Mental Health
Keys to Mental Health & Relationships
Restorative Approaches
TaMHS Strategy
Emotional Needs of Boys
Movement Differences
Training
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Full Training List
Keys to Mental Health & Relationships
The First Key: Welcome and Listening
Lets get the welcome right and then lets really listen! Safety, belonging and security are everything!!
Culture of hope – thoughts from Pouwel van de Siepkamp (www.gentleteaching.nl) that fit the key of welcome really well.
Creating a culture of hope is very important. The culture of hope is the warm and safe environment we all need to feel well and to be able to express and develop our personal qualities and dreams. In each gentle teaching @ bulletin, we will describe an aspect of this culture.
Helping others
Teaching a person to feel unconditionally loved by us, begins with offering our unconditional help. This means that we look at what is hard for a person to do by himself and helping him or her, regardless whether or not he/she has the skills to do it without help and regardless to how he/she is behaving at this moment. Helping concerns help with practical actions when the person likes us to help, as well as help in emotional situations which are hard to handle for the person.
Most people find it more difficult to ask for, or accept help from others in emotional situations, than help with practical and functional actions. Especially when they have experienced others to respond negative on their emotions. That’s why in gentle teaching we may decide to give a lot of support / help with practical actions, even if we know the person doesn’t actually need this help to perform the action. We do this to teach the person that he can rely on us, and we hope that he will remember this when he is getting emotional and needs our support at that moment.
Two aspects are important when we are helping a person. First is to be unconditional and second is that we express our warm engagement with the person while we are helping.
Unconditional means that our help doesn’t depend on the behavior of the person. We help even if he is not listening to us or even when he is harming himself or others. This doesn’t mean that we approve of everything he is doing, but it doesn’t influence our warm feelings towards the person.
Warm engagement means that we do not help because it’s our job to do so, but because we feel related with the person and we feel joy in being able to help him. It’s important that we don’t only feel this joy, but that we also express it explicitly, so the person will also feel it.
We do not just give help, but we give help-plus: help plus warm engagement.
Helping a person with actions he is able to do by himself isn’t what we are used to do in care giving. We are afraid that we are spoiling the person and that this will make him lazy or more dependent of us. But the opposite will happen. If we help the person with these actions, actually we are not helping with the action itself, but we are teaching him to feel safe with us and loved by us. When he feels grounded in a good relationship with us and others, he will automatically start doing all kind of things by himself when he has the skills and the motivation to do it. This is the natural drive of every human being to explore and develop his talents. It just needs the good ground of feeling related with important others and feeling embedded in a safe and loving community.
If you have to work with plans and goals, and if your managers tell you only to do what is necessary for your people, you can make a good gentle teaching plan. For example:
- Perspective: the person feels safe with, and loved by the care givers
- Goal: the person experiences that we help him unconditionally and with warm engagement
- Action: we help the person with getting dressed in the morning and while helping him, we feel and express joy and warmth.
This little plan makes it clear that helping getting dressed is not to spoil him, but that it’s a tool we need to teach an essential feeling: safe and loved.
It has been said that 90% of behavior problems come from children wanting adults to listen to them. One study reported that the number one request from suicidal teenagers was for adults to listen to them. The medical power of listening has also been proven by various studies.
Clearly, we all feel better when we feel heard. And we feel better when we feel understood. In order to be understood, we must be listened to. Often it is more important to us to feel heard than to actually get what we said we wanted. On the other hand, feeling ignored and misunderstood is literally painful whether we are six or sixty.
Check out these simple guidelines on Listening
The Second Key: Our Learning and Their Learning
Learning styles/preferences and accommodations for individual needs are becoming better understood all the time
Children with autism are among those who challenge so may of our traditional approaches to learning and behavviour management. They teach us to work with their interests not just treat these as obsessions or opportunities for reward and consequences.
