Improving the Classroom Performance of Students with Emotional or Behavioral Disabilities: Proactive Interventions at an Out-of-School Time Program
Discussion
The problem is that students diagnosed with EBD are, on average, receiving lower classroom grades than their peers. While it is difficult to highlight specific reasons children develop EBDs, there are several broad solutions to working with these children to help them both socially and academically. The following solutions, gleaned from relevant literature and classroom experiences, will be implemented in the OST program to help support students in their academic pursuits.
Studies have shown that the environment in which a child is raised does have a significant impact on their development. According to Kaufman (2001):
Many emotional or behavioral disorders, though not all, originate in or are made worse by the child’s or youth’s social interactions. The disorders are learned through modeling, reinforcement, extinction and punishment. (p. 7)
This perspective of the development of EBDs combines elements of traditional behaviorism as well as social cognitivism. EBDs associated with low views of self-worth or with inappropriate or violent behavior may be the result of the child’s social upbringing.
Kaufman’s generalization of the role that the social context plays in a child’s development has been examined in earlier studies of aggressive behavior. Albert Bandura, a key figure in the social cognitive field of thought, illustrated the importance of modeling in one of his early articles. Bandura (1963) acknowledges that some behaviors are indeed the result of direct training or conditioning of some form—characteristics of behaviorism. Certain things, personality patterns for example, come from modeled behavior, usually the behavior of the parents. Bandura gives the example of a parent hitting a child as punishment for something like bullying or fighting with peers. The purpose of the punishment is to decrease the aggressive behavior, but in fact, the act is simultaneously teaching—or perhaps better a better term is “reinforcing”—other forms of aggression to imitate.
Bandura’s earlier work focused on aggressive behavior developed through social learning. His theories were based on his observations of adolescents whose parents displayed aggressive behavior; however, his most significant work in this area involved his study of preschool children (Ormrod & Rice, 2003). His experiment involved placing a blow-up doll in a room of toys and exposing three separate groups of preschool children to different behaviors in the playroom. One group saw an adult being aggressive towards the doll, hitting it with wooden mallets and other objects and using aggressive language towards it. A second group saw an adult come in and play constructively with other toys in the room and display no violent behavior. A third group had no adult-modeled behavior in the playroom. Later placed in the room with the blow-up doll, the children who saw the aggressive behavior were the most aggressive of the three groups and the children who saw the adult engaged in constructive, non-aggressive behavior were the least aggressive of the groups.
Bandura repeated the blow-up doll experiment (1963) to have children watching videos—some with human models and some with cartoon characters—which portrayed similar behavior to the earlier mentioned example. Bandura had other groups this time; some videos were extended to let children see the aggressor being punished as a consequence of their improper behavior. Bandura observed that the same pattern of behavior was displayed by viewers who did not see the extended videos; he also observed a decrease in the undesirable behavior by children who saw the consequences of the action. This reinforced the ideas that we can learn how to act based on our observations alone and that the subjects we observe do not have to be live models but can be abstractions of reality. In fact, in a more recent study, Bandura (2001) wrote:
Televised representations of social realities reflect ideological bents in their portrayal of human nature, social relations, and the norms and structure of society (Adoni & Mane, 1984; Gerbner, 1972). Heavy exposure to this symbolic world may eventually make the televised images appear to be the authentic state of human affairs. (p. 12)
From the perspective of the OST program, these are significant, particularly for the students who exhibit behavioral disorders. Without the OST program, it is often questioned what these students would be doing with their after-school time. For most of them, both their parents work long hours, so, in the absence of some form of out-of-school-time care, it is unlikely that they will have a positive environment to come home to. Knowing that the children’s behaviors may be a direct result of their social upbringing, due to parental inputs, or—as is more likely the case with the population in this study—a lack of parental supervision, can help remind practitioners of the significant role that they can play in helping change a child’s behavior. Through constant positive role-modeling and sincere relationship developments, the OST staff can play a significant role to reverse or minimize some of the behavioral problems which interfere with academic potential. That said, extinction—as has been shown in studies of conditioned behavior—is not a process which is easy to achieve. The extinction of undesirable behaviors—reverse conditioning—is time consuming and requires attention even after the results have been achieved (Ormrod & Rice, 2003). The key here is to not concede defeat, label these students as “bad kids” and put them in programs which may be more punitive than educational. Instead, the focus should be on teaching these social skills along with promoting their education.
Self-regulation and guided peer-interventions are two strategies that have been found to work with smaller educational settings (Bos, 2002). Self-regulation refers to the student making decisions about how it is best to proceed, for example, when completing an assignment or when faced with a particular difficulty. Included with self-regulation is the idea of self-evaluation, whereby a student evaluates their success at meeting their self-defined objectives. Guided peer-interventions are where the teacher has identified a particular difficulty and calls on the group to help offer solutions to work through the difficulty. Having the teacher intervene reduces the chances for the intervention to appear negative or confrontational and typically work best in settings where the group size is small and where all members of the group know each other better. Within the OST setting, since the maximum overall participation rate has been 55 students from varied grade levels, there are many opportunities for smaller group divisions, especially when students are grouped by grade level. Furthermore, since they all live at the same apartment community and see each other both at school and at home, they are often more comfortable working together.
Teacher preparation is another concern which needs to be addressed in attempting to alleviate the learning obstacles faced by students with EBD. While the objective of the intervention taking place at an OST program is to minimize the burden that schools face in trying to reach students with EBD, one of the expected outcomes of this study is the creation of a handbook and teacher workshops which can help regular school teachers address the special needs of their students. Teacher preparation has been identified as playing a significant role in successful interventions with students with EBD; however, it has also been found that, while special education teachers have mastered the core competencies, general education teachers often have not (Bender, 2004). As such, identification of learning disabilities may be restricted based on a teacher’s knowledge of EBDs. Furthermore, better preparation and understanding of EBDs by teachers is likely to reduce their stress and frustration, and consequently reduce teacher burnout. This is an important consideration because teachers who are frustrated and dissatisfied are less likely to be responsive to their students’ needs, thus negatively impacting their educational experience (Bender, 2004).