The Importance of equipping Teachers with Child Psychology and Mental Health Training for the Classroom

from The Progressive Minds Journal - February 2020 Edition

River of Freedom Press release

There are several reasons why kids get left behind in the classroom. According to a study by Charles M. Reigeluth and Brian J. Beatty, they propose that there are four main reasons why children are left behind in the school system.

1. Unmet needs that effectively block or interfere with their learning.

2. They may lack the motivation to exert the effort necessary for learning

3. They may lack the foundation of knowledge ie. Skills, understanding and information

4. They may lack quality instruction to support their learning

Unmet needs refer to the fact that there is nothing we can do to help children learn if their basic needs are unmet. For example, if a child comes from a physically or emotionally abusive home, or are coming day after day without having any or adequate meals, there is nothing that educators can do to promote learning. Unless the underlying issue is addressed, the child would not be in a frame of mind to commit to serious study and would therefore have increased odds of being left behind.

The second factor, motivation, is imperative for the engagement of the child in their learning and understanding. Children are generally very excited to start attending school and begin the learning process. They have big dreams and aspirations of who and what they want to be “when they grow up”, and usually have a pretty good sense that school is the vehicle by which they would get to their desired destination. However, this motivation and excitement usually wanes when a child encounters embarrassment or failure at school, and develops a fear of trying. The child therefore does not exert the effort required to succeed. If this demotivation is not picked up on by the teacher, this lack of effort would progress and the child would continue to be left behind.

The third factor, foundation for learning, is extremely important as new knowledge is built from a point of reference that the child would have been exposed to in his formative years. This prior knowledge complements the work that would be covered in the class. The school curriculum is created such that it takes into consideration the information the children should have acquired at each grade stage. For instance, teaching a child to write takes for granted that the child would have been already exposed to the development of simple motor skills. Skills are often built upon each other and are usually made up of similar simple components that are structured such that there is a natural flow to the learning and understanding of related knowledge. Unfortunately, our education system forces slower or unexposed children to a new topic before they have mastered the current skill, leading to greater difficulty in learning future concepts.

The fourth factor, support for learning, is important as teachers must be able to gauge whether students need more reinforcement for a particular concept, while at the same time without overdoing it to create disengagement due to lack of stimulation and boredom. Different children move at different paces. While some children can grasp concepts with very little instruction, others may take a little more time to make the correct connections to cement the idea. This does not mean that the child who takes longer is “slower” than the child who takes less time to retain the information. In many cases, the child who takes longer has to fully understand the idea in order to properly assimilate it, whereas the child who seems to pick up the material faster, may in fact be better at retaining and reproducing information and does not necessarily understand the crux of the material.

The concept underpinning all of these proposed reasons as to why a student may be left behind is that these reasons must first be identified in order to be dealt with. If a teacher is unable to recognize the telltale signs of any one of these broad factors, no action will be taken in order to meet the needs of the student. Furthermore, the teacher needs to be adequately trained to deal with these issues or at least be able to refer the child to the necessary resources for assistance.

Unfortunately, however, our teachers are sent into a classroom, grossly under-prepared for the challenges they would inevitably face when dealing with a group of kids from various homes with diverse backgrounds and upbringing. Classroom management flies out the window as personalities converge. Teachers are then left with the only weapon they know how to wield at this point in order to gain some sense of order –yelling. Several studies have been done citing the damage done to kids in a high-strung environment where they are exposed to a lot of yelling. The kids feel stressed, anxious and frightened as the stress levels in their brains and bodies begin to build up from anything that makes them feel attacked. Loud voices, the harsh tone of an adult’s voice, an angry look or scornful facial expression can easily trigger automatic physical and emotional reactions in children that cause traumatic stress which may continue way into adulthood. In addition, yelling increases the risk of depression in students, as they often fear that they are a source of displeasure, and often times, it worsens the misbehavior.