Teaching and learning, as Paul Ginnis put it, are about the learner “working it out for himself” about dramatic, unusual and multi-sensory teaching methods about the creation of a teaching environment which is emotionally and physically safe about pupil control over his/her learning about making choices and decisions which lead to true independent learning. Surely all these make good sense for pupils with major emotional needs?
Paul Ginnis has produced a number of useful resources for educators in this area. A Guide to Student-Centred Learning (1986, reprinted 15 times) and The Student-Centred School (1990). The Teachers’ Toolkit, published January 2002 by Crown House is an excellent resource for all teachers. Check out these student friendly resources for English: lesson plans, schemes of work and resources
Circle of Courage
We have found this model extremely helpful to many people trying to make sense of young people’s behaviour. The 4 basic needs of belonging, achievement, independence and generosity and the way in which pursuing these needs can so easily become distorted gives many clues as to where to go next with a young person’s behaviour.
Education and empowerment of children provides the foundation for a Native American Belief System of positive discipline. In Reclaiming Youth at Risk, Brendtro, Brokenleg, and Van Bockern (1990) use the symbolism of the medicine wheel to describe the Circle of Courage. This circle entwines central tenets of belonging, mastery, independence and generosity; all components being equally important. In a holistic teaching approach, it becomes vital to understand these components and to be proactive in maintaining the circle for each student in the community of the classroom.
The Circle of Courage has gained international attention and has been adopted by numerous schools , agencies, and organizations for troubled children and youth. The Circle of Courage is based upon Native American ideals that if achieved lead to sound mental health and functioning. To some extent they are similar to hierarchies of “needs” such as that espoused by psychologist Abraham Maslow. Educational and rehabilitation programs may use many strategies to help children and youth attain the core ideals. The circle suggests unity of function.
The four colours of the circle represent four races that are nevertheless as one.
- Belonging is the first of the ideals. The emotionally healthy individual must be able to identify with and relate to others.So many pupils with EBD labels in the UK and elsewhere experience no sense of belonging in either school or family life.
- Mastery/Achievement is the second ideal: each person must be able to accomplish basic tasks in order to feel worthy and maintain good self-esteem.
- The third ideal is Independence. Independence follows logically from Mastery and enables the individual to set,pursue and attain personal goals.
- The fourth ideal is Generosity. The person who is fulfilled has “extra” that he or she can give to others. Ultimately, then, altruism is needed if a person is ever to be emotionally and behaviourally stable. Opportunities for the most challenging to be generous are usually severely restricted! Yet this this represents 25% of basic human needs.
The Third Key: The Long View
We need to take the long view when planning proving and placement for individuals with complex and challenging needs. Currently our system is too geared up for short term decisions.
Person centred planning tools such as MAP or PATH provide one process for helping us think longer term with our dreams and for whom courageous inclusive educationalists and Social Service workers managed to maintain locally despite forces wanting him to be ‘sent away to residential’ . Wayne dreams of a mansion in which young people in care can stay and be well looked after…our nightmares. Check out resources for developing your MAP skills. The MAP process below was the result of working with a diverse team around a young man who has spent many years in public care.
We must take the long view in our planning for complex individuals however young they are.
Follow link to read a detailed thesis by Dr Margo Bristow on the use of PATH by educational Psychologists in the UK.
The findings indicate that PATH impacted positively and pupils attributed increased confidence and motivation to achieve their goals to their PATH. Parents and young people felt they had contributed to the process as equal partners, feeling their voices were heard. Improved pupil- parent relationships and parent-school relationships were reported and the importance of having skilled facilitators was highlighted. Although participants were generally positive about the process, many felt daunted beforehand, possibly due to a lack of preparation. Pre-PATH planning and post-PATH review were highlighted as areas requiring further consideration by PATH organisers. Recommendations to shape and improve the delivery of PATH are outlined together with future research directions.
‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’
How often have you heard this question asked of typical children? What was your own answer as a child to this question? However we so often will not ask this same question of challenging children and families will often say ‘we dare not think beyond today’ let alone into the long term future. So we go about planning for children with complex problems as if they did not really have a long-term future and adulthood. We make major decisions such as placement in a special school or unit without having regard for the long term implications of such a move. The child when they do become an adult are greatly at risk of vulnerability and isolation from the wider community into which they find themselves a part, or not a part. We live in a society that does not have special shops or special bus stops….
The Fourth Key: Locating Gifts and Capacity
‘Possibilities of goodness’
Locating gifts, talents and capacity in children and adults we work with is a much more radical idea than it might seem. Check out the Now Discover Your Strengths book available from Amazon.
All About me This excellent booklet has been written by a young person from Scotland with help from those who know him best.
Essential lifestyle planning underpins many of the questions.This work shows how important gifts are when planning for pupil’s education. Person centred booklets like these are appearing all around the UK. They are getting names like Personal Portfolio or Passport. Develop your own for a child you know today!!
Another excellent one page example has been created by Babu and his family. Have a look at it here.
The Fifth Key: Intentional Building of Relationships
We all need to accommodate each other and find new ways of repairing the damage we can do to each other in our school, family and community settings.
Circle of Friends is of course a key tool for entering the messy world of relationships and can make an amazing difference to individuals with the most challenging behaviour and hard to reach emotional needs.
What about physical contact and touch in relationships when a child really needs this?
Check out this progressive school policy
Roots of Empathy is a powerful idea whose time has come. An evidence-based classroom program, its mission is to build caring, peaceful, and civil societies – child by child – through the development of empathy in children.
The Sixth Key: It’s All About Teams
This is a rich approach to encouraging teachers and other practitioners to mutually support each other with in depth problem solving and emotional insights.It works even better with graphic facilitation and synthesis as we have been discovering. Speak to us for details.We are currently rewriting this paper…feel free to feedback to us.We are providing training to model this approach.
This work links well to that of educational therapy. Educational Therapy is a way of working with children who have learning difficulties. It combines teaching with therapeutic exploration of the emotional factors, which may impede their learning.
Children in school can experience difficulties, which may prevent them from accessing the curriculum and managing in class. A better understanding of the complex issues underlying these problems helps teachers to find new ways of thinking about children and strategies for helping them both therapeutically and by preventing difficulties from developing.
Quick step by step guide to Circles of Adults
Learning from Hostage Negotiators
This is Emma Van Der Clift’s MA thesis and it’s all about moving from behavioural to person centred approaches to behaviour management and what teachers can learn from Hostage Negotiators!
Emma is Norman Kunc’s wife and a long time leader in the North American inclusion movement
Secondary teacher who used to be a Hostage Negotiator reflects on his experience and makes links to our training on Behaviour and Relationships.
Do have a look – it’s very clearly written and incisive on the theme of how schools’ default approaches to conflict – detentions, exclusions etc are the opposite of building a sense of belonging and inclusion – both aims which likely feature in most school’s mission statements. We’ve been saying this sort of thing for years but the research back up Emma provides is outstanding.
Values of Behaviour Specialists
Check out the attached paper by John O’Brien and David Pitonyak – his website well worth a visit at: http://www.dimagine.com/
David is the most respected writer/thinker on issues of challenging behaviour and disability in North America, among inclusionists at least, but not widely known of in the UK.
The paper has an interesting approach to trying to link a ‘behaviour specialist’s’ underlying values and beliefs to their practice in the field – we think it could be an real learning activity to do something similar for an EP or other Support Service. At the very least it’s a good model of how to try and spell out what your values mean in practice.
Restorative Approaches
Do something. In the face of hatred, apathy will be interpreted as acceptance — by the haters, the public and, worse, the victim. Decency must be exercised, too. If it isn’t, hate invariably persists.
Restorative Justice is an essential ingredient for the inclusive school and education system. Howard Zehr is one of the pioneers of this Restorative process. See him on video on YouTube so is Desmond Tutu who can be seen on video here.
Hull to become a fully Restorative City – check out their plans.
