Solving Academic and Behavior Problems

A Strengths-Based Guide for Teachers and Teams

Margaret Searle, Marilyn Swartz

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781416629641
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

"If you are a teacher looking for a proven way to help and inspire more students, a coach searching for more effective practices to support teachers, or a school leader working to create positive, systemwide change, then this book is for you. It is a book of wish craft —a way to craft, or to make real, our most important wishes for our students."
—From the foreword by Harvey F. Silver

How many times have you been stumped by a student's failure to learn? You tried everything in your tool kit, but nothing worked. Now what if there were a process that would help you pinpoint the student's specific need and design an action plan to swiftly remedy the problem? In Solving Academic and Behavior Problems, Margaret Searle and Marilyn Swartz offer just that.

This process, based on the positive psychology of appreciative inquiry, builds on what is working with students to address what is not working. It's a system of support that helps general education teachers partner with specialists and parents to learn new ways to enrich academic, social-emotional, and behavioral growth through structured conversations and a series of productive meetings of 30 minutes or less.

Using more than 25 video clips, Searle and Swartz walk you through the six basic steps of the appreciative inquiry problem-solving process:
1. Connect with team members and stakeholders.
2. Review the meeting focus/concern.
3. Share a story that details when you successfully addressed the concern.
4. Establish a goal using a concise "DATA" framework.
5. Design an action plan.
6. Commit to an action.

The authors also outline how to use five whys to uncover hidden barriers to student achievement when learning isn't improving.

Each chapter contains links to online video examples, activities, reflection questions, scenarios, handy tools, and tips from practitioners. A great resource to strengthen RTI and MTSS plans and invaluable to teachers, support staff, and administrators alike, Solving Academic and Behavior Problems provides the kind of insights and guidance that expand and sharpen educators' capacity to help all students learn.

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Chapter 1

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A New Lens for Solving Old Problems

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It was a chilly February morning and I, Margaret, was to spend three days at a school that served 90 percent struggling learners. The principal described the emotional situation as "intense" due to a huge reduction in both services and resources the previous December. Feeling beaten up by their daily stresses, faculty members were losing their motivation to work together as a team. Meetings had deteriorated into complaining sessions, and the staff was using sick days like crazy. Working harder was impossible, and so were the demands of the job. My job as a visiting consultant was to help teachers figure out what to do about the wide variety of academic and social-emotional needs of their students without sending the teachers over their mental edge.

To clarify the type of support needed, consultants often begin by asking, "What can I do to help you?" This typically works like a charm for identifying the needs and goals for the session. This time it didn't. Every time I asked that question, teachers launched into an emotional enumeration of problems and stressors they could no longer tolerate. Because venting is only helpful in small doses, I didn't wait long to put the positive psychology research I had been reading about to the test. We needed a new approach for solving these old problems.

I asked each teacher, "Which problem would you like to tackle first?" Then, to switch the conversation to a positive lens, I asked the teachers to tell me about a time when they experienced the same problem but were able to turn the situation around, even if it was only for a day or just a few minutes. As teachers detailed their successful experiences, I asked them to elaborate on exactly what they did to make that success possible, as well as what the students did in response. Each teacher was able to identify things that worked with the class or student in question. Every conversation took on a more helpful and creative quality as the teachers focused on what had worked in the past. You could see and feel tension dissolve and a spark of hopefulness ignite. I began to understand the true power of appreciative inquiry and what it can produce.

Appreciative inquiry is based on the belief that focusing on strengths and on what is going well results in a more positive and creative approach to solving sticky problems. So if strengths-based approaches are so powerful, why the continued focus on the deficit problem-solving model?

What's Wrong with a Deficit Approach?

There is nothing inherently wrong with it. For hundreds of years, people have successfully used the process of identifying what is wrong, analyzing why an issue continues to be a problem, and deciding on ways to fix it. However, even when it is used with the best of intentions, the unintended consequences of this model are the defensive feelings it can stir up. As people become more defensive, the problem-solving part of their brain shuts down as strong feelings and emotions take over, thus stifling creativity, open-mindedness, and logical decision making. This type of response makes progress more difficult to achieve. Therefore, when beginning these problem-solving conversations, we suggest adding another approach—appreciative inquiry—to your tool kit.

How Is Appreciative Inquiry Different?

