How Not To Be A Mountain Troll
In the Harry Potter books we are introduced to mountain trolls, huge and volatile creatures roaming the landscape, unable to reason with humans, solving all their conflicts by attempting to knock people unconscious with the heavy clubs they wildly swing. You don’t want to run into a mountain troll.
It is helpful to remember that image when we consider how our anxious, emotionally precarious students have often experienced adults. For many of these students, adults have been like mountain trolls: unpredictable, dangerous, and powerful creatures walking through their lives, seemingly incapable of listening, unable to recognize human emotions. It is helpful to remember that a vast number of these students are victims of pervasive and often undocumented abuse: chronic, lived through in moderate doses year after year, leading to what Bessel Van der Kolk labels as developmental trauma disorder, at an epidemic scale, cloaked in various diagnoses. (Van der Kolk, 2014). It is no wonder these children don’t trust us. They enter the arena of the classroom truly guarded. Some might characterize them through the lens of having a closed mind set (Dweck 2006) because they seem so averse to academic risk-taking. Some may label them as slow, disorganized, monosyllabic, and resistant. I urge us to think of them instead as victims of abuse. Therefore, our task is to establish trust, to identify oursleves as the antithesis of a mountain troll: predicable, organized, reasonable, able to listen.
Developing that trust is a daily, even minute to minute, baseline necessity, because there are no tricks or short-cuts; as the saying goes, if it has been a long walk into the woods, it is a long walk out of the woods (Benson 2014). Our abused students are capable of taking that walk with us, however tentatively, through the academic landscape of our classes: at first perhaps just watching us with the other children to verify that we are safe guides into the hurly-burly of learning, then step by step, first lagging behind, then at our side, and in the best cases, pulling us along. We can engender this journey in every moment in every academic setting. We can do it in kindergarten and we can do it in twelfth grade. It is not the job of only a therapist or counselor; it is the journey these children can take with all of us.
The task is to be trusted. The opportunities to enhance or diminish are mundane and innumerable. Here are four of the biggest, best practice, tried-and-true categories to consider in your work in the classroom, and as a supervisor, evaluator, and staff coach:
- Recognize every student. Stand at the door to the classroom when they walk in and offer each a hand shake, a high five, a fist bump, for the little ones a hug, for all at least a simple greeting by name and a look in the eye; e.g. “Hello, Marie.” For those students most in need of trust, set aside literally two more seconds and add a little personal touch: “I like that hat;” “Heard your team won yesterday;” “How’s your little sister?” “Glad you made it today.” For teams of teachers, track what are called “significant conversations,” making sure that one adult on the team has reached out to every at-risk student at least once a week to say more than “Hello.” Given that there are scores of adults in a school, the expectation that at least one adult is having a significant conversation with a student at least once a week is a very low thresh hold to meet–well within our capacity to accomplish, and incredibly important.
Within this category is the practice of noticing students, even when we don’t have the time or capacity to do more than that. In the same way we are mandated reporters of abuse, we can be “mandated noticers” of a student’s mood: “Dave, you look tired today.” As critical as it is for there to be adults whom students feel safe to seek out, we all can take the few seconds to quietly reflect back to an at-risk student the obvious turmoil, or joy, or confusion, or initiative they are displaying. A lot of student behavior is a way of getting us to notice (Minahan 2014), so notice them first.
- Provide think time. As often happens, teachers conclude a lecture or set of directions and say to the class, “Any questions?”, and if no one responds within literally 2 seconds, the teachers move on. What happens in the mind of traumatized students, among the many students who process slowly, in that 2 second time frame? They have to consider if they have a question–they may have several if they are confused. They have to organize their confusion (how’s that for a challenge!) into a question, and they have to scan the social conditions of the room to make sure they will not be shamed asking their question in front of everyone. All this can’t be done in 2 seconds. Our speed literally creates shut-downs, resistance, and acting out behavior. When we slow it all down, and ask our question, and quietly count to 15, we are communicating in so many ways, “This class belongs to everyone.” The first times you wait those 15 seconds may seem like an eternity, and that alone is telling proof of our need to slow down, because we can afford that small portion of time in the service of our greater mission. It is a great time to scan everyone’s faces, make eye contact and smile—and one more time communicate that you are anything but a mountain troll.
