In This Issue:

1. How to improve teaching, relationships, collaboration, and leadership

2. Building students’ executive functioning skills

3. An Oklahoma librarian makes her space a magnet for readers

4. The unintended consequences of leveled and “just right” texts

5. Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell on the use of text reading levels

6. How schools can address the opioid epidemic

7. Supporting teachers confronted with student mental health issues

 

Quotes of the Week

“Books can be both mirrors and windows, and my goal as a school librarian is to make sure that all kids in the school can find themselves, both who they are and who they want to be, reflected back to them in the pages of a book found in the school library.”

            Amanda Kordeliski (see item #3)

 

“Teens and tweens have an uncanny ability to know when you are pitching books you haven’t read and do not intend to read.”

            Amanda Kordeliski (ibid.)

 

“One of the delights of making regular visits to classrooms is witnessing effective practices and students’ ‘aha!’ moments. Seeing these gems allows administrators to give teachers detailed, authentic praise and spread practical ideas to colleagues and teacher teams.”

            Kim Marshall and Dave Marshall (see item #1)

 

“Every time you push out of your comfort zone to learn hard things, your brain grows new connections and you get smarter.”

Carol Dweck (quoted in item #2)

 

“It is our belief that levels have no place in classroom libraries, in school libraries, in public libraries, or on report cards.”

            Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell (see item #5)

 

“We don’t believe teachers have to become counselors, but we believe teachers can be the eyes and ears of the mental health system.”

            Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey in “Teachers as Early Warning Detectors” in

Educational Leadership, December 2017/January 2018 (Vol. 75, #4, p. 80-81),

http://bit.ly/2iObASu; Fisher can be reached at [email protected], Frey at

[email protected]

 

 

 

 

 

1. How to Improve Teaching, Relationships, Collaboration, and Leadership

            In this article in School Administrator, former principal Kim Marshall and high-school teacher Dave Marshall (father and son) introduce author Charles Duhigg’s concept of the keystone habit: a routine that has a surprisingly large impact on people’s lives. One example: studies show that in families that eat dinner together, the children develop better homework skills, get higher grades, display greater emotional control, and are more self-confident.

“It turns out there’s a keystone habit in schools,” say Marshall and Marshall: “Principals making short, frequent, unannounced classroom visits, each followed by a face-to-face coaching conversation. This simple practice has an outsize impact on teaching, relationships, collaboration, and leadership, four of the most effective ways to improve student learning… Policymakers should give serious thought to shifting from the traditional teacher-evaluation model, which focuses mostly on compliance and has a remarkably weak track record, to mini-observations.” Here’s the ripple effect in each area:

Teaching: When principals (and other supervisors) systematically make several 10-15-minute classroom visits a day, they:

• See what’s really happening in classrooms. “Knowing daily teaching is the foundation for effective praise, coaching, and professional development,” say Marshall and Marshall, and face-to-face chats afterward allow teachers to provide more detail and context. This is far more informative than infrequent traditional evaluations or superficial walkthroughs.

• Get early warning of classroom problems. Being in classrooms early and often allows administrators to spot classroom management issues and less-than-effective instructional practices and help teachers address them.

• Provide focused coaching. With annual evaluations, supervisors need to give feedback on everything at once, which is often more than a teacher is willing or able to handle. With frequent mini-observations, supervisors can focus on one “leverage point” each time, spreading suggestions (and appreciation) over 10 or so visits through the school year.

Relationships:  The human side of school leadership is essential to improving teaching and learning. With mini-observations, supervisors:

            • See kids in their element. Looking over students’ shoulders in classrooms and chatting with them about what they’re learning gives school leaders detailed glimpses of what’s going through kids’ minds and how they’re experiencing school. Supplemented by chats in corridors, cafeteria, playground, and bus lines, these classroom encounters forge authentic connections – and also improve the quality of feedback to teachers.

            • Build empathy and trust. “Low-stakes chats with teachers about short observations

give supervisors a better understanding of what teachers face every day, from technology

glitches to challenging students,” say the authors. “Savvy supervisors approach these talks with curiosity and humility and put the teacher at ease by conducting them in the teacher’s classroom when students are not there.”  Relational trust is a consistent correlate of effective schools, and face-to-face conversations based on authentic classroom visits are an ideal way to build it.

