By Ruth Wells
Their college training prepares teachers to work with Beaver Cleaver yet Beavis and Butthead show up instead each day. While students have changed radically over the years, with youngsters being dramatically more misbehaved, unmotivated, challenging and troubled, teacher training has stayed pretty much the same. Experts at Washington State University have estimated that 80% of teacher training focuses on content: arithmetic, spelling, reading and so forth. Only 20% of teacher training focuses on “human factors” such as the misbehavior, apathy, and challenges that students face. Ask any teacher if they have ever had a day dominated by content problems, and they laugh at you. Ask any teacher: they’ll tell you that their day is dominated by those human factors– the misbehavior, apathy, disrespect, and so on.
High stakes testing has made training zero in even more on content. The testing mania spawned by the ironically named No Child Left Behind mandate has left little time to even notice children who struggle beyond the academic arena– much less do something for them. Our national testing obsession has made teacher training become even more focused on academics and has shoved those human factor issues even further into the background. Meanwhile, all indications are that children face increasing problems and challenges. You don’t have to be a teacher to have noticed that school misconduct has worsened dramatically over the years. You don’t have to be a teacher to be aware the more and more children appear to be severely emotionally disturbed. You don’t have to be a teacher to know that increasing numbers of children live in deeply troubled families. So, as data and observation indicate dramatic increases in troubled and challenging children, conventional college training for teachers remains focused in a completely different direction. Teachers end up attempting to provide instruction to youngsters who are so misbehaved, apathetic or troubled that they can’t fully benefit. Lacking much practical training on what to do about these compelling human factors, teachers often feel utterly unprepared to help.
For nearly two decades, I have been criss-crossing North America with my teacher training workshop (Breakthrough Strategies to Teach and Counsel Troubled Youth, http://www.youthchg.com/live.html.) This inservice updates teachers’ skills to fit contemporary students, and shows them how to help students with those all-important human factor, non-content problems. We get some pretty nasty comments over and over again on our workshop evaluations. The one that we get the most sounds like this: “How come I wasn’t taught this in college?!” After class, veteran teachers will come up to me, shaking their heads side to side, sometimes reaching to touch my arm or sleeve, and will say “I have taught for 20 years, and I can’t believe that I wasn’t given this information until now. I can’t tell you how many students I could have helped if I had only been taught this before. I would have done things so differently.”
But training teachers about troubled and challenged students is not just a matter of common sense. It is also an issue of safety. Teachers who do not have training on family problems like domestic violence, substance abuse and sexual abuse, will have difficulty identifying and best assisting children living through terrifying times. Teachers who have never been offered basic training in juvenile mental health do notknow about conduct disorders, thought disorders and other severe disturbances. Take a look at why this is very dangerous. For example, children who have one of those two disorders I just mentioned in the preceding sentence, can present extreme safety concerns and can cause damage to people and property. Ask most teachers to pick which of those two disorders I am referring to as most dangerous, and most educators say they really don’t know. They can’t even name their most dangerous student from the two choices I just offered. Worse, since they are unaware of this disorder, they are also unaware of the special way they must work with these youngsters to avoid violence and other problems. Adjusting the focus of teacher training could rapidly cure that. Until that time, unnecessary safety issues remain because we seem to believe that teaching educators about content and testing is more important.
So college training for teachers stays mired in the 1950’s. My son, a first year teacher, received training that really hadn’t changed very much from that offered to his veteran colleagues who are nearing retirement. Over the past 50 years or so, teacher training has in many ways stayed the same, retaining a laser-like focus on content. Meanwhile, our students have changed dramatically. Years ago, students did arrive at the school house door recognizing the value of school, possessing appropriate social skills and for the most part, ready to learn. The big problems a teacher in the 50’s might face was students chewing gum or too much trash in the trash can. Now the biggest problem that a teacher may face is that the trash can is being used as an assault weapon. Our students have changed dramatically over the past 50 years. Teacher training has not kept up with those changes– then we wonder why today’s students don’t seem to benefit properly from school.
It is way past time to provide universal training for teachers on the human factors: the violence, family problems, withdrawal, work refusal, negative attitudes, non-compliance, and so on. Until we shift our priorities, all the training on content and testing won’t matter. You can’t teach reading to a out-of-control student. You can’t teach subtraction to an absent student. You can’t teach anything to youngsters whose problems are going unaddressed. You can’t really teach very successfully to a student who believes that school is a complete waste. For all our attention to testing, you think that the thousands of “cry for help” essays received each year as part of the essay exam portion of many state-wide tests, would help us to notice we have a problem. (Cry for help essays are distress calls; submissions that students write for exams that they choose to focus on the their own beatings, poverty, homelessness, suicide attempts, disabilities, depression, or other distress.) Imagine now that you were being beat most nights. Imagine now that you have no place to call home. Imagine that Dad almost killed Mom last night. Imagine that you have an out-of-control temper, or you have a disability that makes learning almost impossible. How much energy would you have left for school and tests if no one was helping you with your struggles? Until we give teachers the tools to help students with their struggles, all the teacher training in the world on content will not compensate. If we really cared about school success, we would find time in college to teach teachers how to help students who struggle.
Today, if a teacher encounters students who think school is a waste, they often have few practical interventions to use. Today, if a teacher has students who are non-compliant and threatening, they may lack the special skills and information they need to know how to manage such extreme misconduct. Today, if a teacher has students who refuse work, refuse to talk, and often fail to even show up, they may have little expertise to manage the situation. Terrific methods do exist for all these problems, plus for all the other non-content concerns that contemporary students present. A dedicated teacher seeking updated training on these contemporary concerns better be inventive or very good at searching on the internet, because finding seminars, workshops, inservice or training that will give practical, common-sense methods is hard to find.
The education realm has always ricocheted from trend to trend rather than making common-sense refinements. Sadly, the concept of updating teacher training to address human factors doesn’t reduce to a quick sound bite or catchy acronym. The concept doesn’t have political cachet, or a big name backer so it is probably unlikely to ever take hold on any widespread basis. It may not be enough that the 50’s are long over. It may not be enough that it is way past time to stop training teachers for a type of student that exists only in memory. Testing mania will likely remain the king of all things educational, and because of that children will continue to unnecessarily struggle and suffer. In the meantime, workshops, inservices, district trainings, conferences and seminars like those offered by our company, will be utterly unable to fill in the gap. As long as educator training and professional development is primarily devoted to content and measurement, as long as teachers can lose their jobs based on test scores, as long as a principal’s tenure is contingent on a single number, as long as schools and districts are graded and sometimes flunked, students who struggle will continue to be needlessly sacrificed at the sacred alter of high stakes testing.
About the Author: Ruth Herman Wells MS is the director of Youth Change, (
youthchg.com
.) See hundreds more of her innovative, problem-stiopping interventions at the Youth Change web site
youthchg.com
. Ruth is the author of dozens of books and conducts workshops, inservice, professional development seminars, and trainings throughout N. America.
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