Lost at School: Why Our Kids with Behavioral Challenges Are Falling Through the Cracks and How We Can Help Them [Paperback]

If you are a real teacher (or principal or dean) in a real school, this humane and engaging book will surprise you with its combination of practicality and idealism. It will inspire you to change things and to believe in the possibility of change.

After teaching for eight years, I have spent the last three as "the discipline guy", Dean of Students, in a small, rural middle school. As both teacher and now as dean I have developed a deep suspicion of a certain sort of books. You know the ones: written by theoreticians or one-on-one therapists who have never had to juggle a roomful of 25 actual young human beings with not enough time, not enough resources and far too much of paperwork, testing, and ringing bells; and more and more deeply-troubled youngsters. These are the books that anxious or angry and frustrated parents bring to meetings that tell them how you should be meeting the needs of their unsuccessful or disruptive child. These books make things far worse for everyone involved.

"Lost at School" is different; and that's clear from the beginning. After a brief introduction which pulls no punches in saying "school discipline is broken" the book launches into a story! Every teacher I know likes a good story - and this one feels so much like real (school)-life from the beginning that it sets the hook for the rest of the book. The different thing about this story is not the characterization of the troubled and challenging kids, but of its inclusion of the realistic range of adult personalities that combine to make education what it is - and sometimes isn't. The book sets out to follow the path of a handful of youngsters and another handful of fictional teachers and administrators who are struggling with the limitations of their own range of personalities and world-views as well as the real constraints of what schools can and cannot do. It is quite eye-opening and, in my opinion, dead-on accurate.

Now don't let me give the impression that this book is just another entertaining "Up the Down Staircase" or "Room 222" or even merely another inspirational "Stand and Deliver". "Lost at School" is ultimately focused on a suite of methods for understanding children who exhibit challenging behaviors in school and for working with them to help them change. The "storyline" serves as an opportunity to view those methods in action as used by some fictionalized but well-drawn characters.

The core assumptions of Greene's approach are that behaviorally challenging youngsters (a) "know how we want them to behave" and (b) "want to behave the right way". They don't need us to keep depriving them of privileges or offering them rewards to learn these two bits.

The basic premise of the book is that these youngsters lack specific thinking skills which make it difficult or impossible for them to behave in circumstances that come up too-frequently in their school lives. Much as education has come-around in the past 20 years to acknowledge that cognitive deficits, learning disabilities, must be acknowledged as part of a youngster's learning of reading or mathematics, we need to move to a similar approach with behavioral difficulties.

The goal, then, for educators, parents and the students, is to identify these missing or lagging cognitive skills and help students develop them - as central parts of their education. Greene provides an inventory which will remind educators of the sorts of rubrics we use frequently, for instance, in assessing students for attention or hyperactivity disorders. Some of these skills may well have come up in your conversations about a difficult student, e.g. "difficulty handling transitions". Some of them have probably been parts of conversations about students without the notion that they ought to be taught, e.g. "difficulty considering likely outcomes or consequences of actions". And some of them might just not have occurred to you as loci of behavioral challenges, e.g. "difficulty taking into account situational factors that would suggest the need to adjust a plan of action". Rarely, though, have you or I managed to systematically think about what to do with these anecdotal observations.

Having worked through the assessment of lagging skills, the next task is to "teach" these skills. In this regard Greene shifts gears and does not provide a "curriculum". Instead he provides an approach - a way of communicating with behaviorally challenging youngsters that he terms "Collaborative Problem Solving" or CPS. Some might find this unsatisfying. I did, at first; hoping for a "methods" approach to teaching this as any other group of skills. But I found Greene's system ultimately satisfying and revealing instead. He gives us CPS and weaves his ongoing story of sixth-grader Joey into its explication

The CPS approach is interesting because it sounds so simple. Greene calls it simply "Plan B"; distinguishing from "Plan A" - wherein the teacher or institution imposes its will on the student, and from "Plan C" in which we "drop an expectation completely, at least temporarily". I have to compliment Green on boldly sticking to such a simple naming scheme instead of coming up with typical ed-psych jargon to describe his schema or its alternatives. But the real power of such a simply-named approach is that describing it reveals how much we are all rooted in bouncing between poorly-implemented versions of plans A and C as part of school discipline. The "Plan B" or CPS approach assumes and requires listening to and the meaningful participation of the student -- and that is revealed to be a deeply-buried skill of even the well-intentioned educators in the storyline. But it can be learned and is the key to making things work.

Greene is very open to all the ways things can go awry in dealing with real kids in real school environments. He peppers the book with "Q&A" sections, and sample dialogues. But central to his acknowledgement of the "real world" is his fictional one! He weaves in, throughout, the ongoing tale of Joey and Mrs. Woods; of the Assistant Principal who got knocked in the jaw by Joey back in chapter one; of Joey's anguished mom and even of Mr. Armstrong, the "these kids just have to learn how to behave" guy, whom seems so familiar to any educator. This side-story becomes in many ways a central one as all of these people move through a year of struggle and transformation.

I won't tell you how it ends but will reassure you that it does end, as most school years to, not with a bang of disaster or triumph but with a deep breath and a look ahead as all the good but flawed folks involved anticipate the next year's labors. In this Greene manages to honor the motives and efforts of everyone who chooses to work in the often thankless business of education while he deftly reminds us of how much better we could and should be doing with these youngsters.

Please Read this Book! I couldn't put it down. It encouraged me and helped me step back so that I could get a fresh outlook with my children's motivations and struggles. If you are struggling with behavioral issues in your classroom or at home and have ADHD students or students with other behavioral issues, I believe this book will encourage you. This book is geared toward educators, but I believe it would also be very valuable and helpful for parents who have children with behavioral challenges to understand why their children are struggling in school and what can be done to help them.

The premise of this book is that traditional methods of rewards and consequences are not effective with students with behavioral problems. So, we are faced with the question, "What do we do now?" The author's answer is that we need to discard the labels of things like Bipolar and ADHD and look more deeply at the skills students are lacking--emotional and intellectually. We, as parents and teachers, need to equip students so that they can cope. There is an inventory/questionaire at the back of the book called the ALSUP which is a great tool to help you pinpoint your child/student's struggles.

The book focuses on the philosophy behind this list of skills and then how to implement strategies to address the student's/child's needs. The author does a great job of giving examples that illustrate his points.

I highly recommend this book! Many books written for educators are very dry and hard to get through. On the other hand, this book is interesting and thought provoking throughout!

As a comrade in the effort to make the care of challenging kids humane and healing, I can not say enough about Dr. Greene's work. The collaborative problem solving model is the first truly effective model of care and conceptualization for these kids I have seen in nearly 25 years of work, and is the only model that uses the best of the people who really give the care-the teachers, the parents, the staff-to make a difference.

Lost at school is not only for educators but for anyone who cares for troubled kids. For caregivers using the Collaborative Problem Solving model, Lost at School develops and deepens understanding of why kids have problems and how they can be helped. Since school is the primary work of childhood, anyone who works with children needs the wisdom of this book.