            • Write fair end-of-year evaluations. An unfair or clueless summative evaluation is a sure way to kill a supervisor-teacher relationship. But numerous informal classroom visits, face-to-face debriefs, other points of contact during each week, and teacher input on the final evaluation combine to increase the likelihood of fair and informative evaluations.

Collaboration:  Most principals know that the most important driver of student achievement is teachers’ work with their colleagues, but that it can’t be left to chance. When mini-observations are happening on a regular basis, principals can:

            • Cross-pollinate. “One of the delights of making regular visits to classrooms,” say Marshall and Marshall, “is witnessing effective practices and students’ ‘aha!’ moments. Seeing these gems allows administrators to give teachers detailed, authentic praise and spread practical ideas to colleagues and teacher teams.”

            • Connect lessons to the bigger picture. Each lesson is part of a unit plan, and assessments of student learning are grist for teacher discussions of what’s working and what needs fine-tuning. Mini-observations make supervisors much better-informed visitors to PLC meetings, and what they observe in team meetings makes them much more perceptive classroom observers (it’s as if they have 3-D glasses, says Paul Bambrick-Santoyo).

            • Encourage teacher reflection. “Frequent unannounced visits carry the implicit message that teachers should bring their ‘A game’ every day,” say Marshall and Marshall. This can seem daunting at first, but the follow-up chats allow for dialogue about what was observed, sharpen teachers’ thoughts on their A game, and provide insights for teacher team meetings.

Leadership: With infrequent, inauthentic evaluations, principals are seriously handicapped as instructional leaders. With mini-observations, they:

            • Walk the talk. “Getting out of the office and doing one or two mini-observations directly advances the school’s fundamental work,” say Marshall and Marshall, “and each takes only 30 minutes, including the visit, chat, and a brief follow-up summary… A principal who can’t squeeze in at least one mini-observation most days has a serious time management problem.”

            • Foster teacher efficacy. Frequent substantive, reality-based conversations with a supervisor give teachers a sense of how their work fits into the overall mission of the school. Positive professional working conditions help retain effective teachers and attract high-quality educators from other schools. Everyone wants to be part of a winning team with ongoing support and dialogue.

            • Master the job. Principals who make frequent, observant visits to classrooms and follow up with teachers really know the inner workings of their schools. The insights they gain and the stories they can tell build credibility with teachers, parents, superiors, and other stakeholders. “It’s always winning to tell a mother about a thoughtful comment her son made in class, to describe a funny teacher-student interaction in a faculty meeting, or to give the superintendent specifics on how to tweak the new laptop program,” say Marshall and Marshall. “And if an unhinged parent unfairly attacks a teacher, the principal can defend him or her with on-the-ground evidence from frequent classroom observations.”

            In sum, the keystone habit of mini-observations produces no fewer than 12 benefits to teaching, relationships, collaboration, and leadership. “That’s a serious return from only 30-60 minutes a day!” say Marshall and Marshall. “Of course, not every mini-observation and follow-up conversation is a home run. Many supervisors need practice honing their observation and feedback skills. Teachers sometimes are defensive and unreceptive, and there are days when administrators are so swamped with paperwork, meetings, and discipline referrals that they don’t visit a single classroom.”

            But as Charles Duhigg says, “success doesn’t depend on getting every single thing right, but instead relies on identifying a few key priorities and fashioning them into powerful levers… The habits that matter most are the ones that, when they start to shift, dislodge and remake other patterns… A series of small wins can leverage modest advantages into patterns that convince people that larger achievements are possible.”

 

“Mini-Observations: A Keystone Habit” by Kim Marshall and Dave Marshall in School Administrator, December 2017 (Vol. 74, #11, p. 26-29),

https://marshallmemo.com/articles/Keystone%20final.pdf; Dave Marshall can be reached at [email protected].

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2. Building Students’ Executive Functioning Skills

(Originally titled “Helping Anxious Students Move Forward”)

            In this article in Educational Leadership, Jessica Minahan says that in her work as a behavioral analyst and consultant, she hears lots of stories about students avoiding work – a first grader staring at the wall during a reading lesson; a high-school basketball star who still won’t do his homework even when he’s in danger of being kicked off the team for not doing it. These students all seem to lack motivation, but that’s not what’s going on, says Minahan. It’s one or more of these aspects of executive functioning:

-   Accurate thinking – Assessing how difficult a task is, how long it will take, and one’s ability to do it;

-   Initiation – Organizing one’s thoughts and getting started;

-   Persistence – Sustaining effort in the face of errors and difficulty;

-   Help-seeking – Knowing when to ask for support.