Many teachers are guilty of this. However, we must be sure not to simply cast blame on them as handling a classroom full of vastly varying individual personalities is definitely a challenge. Teachers have a lot of responsibility, are underpaid and do not have enough time in the day to cover everything that needs to be covered. They dedicate their professional, and often their personal lives to ensuring that the children who sit in their classes are well-equipped and adequately served and prepared for life. On top of this, they are required by their respective education administration bodies, to cover a certain amount of content per grade, of which failure to do so may incur harsh disciplinary action on the teacher, regardless of the conditions he or she may have to work under.

We often castigate teachers for trying to fit all children within a mold to produce non-thinking, fact-regurgitating robots who are unable to rationalize for themselves. The truth is, for the teacher, it is easier to make sure everyone covers the syllabus laid out by the education boards if all the kids are on the same page every day. Even if they do not fully understand the material, they would have at least interacted with it, and maybe, as they mature and come in contact with more advanced concepts later down their academic road, some of the previously missed concepts will reveal themselves unto them.

Yes, this is definitely not the most efficient method, but it is currently the best option given the lack of resources, overcrowding and increasingly withdrawn parents of children in the system. It is a fact that smaller class sizes would be optimal, but this is not fiscally possible given the magnitude of children entering the school system annually. Other than engaging parents in their children’s education to a higher degree, the next best option is to teach teachers how to recognize the pitfalls that students are prone to falling into, which severely retards or arrests academic development.

According to therapist, child psychologist and school counselor Thomas Winterman, there are three crucial elements of child psychology that will make teachers’ lives a lot easier if they are afforded the opportunity to receive training in better assessing classroom behavior.

1.All behavior is purposeful and goal-directed.

This suggests that teachers need to move past the overt manifestation of behavior, and delve into the understanding the reasoning behind it. Many times, children exert abrasive behaviours because it gives them a sense of safety or power in a situation, or they may be seeking the attention and feelings of adequacy that are important to developing their sense of self. If we educate teachers on recognizing these signs, and dealing with them according instead of responding in an equally abrasive or domineering fashion that would further dissuade students from settling down to work, many more students would be saved from falling through the cracks.

2. Understanding that a child’s “lifestyle” is crucial.

By understanding key elements of the child’s upbringing and environment, teachers are able to decipher the cause of certain behavioural triggers. Elements such as birth order (place among siblings or whether an only-child), family rules and roles, as well as the home environment and community within which the child lives, play a huge part in a child’s perception of and reaction to situations he may come in contact with.

3. The brain is plastic.

Everything in the brain is plastic, meaning that it is not static, but changeable and able to be molded and remolded. Children’s brains are most adaptable to change, and therefore, reinforcing good habits and positive notions of self will create new neural pathways to improve the way the child responses to external stimuli. Even though some areas of the brain are unchangeable, for the most part, an aware teacher can make significant steps towards reaching a student in danger of falling behind due to circumstance.

Child Psychology is a subdivision of Psychology that deals mainly with the mental care and conditions of children under the age of 16, while Mental Health education takes a developmental approach that spans across all ages. A teacher needs to understand the child psychology to transform from a good teacher to an effective teacher, as every child is unique and requires different techniques to enable learning. Children of varying IQs cannot be all met by using the identical teaching techniques.

There are different kinds of developments in children, such as cognitive, physical and socio-emotive development. Adequate training, not only helps to identify the belief system and social experience of the child, but also to assess the cognitive development of children to determine the ability to absorb the knowledge imparted, as well as their reasoning and though processing. Identifying whether children are within the healthy range of achieving their age-related milestones, and detecting the relationship between any lag in development and the arising of behavioural problems in the early stages is crucial to catching a child before he starts falling behind. It if often a small gap in the child’s learning that creates an increasing larger problem as more information is piled on.

Understanding a child’s aptitude and competence in accomplishing given targets is crucial to success and hence it is a key investment in our children to educate our teachers such that they can identify breaches in development and barriers to learning, and step in to address the problem in the early stages.