Therapists, Stop Telling Educators How to Do Their Jobs

As educators we need to stop letting therapists tell us how to do our jobs and we need to recognize that being a therapist and being a teacher or an administrator are very different jobs and if we try to run education the way that therapists want us to based on how they work individually with their clients we're going to end up with some pretty bizarre results like we're seeing with student behavior and I didn't quite understand exactly what was happening until I came across this article today from Education Next, which is an extensive kind of overview of Ross Green and Stuart Ablon's work on collaborative problem solving and some related programs.

And it's the idea that as a teacher, you should essentially be a psychologist.

You should work one-on-one with the student to help them work through whatever issue they're dealing with.

And I have to wonder if the people who are coming up with these approaches have ever actually been in a classroom or been a parent or tried to teach a lesson.

Like, when would you have the time and opportunity to do this type of thing?

And why would you not think, hey, maybe the counselor should be the one to do this kind of thing with students?

But this one really blew my mind.

They give an example of when a student walks into class 10 minutes late and cusses in front of the class and just disrupts everything and clearly is kind of out of control and needs to not have the opportunity to disrupt the class.

Guess what they propose doing here?

The proposal is not to have the counselor talk to the student or have an administrator talk to the student, but to have the teacher sit down with the student, have somebody else cover the class and have the teacher sit down with a student and figure out what's going on.

with the assumption that it wasn't just a personal choice to make a bad decision and do something disruptive, but that it was something that was kind of outside the student's control that they need help regulating or they need help dealing with something that's not really a choice in terms of their behavior.

And I think with therapists in particular, I'm seeing this pattern of removing students locus of control and saying students have no control over their behavior.

It's always something else going on that they just don't have any control over.

And of course that makes it pointless to have any kind of rules or consequences because, well, they can't help it.

What are you going to do?

You just have to listen and be there for them and sit down with them and give them time.

And there are all these things that are basically coddling students and enabling students to behave worse and worse and worse that are coming from therapists.

And I don't really understand that from the perspective of somebody who cares about kids.

Like if you're a therapist and you care about kids, why would you want to enable them?

Why would you want to coddle them?

Why would you want them to think that they don't have any control over their behavior?

Why would you want the adults around them to blame themselves for the struggles of the individual student?

Like how does that, any of that help the individual student just even as a therapist?

Now, of course we're not therapists.

As educators, this is way outside of our lane, way outside of our training.

And I just think we really have to push back against Ross Green and these psychologists who are trying to get us to do their jobs in the classroom.

Let me know what you think.