“Penalties and incentives don’t teach these skills and are unlikely to improve students’ behavior,” says Minahan. Instead, students feel misunderstood and rejected.

            Minahan’s analogy is training wheels when children are first learning to ride a bike – accommodations as they learn how to think accurately about challenges, get going, persist, and ask for help. “If we remove the supports before students are ready,” she says, “they’ll crash.” Her suggestions:

            • Accurate thinking – Anxious students tend to think all-or-nothing (I hate math) or engage in catastrophic thinking (I’ll probably flunk sixth grade). One strategy is having students rate the difficulty of an assignment beforehand (very difficult) and afterward (not that bad); comparing the two may help reset the student’s mindset. Another approach is breaking a task into parts and rating each one – I like it. It’s okay. I don’t like it. Looking over these after making a catastrophic statement can help isolate the problem.

            • Initiation – Don’t ask students prone to negative thinking to work independently at first; instead, provide helpful support within 30 seconds of giving an assignment and then have them continue solo. Or go over the assignment beforehand: This is the math sheet we’ll be doing later. Let’s start the first and second problems together. Or chunk assignments and take one piece at a time. Or give the student a math sheet with all but the last two problems completed and ask the student to finish. Working with an erasable whiteboard is also helpful for students who are risk-averse and perfectionistic.

            • Persistence – Some students need a dose of Carol Dweck: “Every time you push out of your comfort zone to learn hard things, your brain grows new connections and you get smarter.” It also helps to reward increments and get students monitoring themselves on persistence rather than the final product: Did I attempt more problems today than on my last quiz? Did I correct an answer?

            • Help-seeking – “Students with anxiety or depression may lack the initiative to ask for help when they’re stuck or overwhelmed by a task,” says Minahan. Or they may be too embarrassed to ask. Agreeing on a silent signal may be the answer: Put a pencil behind your ear when you need help. Next get students thinking about how to reduce dependency: What do you need help with and why? The idea is for students to realize that they can solve some problems by themselves. Great! You didn’t need my help! I’m glad you figured it out. These students need to learn how to self-monitor, assess their needs, and find strategies to get help without depending on the teacher.

            The key is seeing where the student is at. Jeremy seemed unable to do research on the computer in his history class and answer two open-ended questions. Instead, he scrolled through social media and encouraged classmates to join him. Eventually the teacher kicked him out of the room. When Jeremy’s teachers were asked how often he completed open-ended assignments, they said, “Never!” They were “overshooting the method of output,” says Minahan. He wouldn’t engage in reading when there were more than two paragraphs on the page. The solution was simple: limit texts to one or two paragraphs and give Jeremy multiple-choice questions. Within five weeks, he was completing work and moving toward reading one page of text in a book and answering fill-in-the-blank questions. “It’s like I’m a student,” said Jeremy. “I hand in work and get graded.” History was the one class he passed that term.

 

“Helping Anxious Students Move Forward” by Jessica Minahan in Educational Leadership, December 2017/January 2018 (Vol. 75, #4, p. 44-50), available to ASCD members and for purchase at http://bit.ly/2nsrN1b

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3. An Oklahoma School Librarian Makes Her Space a Magnet for Readers

            In this article in Knowledge Quest, Oklahoma school librarian Amanda Kordeliski says that when she arrived midyear at a high-school library position, she was impressed with the school’s reading day: students were expected to have a “prime time” reading-for-pleasure book with them at all times. Brilliant idea, she thought – a schoolwide reading culture, kids (and adults) reading for pleasure. But then she noticed that at the beginning of each reading day, the library was besieged with students checking out books, and at the end of the day, the library’s book drop was overflowing with books that had been checked out earlier in the day. “Students carried books around so they didn’t get in trouble in class,” says Kordeliski, “but few teens and even fewer teachers were actually reading for pleasure during this time.”