The Compass of Shame
The Compass of Shame (adapted from Nathanson, 1992) illustrates the various ways that human beings react when they feel shame. The four poles of the compass of shame and behaviors associated with them are:
- Withdrawal — isolating oneself, running and hiding
- Attack self—self put-down, masochism
- Avoidance — denial, abusing drugs, distraction through thrill-seeking
- Attack other—turning the tables, lashing out verbally or physically, blaming others
Nathanson says that the “attack other” response to shame is responsible for the proliferation of violence in modern life. Usually people who have adequate self-esteem readily move beyond their feelings of shame. Nonetheless, we all react to shame, in varying degrees, in the ways described by the compass. Restorative practices, by their very nature, provide an opportunity for us to express our shame, along with other emotions, and in doing so reduce their intensity. In restorative conferences, for example, people routinely move from negative affects through the neutral affect to positive affects.
We regularly explore this process in our training days – a great way of building empathy with challenging young people!
Read more at http://www.realjustice.org
Watch and listen to the originator of this idea on YouTube or check out this YouTube video on Shame and Guilt.
Check out the links on the Transforming Conflict site, it is an excellent site developing restorative justice still further. There are at least 6 national UK projects currently being evaluated and highly likely to be followed by a national roll out of this initiative.
Trust and Forgiveness find new importance within this key to meeting emotional needs. Forgiveness really has to be worked on and needs to be seen in Relationship Policies in schools (our preferred alternative to Behaviour Policies).
Restorative Interventions Training : North East England
‘I have just done a rough count of children who have been involved in Restorative Conferences since we completed our training with you and I am up to about 100 children. We have also had about 12 parents involved in conferences. We are using the language so much it is second nature and there have been many more children who have benefited from this I’m sure! We are really pleased with how it is going and just this week me and Jane Cunningham (Head Teacher) have held a couple of really successful conferences where the children have been so on board and positive at the end of the process it has confirmed to us that we are doing the right thing! We have had times when we doubt what we are doing because we are still struggling to get some staff on board but luckily we have been able to remind each other of our successes! We both agree that your training was very inspiring and would like to thank you for that! We will keep chipping away at everyone!’ Thanks again!
Alison Holmes Relationship Manager, Seaview Primary
Therapeutic Services Offer to tackle Mental Health challenge
We work with children or young people recovering from brain damage, accidents or longer term disability including those with challenging behaviour, or social and communication issues – read more here.
Our Pack
Restorative Solutions: Making it Work
Colin Newton and Helen Mahaffey
This is a practical book about how to implement Restorative interventions and approaches in schools. The book gives guiding ideas, principle, theory and values as well as direct scripts for those involved in direct contact with pupils, staff and parents. Restorative Solutions are about inclusion, transforming relationships and radical ways of impacting upon conflict and rule breaking behaviour. All schools in the UK and Support Service staff will want a copy. Parents will also find it an extremely valuable resource for bringing up their own children peacefully.
There is also a pack available featuring a great DVD created in Milton Keynes led by Tom McCready.
A Great Behaviour Book!
Restorative Solutions
Restorative Justice as aprocess is a great approach to ‘making it right’ instead of simply punishing offenders.Find out more about it from some of the successful work carried out in Nottingham
Do something. In the face of hatred, apathy will be interpreted as acceptance — by the haters, the public and, worse, the victim. Decency must be exercised, too. If it isn’t, hate invariably persists.
We have been supporting the development of Robin Tinker’s work in Nottingham focused on secondary schools. Check out the links on this national UK site. Transforming Conflict is an excellent site developing restorative justice still further. There are at least 6 national UK projects currently being evaluated and highly likely to be followed by a national roll out of this initiative.
Restorative Interventions Training: North East England
‘I have just done a rough count of children who have been involved in Restorative Conferences since we completed our training with you and I am up to about 100 children.
We have also had about 12 parents involved in conferences. We are using the language so much it is second nature and there have been many more children who have benefited from this I’m sure! We are really pleased with how it is going and just this week me and Jane Cunningham (Head Teacher) have held a couple of really successful conferences where the children have been so on board and positive at the end of the process it has confirmed to us that we are doing the right thing!