Formalized by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva in 1987 at Case Western Reserve University, appreciative inquiry is a positive psychology approach to change that has been practiced around the world for more than a decade by nonprofit organizations, Fortune 500 companies, health care agencies, schools, and governments. Positive psychology is based on the premise that more energy is directed to the thinking part of our brains when we focus on strengths, goals, and what is going well. This doesn't mean we stick our head in the sand and refuse to acknowledge problems. It means that how we frame a problem makes a difference in our level of resilience and openness.

For example, instead of asking why 24 percent of our students are unable to read on grade level, it would be better to ask, "What are we doing that enables 76 percent of our students to be successful readers, and what do the other students need more of?" Students and staff are typically willing to listen to and engage in telling success stories that verify what teachers, parents, and students know are practices that will positively influence their situation. These stories enable them to identify ways to increase what is working well and identify what they need to add to the mix.

Cooperrider, Whitney, and Stavros (2003) argued that we tend to get more of whatever we pay attention to, so talking about what is already right generates the confidence and motivation we need to expand and replicate these good practices in new situations. Affirming and building on strengths that already exist open us to new levels of energy and possibilities for overcoming obstacles. Positive feelings enable us to be more flexible, creative, and efficient in our thinking (Isen & Reeve, 2005).

Here are the six basic steps to the appreciative inquiry approach that we will cover in this book:

1. Connect: Begin by asking a question designed to establish a positive tone and build relationships among team members. Ask participants to share funny anecdotes or interesting things about themselves. This establishes the right frame of mind for doing hard work.
2. Review the concern/focus: Clearly state what needs to be accomplished.
3. Share success stories: Get team members to recount stories that reveal what has been successful for them in the past. This positive core of the process builds a can-do environment and reveals values and strengths to build on.
4. Establish a DATA goal: Forge a statement that clarifies what we will do differently to achieve the desired end result, the time frame, and the specifics for measuring growth.
5. Design an action plan: Come up with an action plan listing what people will do to create a successful experience.
6. Commit to an action: Make a specific commitment to start right away with small steps that will begin to make the vision a reality.

These steps don't always follow this order, but together they result in an energetic strengths-based conversation that pays off with an action plan at the end.

The questions asked are the heart of this process. The stories told are the soul that gives meaning and substance to the plans. The commitment serves as the launching pad that gets everything moving quickly. Olin Miller once said, "If you want to make an easy job seem hard, just keep putting it off." Ending each conversation with a commitment to get started the next day keeps difficult jobs from becoming overwhelming.

Team Meetings—Transformed

Do teachers in your building say things like, "I get more done when I figure out how to avoid our team meetings" or "We sit around and admire data and problems for hours. When are we going to do something important that changes our results?" One teacher I met quipped that he hoped when he died it would be during a staff meeting—because it would make the transition so subtle. If meetings at your school are coma-inducing and unmotivating, perhaps it's time to change your approach.

Meetings should be compelling, creative, and intense, not boring and unproductive. They must address pressing issues the team cares about, as well as energize people to achieve worthwhile things. Support and commitment don't just happen, even when you work with competent and caring people. They take intentional plans, constructive conversations, and good meeting protocols.

Most well-intended school improvement plans focus on what needs to be fixed. This makes sense because that is how we have done business for hundreds of years: Tell me what's wrong, then we'll figure out why that is happening and look at options for fixing it. This can work, but it often generates pushback from the people who are required to implement a plan in which they have had limited input. Sometimes they don't even think that what you are fixing is a real problem.

Appreciative inquiry is built on the premise that every system and person has things that already work for them. When we focus on what works and what is going right, we can use those ideas to develop ways to improve. This strengths-based approach engages the primary stakeholders in asking questions, analyzing what is currently working, setting new goals, and developing action plans for achieving those goals.

What we focus on gets stronger. Alternatively, when we choose to focus on uncooperative students and daily stresses, they loom even larger. Have you ever gone into the teachers' lounge feeling OK, only to hear one person after another complain about how intolerable the kids and conditions are? If other people join in and add to that poisonous conversation, you leave feeling drained.

The team meetings we describe in this book start by asking the teachers to identify three key concerns that stand in the way of many students' success. Teachers have no problem making lists of things they wish they could change: students' lack of organization, poor motivation, inability to comprehend text, or failure to complete homework, to name a few. Addressing these teacher-identified issues becomes the content of the agendas for two teacher meetings each month. Because the teachers have a voice in setting the agendas, it creates a sense of ownership in the meetings and more motivation to get things done.

