I saw a post on Twitter the other day which was a version of posts I've seen many times before - a sort of reaction against a strawman version of what trauma-informed might mean in the context of school.
To demonstrate their point that trauma is not a common cause of 'behaviour' and that behaviourist approaches work well the overwhelming majority of the time, the poster invited readers to remember times when they had pushed the boundary as children and been set right by a consequence.
I could think of a few times when this happened in my own childhood. I expect we all could.
Yet, if we think a bit longer, we might also remember times when our behaviour was not at all moderated by a consequence, or the consequence merely encouraged us to put a lid on it, only for it to pop up again in a different form and at a different time.
During the first few years of secondary school, I struggled with Maths. I remember feeling a red, hot flush rising up my neck and into my brain as I looked at the sea of numbers in the book in front of me. The teacher would talk but I didn't seem to process anything he said. Yet, despite knowing I was 'stuck' in most lessons, I never raised my hand to ask for help. I had a real problem putting my hand up.
I fell behind. My exam scores plummeted during the first two years and my already shaky confidence fell with them. My parents were called in. "She just needs to ask for help if she's stuck," the teacher said. Seemed simple enough advice, but somehow I couldn't follow it.
It wasn't only a problem in Maths. Twice a year, the whole lower school sat exams. They arranged us into mixed-aged groups for a week and split every day into exam sessions and silent revision sessions.
During the summer exams of my year 7, the Book Club books arrived. I had ordered two. A teacher I didn't know came into one of our revision sessions to hand them out. I watched the other children raise their hands when their names were called and walk to the front of the class to get their books but, when she called my name, I didn't put my hand up.
Thirty-five years later, I still vividly remember sitting on the hard, wooden chair while the teacher repeatedly called my name, feeling the heat rising up the back of my neck. Some of the other children knew who I was and stared at me, while others were looking round for the culprit. I couldn't have explained why I didn't just raise my hand straight away but, the longer it went on, the more impossible the situation became. I had backed myself into a metaphorical corner, so I sat mute, eyes on my books, and waited it out until the teacher gave up and left the room.
Why the anecdote? This wasn't happening because of 'trauma' and arguably it wasn't that much of a big deal behaviourally either, irritating though it undoubtedly was for the teacher. I was generally a good student, I never had a detention, and found most of the academic work manageable. I was, however, acutely aware that I wasn't a 'popular' classmate and that keeping my head down was a good tactic for avoiding unwanted attention from my peers.
The fact is that lots of children have lots of random things going on for them and, much of the time, they probably can't explain why they do what they do, but it isn't as simple as making a choice to ignore the behavioural norms, and neither is it necessarily ignorance of what behaviour is appropriate.
I knew I ought to raise my hand. I knew my work would suffer if I did not. On Book Club day, I knew that failing to raise my hand would mean an embarrassing conversation with the teacher at the least (if I actually wanted to get the books), and possibly some sort of other consequence as well. Yet despite knowing what to do, and knowing what the consequence would be if I didn't do it, I still didn't comply.
You see, for a consequence to work, it has to be bigger than what motivates the unwanted behaviour. My fear of raising my hand may have been irrational, but it was strong. Only the threat of a consequence that I feared more would have overcome it.
If a child's behaviour really is just a bit of momentary boundary pushing, then it is likely that a mildly unpleasant consequence will do the trick.
But if it's rooted in deep fear, shame, anxiety, avoidance or some other complicating factor, then we're going to have to raise the stakes of the consequences so that their desire to avoid the consequence overwhelms all other factors - a sort of consequences escalator.
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| Víctor Vázquez on Unsplash |
How high are we willing to go? I was scared to raise my hand - it was a kind of mild survival behaviour. What consequence would have scared me more? A public telling off? Detention? Something else? Now imagine a child inured to violence, neglect, emotional abuse. What level of consequence would be needed to persuade them to abandon their survival behaviour?
It's not that consequences never work. A consequences-based approach to behaviour might head off immediate problems 95% of the time with 95% of the children but, for most children, there will be times when it doesn't work and, for a small number of children, it won't work most of the time.
My issue is that we don't seem to have an answer for when consequences don't work, other than to ratchet up the stakes. If the breadth of what we might call 'trauma-informed' approaches can give us some insight into the 5% without derailing the 95%, then surely it's at least worth taking a look.
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