We have had times when we doubt what we are doing because we are still struggling to get some staff on board but luckily we have been able to remind each other of our successes! We both agree that your training was very inspiring and would like to thank you for that! We will keep chipping away at everyone!’
Thanks again
Alison Holmes Relationship Manager, Seaview Primary
Download the ‘Short Restorative Conference Process’ sample of the book
Undercover Teams
Undercover Teams (Bill Hubbard: New Zealand) are a low-intrusion restorative approach to bullying and are an adaptation of the influential and far-sighted work in the early 90’s of Barbara Maines and George Robinson of the UK. They labeled their support group approach to addressing school bullying as “No-Blame”. At the time and for years later, some people believed that this process was the single answer to school bullying that everyone had been looking for. Undercover Teams represent a unique tool that fits within the family of ‘restorative responses’. Undercover Teams are a ‘targeted approach to – repairing relationships.
Viewed using a restorative perspective, Undercover Teams (UTs) may not be regarded by some practitioners as ‘fully restorative’ because the victims of bullying and the offending students are not brought face-to-face as part of the process however this fact alone should not undermine the worth of UTs. Rather, UTs can represent a niche process for supporting young people who may be fearful at the prospect of participating in a restorative conference situation. For students who have been bullied for much or all of their school lives, this can often be the case.
Gentle Teaching
Some really interesting thoughts from Pouwel van de Siepkamp who has this website which echoes many of our views.
Six good reasons for avoiding punishment
Using punishment in order to control and change behaviors seems so normal in most of the cultures we know of. We don’t realize the many negative side effects of punishment. If we would, we would stop using punishment.
Traumatic imprints
Research has shown that a repetition of even minor negative experiences over a period of time may lead to traumatic imprints in the brains of a person and cause a post traumatic stress syndrome. So imagine you have a disability, and you keep doing something you can’t help doing, and your caregiver corrects you with an average of 3 times a day by saying STOP DOING THIS! 3 times a day = 21 times a week = 1092 times a year = 10.920 times in 10 ten years. We know people who lived like this for 20 – 30 years. They are traumatized by the words STOP DOING THIS. And most of us even don’t see these words as punishment, but merely as correction. !
More negative energy
When you use punishment, by definition you are too late. The behavior already happened and for some reason you couldn’t prevent is. The person may have created negative energy by his behavior, but you add more negative energy by punishing. Besides that, you may perhaps teach the person what not to do by punishing afterwards, but you won’t teach him how to handle his stress in another way. You just leave him empty handed.
Inequality
By using punishment we put ourselves explicitly above the person. Not only because we have better insight in what is appropriate or not – which might be true – but because we think we have the right to judge over the person and do harm to him. We don’t have that right.
Creating fear
By definition punishment has the intention that you want to make the person afraid of what you might do when he doesn’t listen to you, or behaves the way you want him to. You teach him to turn away from you instead of the feeling of companionship.
Wrong role-model
You also teach the person that it’s obviously ok to punish a person who is lower in rang than your are (according to your own opinion) when he does something you don’t like. You don’t only teach this to the person who is punished, but also to the others who witness this. They all might start doing the same we do.
Social exclusion / marginalization
By punishing a person in front of others (like in a classroom or group home), you show the others that this person is doing something bad. This can cause others to punish him also when they see him doing it again. Or they come and tell you, hoping that you will punish the ‘bad guy’. This starts a process of marginalization and social exclusion.
So think it over and decide for yourself whether or not you should punish a person.
Restorative Links and Resources
This is an organisation working to promote conflict resolution and restorative justice as alternatives to the endless cycles of conflict, violence and crime that are the hallmarks of our time.
Fight Hate and promote Tolerance
This is a great place for teaching tolerance resources and ideas.
What is really important when meeting emotional needs? In Punished by Rewards Alfie Kohn challenges us to get back to what really counts and not be so preoccupied with rewards and punishments!
