully functional adult will reach self-actualization when he acts in ways that are good for himself and for others.

Interest

Newborn babies eat, sleep, and do those other things that require a change of diaper. But before long they start to look around and take an interest in their immediate surroundings.

As they grow up, they start to explore away from home. School becomes a critical factor in developing curiosity. As I said before, schools are becoming less and less interesting for kids because of the adoption of standardized testing and teaching to a prescriptive curriculum. Good schools should provide a wide curriculum, including all the arts and plenty of time for play. Modern commercial businesses are finding the value of play to spark curiosity in their workers; it leads to better productivity and creative solutions to inevitable problems. But schools are reducing activities that develop unprescribed curiosity.

It is our task to provide objects and experiences that attract children’s attention. As they develop the skills for one environment, the quality of the stimulus needs to be adjusted so more complex games can be mastered. To develop into truly curious adults, they must be exposed to as wide a variety of experiences as possible.

I have concluded that these are the characteristics that will equip children to reach their potential and be a positive force in their community.

When Things Go Wrong

I have said above that it is not just the parent’s task to support the child; society must also be held responsible. Too many children are born into families who, for a range of reasons, do not have the skills to provide the required lessons. Some children are orphans; others have parents who are abusive or absent physically or psychologically. These children are not responsible for the poor quality of their childhood, but they will develop behaviours that suit that environment. Most often children brought up in such conditions will be disadvantaged and dysfunctional. As a society, we will pay the cost of not stepping in to provide the early support.

I spent a significant part of my career working with adolescents who were excluded from mainstream schooling because of their dysfunctional behaviour. These kids’ reactions to ‘threatening’ situations were the ones they had learned as children, almost always in an environment where the parents’ actions were consistently at odds with the rest of society. They had learned how to behave in order to manipulate their parents. When this learned action was used on teachers at school, these (functional) adults saw the child’s behaviour as dysfunctional and eventually excluded them. We need to understand and realize that it is not children’s behaviour that is dysfunctional but their capacity to recognize the appropriateness of the behaviour for the environment they are in.

At my school, I appreciated that the kids knew their yelling and screaming wasn’t working when they were at school—but yelling and screaming worked at home. My task was to get them to learn another behaviour to adjust to the presenting environment.

To do this, I explained that when they were growing up they had tried behaviours to get results. The ones that worked were retried, and if the success continued, those would be used. These became their habitual action in a situation and became subconscious. But at our school they found themselves in an environment different from the one they had grown up in, and their habitual behaviour needed to be changed if they wanted to succeed. We coached them to try different behaviours to get the response they wanted in an environment that mirrored acceptable society. To do this required a conscious effort; they had to think about what they needed to do.

This was fine as long as they were calm, but if they became stressed they could not intellectualize what was the right thing to do, and so they reverted back to their habitual behaviour.

At the school we understood this, and we explained that eventually, if they used the intellectualized behaviour enough times, it would become habitual itself. As a bonus, the more they left the old behaviour stagnating in the brain the less it would become the chosen behaviour.

This explains what really happens in the child’s brain. Neuroscientists know that when we are looking for a behaviour that suits a situation, we fire off weak signals across a neural pathway to provoke an action. If the action is successful, it will be reused. After a while, the pathway becomes so predictable that it is made very efficient by myelination, a coating of myelin forming around that pathway to insulate it. Also, to improve the efficiency, the excess neurons are pruned away. The famous statement that ‘neurons that are fired together are wired together’ holds.

So when faced with a stressful situation, the strongest nerve connection will be accessed—the strongest habit will prevail. The task is to make that habit the one that best serves