            She had grand plans to improve things during her first full year as librarian, but the school embarked on a renovation and she had to work in a small space with most of the collection in storage. Kordeliski improvised, collaborating with the public library, and when the renovated library opened the next fall, she approached “every student in the building as a potential reader who ‘lost’ their love of reading during the construction.” With book trailers, a school newscast, costume wardrobes for favorite characters through a fashion app (Polyvore), fan fiction, turning the library into a Tardis for the Dr. Who books and Hogwarts for Harry Potter, she believes the library became a “first-choice destination before, during, and after school.” The renovation gave Kordeliski a pivot for creating this kind of library, but she believes the same outcome can be accomplished anywhere with five key factors:

            • A school librarian who reads widely and recommends current young adult books – “Reading what the students read gives you credibility and goes a long way in building relationships with the students,” she says. “Teens and tweens have an uncanny ability to know when you are pitching books you haven’t read and do not intend to read.” She shares her own likes and dislikes – thumbs up for romance novels, thumbs down on manga – and encourages students to do the same: “Students need to understand they should never feel embarrassed by what they like to read or apologize for liking certain books.” Of course a librarian can’t read every book in the collection, but it’s important to try to know something about every book and series and be honest if you haven’t read it. Kordeliski makes a point of reading the first book in a series and noting the release days of new series books and, during her hall duty, alerting students she thinks will enjoy them.

            • Access to books that teens and tweens want to read – Kordeliski asks students for book recommendations, gets advance copies at conferences, reads reviews and blog posts, watches book-related video channels, and writes grants to supplement her school’s library budget. In the spring, she visits her high school’s feeder middle schools to introduce her library and get a sense of the kinds of books students are reading. This means that incoming students “already know when they walk through the doors in August they are welcome in the school library and most have an idea of at least one book they want to read or activity they want to do.”

            • Teacher buy-in – “All teachers, not just English teachers, need to believe in the magic and power of pleasure reading,” says Kordeliski, and she runs a monthly staff book club on YA novels. At her school, teachers have laminated signs on their classroom doors with the books they are reading, and there are interactive displays highlighting books teachers love, sparking ongoing conversations with students.

            • A willingness to adapt programs and rules to fit the needs of readers – Kordeliski has let go of some standard library rules – for example, she allows food and drink in the library, lets students check out more than one book at a time and keep books over the winter and summer breaks, doesn’t levy fines, and permits students to use the camera equipment, editing software, 3-D printer, and maker space for any school project. “I do all of those things not to be a rebellious rule breaker,” she says, “but because the students asked for them. If I couldn’t explain the reasoning behind the rule and the kids could articulate why doing something like eating lunch in the library was important to them, I abandoned or modified the rule to the best of my ability.”

            • A safe and welcoming space for all, even if they aren’t readers (yet) – “I don’t believe we can have a community of readers until we have established a community,” says Kordeliski. “Making sure every student – whether or not students consider themselves to be readers – feels welcomed and at home in the school library is priority number one for me… Books can be both mirrors and windows, and my goal as a school librarian is to make sure that all kids in the school can find themselves, both who they are and who they want to be, reflected back to them in the pages of a book found in the school library.”

 

“Establishing a Community of Readers in a Secondary Library” by Amanda Kordeliski in Knowledge Quest, November/December 2017 (Vol. 46, #2, p. 8-14), no e-link available; Kordeliski can be reached at [email protected]; she and other teachers have created a website, with research and lesson plans integrating World War II topics into the middle- and high-school curriculum: www.abmceducation.org.

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4. The Unintended Consequences of Leveled and “Just Right” Texts

            In this article in The Reading Teacher, James Hoffman (University of Texas/Austin) describes walking into a school and seeing a large chart in the front hall with a continuum of color-coded reading levels and samples of texts at each level. The chart’s headline: What level of reader are you? Find the level that’s comfortable for you. Find your “just right” level. Across the hall in the school’s library, books had colored labels mirroring the levels on the hallway chart.

            Hoffman was angry. “Everything about the chart was so sure and so wrong,” he says. To explain his strong reaction to this practice, he traces the history of leveled texts and “just right” books, which started with research on frustration/instructional/independent reading levels and Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development. The theory of action sounds logical: if teachers give their students reading material that’s challenging but not too challenging and provide appropriate support, students will make progress.

But Hoffman believes this theory has three fundamental flaws. First, there’s no such thing as a uniform scale of reading difficulty; there’s lots of variation depending on students’ prior knowledge, interests, and motivation and the nature of the texts they’re reading (this is especially true for informational material, which conforms less readily to leveling). Second, a single “just right” reading level doesn’t account for a teacher’s desire to use different texts to promote curiosity, comprehension, appreciation, imagination, writing, or critical thinking. And third, reading is not a subject; it’s a tool for comprehending and working with literature, history, science, math, and other real subjects.

Because of these conceptual flaws, Hoffman says the practice of leveling and “just right” texts has produced no fewer than 12 unintended consequences for students and teachers:

-   Literacy becomes a goal and not a tool.