Scheduling topics that teachers want to discuss is half the task. The other half is making sure the conversation about concerns doesn't becoming a griping and blaming session. Again, it's all about crafting the right questions. Appreciative inquiry questions empower people by eliciting success stories that are described in enough detail to clarify the vision and switch perspectives to enable new possibilities. A key person in this process is the coach.

The Role of the Coach

The coaching role can be filled by anyone on the staff who is a good listener with a positive outlook when solving problems. This can be an administrator, a counselor, a specialist, or a classroom teacher. When starting off, choose a set of people who show interest in coaching and who are seen by the faculty as trustworthy and helpful.

To foster successful, strengths-based conversations, every coach needs to be skilled at the following:

1. Be a good listener and observer so you can reflect people's strengths, best practices, and fresh solutions back to them. You will need to be able to capture both their thoughts and feelings as you paraphrase what you hear them say so you can reframe their thinking in a larger vision.
2. Ask questions that focus on assets and opportunities instead of on weaknesses and problems.
3. Help people feel safe, valued, and welcome to release their creative thinking. An environment of trust is essential.
4. Invite people to commit to excellence instead of business as usual.
5. Use the five whys questioning technique (more on this shortly) to identify hidden skill needs.
6. Be familiar with the strength charts we provide in this book to help teachers articulate specific areas of strength and what students need more of.

You can start to develop these skills by using the practice videos and activities we provide here. However, reading about the process, watching demonstrations, and discussing only take you part of the way. It's like learning to swim; you have to jump into the pool and do the hard work if you want to become proficient. This will take consistent practice over time, but it's worth every minute spent. That is why we offer such a wide variety of activities to guide you through the steps.

Let's look at a tool called strength charts now; these will make the process much easier.

Strength Charts: How Can They Help?

A strength chart is a listing of desirable assets arranged by categories to help you identify student strengths and opportunities for improvement. To demonstrate the thinking behind this tool, let's say you have decided to design a health improvement plan for yourself. You know you want good health, but it is hard to decide where to start. Begin by thinking of subcategories like nutrition, exercise, stress, and sleep. We can evaluate which of these are strong areas for you and which ones you need to improve.

Let's say you're a runner, and you work out at the gym twice a week. Obviously, this is a strength. You also know your eating habits include lots of snacks but few fruits and vegetables. Now there's an opportunity. Breaking down the big category of health into subcategories was helpful, but breaking these subcategories into smaller subskills makes it easier to identify where to start on your improvement plan.

When designing a support plan, teachers and coaches sometimes find it hard to articulate a list of subskills that the student already has and ones that are priority needs. For instance, say you want a student to become more resilient. Can you list 10 skills a resilient person possesses? Which of the skills listed are the strongest for this student, and which ones need work? How about 10 skills for a creative writer? The charts in this book—there are 16 in all, and you can find them in Appendix A—will help you through this conversation. A chart is available for each major academic, social-emotional, and executive function category. You will find charts on math, reading, and writing, as well as on such categories as memory, resilience, organization, problem solving, and self-regulation.

A Word About Executive Function

Many of the strength charts we include deal specifically with executive function skills because they are so crucial to school success. Neurologists use the term executive function to describe brain processes that drive our ability to focus, solve problems, organize, remember, self- monitor, and control our impulses, all of which help us learn efficiently and develop important social skills (Blair, 2002). Understanding how executive function skills develop helps parents and educators pinpoint the best responses to academic and behavior problems that are often mistaken for laziness, carelessness, or lack of motivation.

Contrary to popular belief, executive function skills—especially working memory—rather than IQ are the best predictor of success in reading, spelling, and math (Alloway & Alloway, 2010). Teachers often believe that students struggle because of lack of focus or low IQ; seldom do they identify working memory or other executive function skills...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword by Harvey F. Silver
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Support System That Works
• Chapter 1. A New Lens for Solving Old Problems
• Chapter 2. Strengths-Based Team Conversations
• Chapter 3. Nothing About Us Without Us: Student and Parent Conversations
• Chapter 4. The First Meeting with a Coach
• Chapter 5. Getting to the Hidden Cause with Five Whys
• Chapter 6. The Student Support Team Meeting
• Chapter 7. Questions Asked—and Answered
• Answer Key
• Appendix A. Strength Charts
• Appendix B. List of Videos
• References
• About the Authors
• Related ASCD Resources
• Copyright