TaMHS Strategy
Targeted Mental Health in Schools (TaMHS) is a three-year pathfinder programme aimed at supporting the development of innovative models of therapeutic and holistic mental health support in schools for children and young people aged five to 13 at risk of, and/or experiencing, mental health problems; and their families.
Inclusive Solutions is providing training input around the UK as part of this strategy. Circle of Adults is being embraced in a number of LAs as a great process for shared problem solving and in depth reflection on emotional issues and behaviour.
Contact us to talk more about this.
Emotional Needs of Boys
This is a theme we provide considerable training around because of the over representation of boys in special schools and within exclusion statistics,and as they grow up they continue to be over represented among those with mental health problems, in prison and so on. Recent 2003 UK HMI/OFTED publications OFSTED finds extra R helps boys perform well at school and Boys Achievement in Secondary Schools have highlighted the importance of boys experiencing respect, high expectations, constructive feedback, clear limits and a sense of humour! Boys respect teachers who are enthusiastic and knowledgeable. In successful secondary schools where boys make good progress there is a ‘non macho’ culture, where they can feel valued by an ethos that celebrates diverse achievements, where short term tasks are set and work is marked promptly with detailed feedback. These schools have plenty of extra curricular activities, teaching is at a ‘sprightly pace’ and there is good use of computers and interactive learning value is placed on the diversity of learning styles and all experience a true sense of belonging!
Boyz 2 Men
Check out this wonderful piece of work in an inner city primary school. This OFSTED praised work shows the powerful use of drama, art and music in the meeting of emotional needs.
Creative Partnerships works to give school children in areas throughout England the opportunity to develop their potential, their ambition, their creativity and imagination through sustainable partnerships with creative and cultural organisations, businesses and individuals.
Emotional Intelligence, emotional competence and emotional literacy are so important to develop and teach especially among our boys and young men. The dark side of emotional intelligence will be very familiar to many visitors to this site and yet is seldom as well explored.
Gentle Teaching may offer us a new way of exploring relationships with those who are hard to reach…Gentle Teaching is a non violent approach for helping people with special needs and sometimes challenging behaviours that focuses on four primary goals of care-giving:
- teaching the person to feel safe with us
- teaching the person to feel engaged with us
- teaching the person to feel unconditionally loved by us
- teaching the person to feel loving towards us
Gentle Teaching is a strategy based on a Psychology of Interdependence that sees all change as being mutual and bringing about a feeling of companionship and community- symbols of justice and non-violence
PRUs Are they good or bad? Check out the arguments in this paper by Colin Newton and Derek WIlson which draws upon DfES policies as well as research.
Movement Differences
Understanding Movement Differences can be key to including many challenging children and adults who appear very different and may have labels of autism, Tourette’s syndrome, or severe learning difficulty.
Our Training
Fresh approaches to behaviour and relationships
Meeting the needs of children in care
Attachment difficulties: Including children
Multi agency working
Problem solving tools and techniques
Listen, LISTEN
When you listen you affirm me but your listening must be real sensitive and serious not looking busily around not with a worried or distracted frown not preparing what you are going to say next but giving me your full attention. You are telling me i am a person of value important and worth listening to one with whom you will share yourself. I have ideas to share feelings which i too often keep to myself deep questions which struggle inside me for answers I have hopes only tentatively acknowledged which are not easy to share and pain and guilt and fear i try to stifle These are sensitive areas and a real part of me but it takes courage to confide in another I need to listen too if we are to become close How can i tell you i understand? I can show interest with my eyes or an occasional word attuned to pick up not only spoken words but aloso the glimmer of a smile a look of pain, the hesitation, the struggle which may suggest something as yet too deep for words So let us take time together respecting the others freedom encouraging without hurrying understanding that some things may never be brought to light but others may emerge if given time Each through this listening, enriches the other with the priceless gift of intimacy.
Keith Pearson, Melbourne, Australia