-   Readers take on levels as their reading identity.

-   Reading levels feed into deficit discourse around students in schools, particularly in schools serving students from low-income families, as low, poor, or struggling.

-   Denying access to challenging texts leads to the “poor” getting “poorer.”

-   Levels that students carry with them are used to summarize performance by class, grade, and school, and to gauge students’ progress and teachers’ effectiveness.

-   Teachers are not allowed to make decisions about how to support students as a function of the challenge level of texts and tasks.

-   Reading pulls time and attention from content subject areas.

-   “Just right” leveling may divert attention from other important goals in the curriculum.

-   Leveling in basal readers serves the interests of publishers rather than those of teachers and students.

-   “Just right” leveling denies access to informational texts that readers want to read – and can read.

-   When students are reading above their “just right” level, teachers tend not to recognize that as legitimate reading.

-   “Just right” levels eliminate the responsibility for the reader to make decisions and adjustments to reading based on the reading task.

These are consequences, says Hoffman, “that limit more than enrich, that penalize more than they promote, and that divide more than they unite.”

            The last three on the list make a particularly important point. Hoffman says that adults approach texts in a variety of ways: depending on our goal, we might skim, scan, or study it word for word. Often we can get what we want from a text that’s technical or above our reading level. The same should be true for students. Limiting children to “just right” texts underestimates their ability to get value from more difficult texts, and also keeps them from practicing the important life skills of skimming, scanning, and selective reading. It also deprives teachers of teachable moments as they support students wrestling with challenging texts, ideally as part of engaging and meaningful projects.

            “I am not suggesting that we abandon attention to providing accessible and supportive text to learners,” Hoffman concludes, “especially in the early primary levels (Bill Martin Jr. and Dr. Seuss still have much to teach us here). I am not suggesting that we totally abandon narrative texts or guided reading to support strategy development in ways that value readers and build on what they know. I am suggesting that we need to recognize that what we are currently doing to support literacy development with leveled texts is not having the effects we desire, that we take account of the serious unintended consequences of the path we are on, that we expand our understanding of reading skills and strategies…”

 

“What If ‘Just Right’ Is Just Wrong? The Unintended Consequences of Leveling Readers” by James Hoffman in The Reading Teacher, November/December 2017 (Vol. 71, #3, p. 265-273),

available for purchase at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/trtr.1611/full;

Hoffman can be reached at [email protected].

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5. Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell on the Use of Text Reading Levels

            In this interview with Kiera Parrott in School Library Journal, literacy gurus Irene Fountas (Lesley University) and Gay Su Pinnell (Ohio State University) have this to say about the use of their widely used A-Z text difficulty scale: “It is our belief that levels have no place in classroom libraries, in school libraries, in public libraries, or on report cards. It was certainly not our intention that levels be used in these ways.”

How should the levels be used? As “a teacher’s tool, not a child’s label,” say Fountas and Pinnell, “to show small steps from easiest to most difficult. The goal was for teachers to learn about the characteristics of each level to inform their teaching decisions – how they introduce a book, how they discuss it, how they help children problem-solve as they process a book.”

            What about school libraries? “A good library could be organized like a good bookstore, trying to sell books to readers,” say Fountas and Pinnell. “And the librarian is such a key person in the school in guiding students according to their interests, not their levels.” Librarians and teachers might recommend books based on their sense of a particular age group or what they know about individual students, but choice is “at the heart of what it means to become a confident reader,” they continue. “If you have the opportunity to choose what you read, and then to talk about it with others, maybe to draw and write about it, it builds your sense of yourself as a reader and your self-efficacy as a reader.”

            So how can educators keep a parent or caregiver informed about a child’s reading progress? Fountas and Pinnell suggest showing a book the child was reading at the beginning of the year and a book he or she is reading now and describing the specific ways the second is more advanced than the first. Teachers can also give parents a sense of whether the child’s current reading level is on a par with, behind, or ahead of the expectations for that grade and month of the year.

            The big point is not to oversimplify children’s reading status with one letter. “[L]abeling children in this way is detrimental to their self-esteem, their engagement, and, ultimately, their progress,” say Fountas and Pinnell. “And when we restrict kids to reading on a specific level, we’re really restricting their opportunities… The truth is that children can read books on a wide variety of levels, and in fact, they experience many different levels of books across the day.”

“Fountas and Pinnell Lament Labels” by Kiera Parrott in School Library Journal, November 2017 (Vol. 63, #11, p. 15), http://bit.ly/2g6Lyos; Fountas is at [email protected]; see Marshall Memo 467 for a 2012 Fountas and Pinnell article on reading levels.

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6. How Schools Can Address the Opioid Epidemic

(Originally titled “The Opioid Epidemic: 7 Things Educators Need to Know”)

            In this article in Educational Leadership, Justine Welsh (Emory University School of Medicine), Nancy Rappaport (Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance), and Valeria Tretyak (University of Texas/Austin) say that opioid misuse is often initiated during the high-school years. Opioids (morphine, heroin, methadone, oxycodone, fentanyl, and others) relieve pain and stress and produce a feeling of relaxation, which makes them appealing to secondary-school students under academic or athletic pressure.

“In low doses and short-term use, opioids are not dangerous,” say Welsh, Rappaport, and Tretyak, “but long-term use can lead to addiction and dependency.” Early intervention can be highly effective, they say, which means being well-informed is crucial for secondary-school educators. Some key points:

• Students are often introduced to opioids legitimately, perhaps for pain relief after minor surgery or an athletic injury.

• It is very easy to overdose on opioids. They’re especially dangerous when combined with alcohol or other drugs.

• Knowing what to look for can help identify students who may need intervention. Signs might include an altered mental state of euphoria or confusion, sleepiness, glazed eyes, nausea or vomiting, dilated pupils, and difficulty breathing.

• Drug testing is not always the answer. The American Academy of Pediatrics and other groups say this may alienate students from seeking help. However, the six-question CRAFFT Screening Interview can be given anonymously to scope out the extent of drug use in a school, or individually by counselors and other educators. It is available free at www.ceasar-boston.org/CRAFFT/screenCRAFFT.php.

• Talking about the issue – to parents, students, and the community – can reduce the stigma and encourage teens to get help. This could be in an assembly, parent meetings, classrooms, or one on one. Schools might also form an opioid prevention committee to make recommendations and monitor activity around the school.

• A point person can look out for students who are at high risk or in recovery. For example, a school counselor might be designated to work closely with athletes returning to school after treatment for addiction, or other at-risk students.

• There are limits to how schools can intervene. Schools can’t mandate treatment for a student, but schools can encourage treatment and use incentives to get students to engage (for example, reduced suspension days or no disciplinary action).

 

“The Opioid Epidemic: 7 Things Educators Need to Know” by Justine Welsh, Nancy Rappaport, and Valeria Tretyak in Educational Leadership, December 2017/January 2018 (Vol. 75, #4, p. 18-22), available to ASCD members or for purchase at http://bit.ly/2BAhH0h; the authors can be reached at [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected]. The National Institute on Drug Abuse has free materials for students and schools: https://teens.drugabuse.gov.

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7. Supporting Teachers Confronted with Student Mental Health Issues

(Originally titled “Who In Your Class Needs Help?”)

            “Any training regarding student mental health should seek to help teachers become better teachers, not mental health experts or therapists,” says Arizona teacher Sandy Merz in this article in Educational Leadership. As a veteran middle-school teacher, Metz has come across a number of troubling situations – for example, a girl who confided in him, “I just don’t want to be sad anymore.” He suggests that effective school-based mental health training should answer these questions:

-   What do the most reliable data say about the extent of mental health issues among our students?

-   What specific mental illnesses occur, and how may each be expressed in school?

-   When is clinical language (“oppositional defiant” and “on the spectrum”) appropriate to use in describing a student, and when should it be left to mental health professionals?

-   In what ways do specific mental illnesses limit students’ life prospects and quality of life?

-   What treatment options are available?

-   How can teachers make their classroom environments more accommodating, both physically and socially, for students dealing with mental illness?

-   What behaviors should educators address in class and when should they call for assistance?

-   How can teachers avoid inadvertently exacerbating students’ problems or setting off disruptive behavior?

-   What risk factors and warning signs merit immediate referral to mental health professionals?

Training should also cover legal and ethical issues, including liability for not reporting concerns, freelancing outside one’s area of expertise, and knowing when legal or ethical obligations outweigh personal judgment.

 

“Who In Your Class Needs Help?” by Sandy Merz in Educational Leadership, December 2017/January 2018 (Vol. 75, #4, p. 12-17), http://bit.ly/2jesg2h; Merz can be reached at [email protected].

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