- Never shame a student. In medicine the motto is, “Above all else, do no harm.” In education it must be, “Never shame a student.” We can discipline them, correct them, coach them, and set high expectations, and we can do it without shaming them in front of their peers. When we forgot that absolute standard, every student in the class will know that they are at risk of being the recipient of the adult frustration, but students who are already traumatized (I sometimes refer to them as “post risk” because they have already been through the “at risk” stage) often have little capacity left to manage that adult power. Many traumatized students will try to disappear. Many will take few risks. Conversely, and sadly, many will behave in such a way to provoke our shaming because that is what they have become accustomed to seek in adult attention.
Think about how you as an adult would like to be treated by the principal at a staff meeting when the principal is not pleased with your performance. We would never consider it a good practice for the principal to yell at us across the room, to hold up our evaluation as an example of what not to do, to call on us when we have obviously been pre-occupied and unprepared to answer, to curtly say, “No” when we make a request.
There are many ways adults and school children have different needs, but the need to be treated respectfully in front of one’s peers transcends age. Students never forget those moments, just as we never would in a staff meeting. Instead, walk over to students to give them redirections. Sometimes just our presence walking towards them is enough to alter their behavior. Never use their peers to embarrass them; never shame them. Our most vulnerable students have little left in their savings bank of self-esteem and trust.
- Minimize your absolutes. To be trusted, predictable and organized adults, we need to reliably do what we say we will do. We need to follow our part of the classroom rules. What we should not do is have so many rules that we are either ignoring them, randomly enforcing them, or becoming handcuffed to them all day long in an endless exercise of consistency that makes our job feel like we are playing Whack-A-Mole in the arcade, scrutinizing every possible place that a rule may be broken. For instance, we shouldn’t ask students to be absolutely quiet for very long or very often, because it’s just not possible for them to hold up their end of that expectation. As a result, we end up giving some students a harsh look, others a “Shhh”, and still others get the full force of our disappointment, with all the consequences and frustration we are capable of producing.
Have a very few important rules about the most significant safety and respect needs of the class. This is as important for the traumatized quiet students as it is for the traumatized acting out students, as it is for every child who needs to feel safe in a crowded room. Follow through on those rigidly, because they are rules. Know the steps you have to take. If necessary, make sure the school administrators know their part to play.
Let everything else be a guideline. Work within the zone of proximal development of the child. Gauge the climate of the group to assess if it is a behavior that will disappear if ignored, if the students need a brief reminder, or if this is a teachable moment and the time and personalities allow for you to practice replacement skills, and perhaps make a call to home. And please do call home with good news too!
Our most troubled and troubling students will often surprise us with their reactions to the standard give-and-take of the class—you can’t have a rule to predict everything. And you shouldn’t. Respond respectfully in the moment, and resist the impulse to come up with a new rule. For a given student, you can develop a specific behavior plan and follow through; that’s not the same as making a rule that everyone has to abide by.
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Students who have emotional and mental health problems are not bad people, and they are not beyond redemption. In far too many cases, their anxiety around powerful adults is a well-earned outcome of their life experiences. By committing ourselves to being predicable, organized, reasonable, and able to listen, we teachers may represent the best hope for them to grow into their better selves. It’s hard work at times for us, and we have to hang in, often through many reiterations of the same lesson (Benson 2012). The good news is that we can establish ourselves as touchstones for all those better selves in our students, in so many ways every day, every hour.
References
- Benson, Jeffrey, Hanging In—Strategies for teaching the Students Who Challenge Us Most; ASCD 2014
- Benson, Jeffrey, “100 Repetitions”; Educational Leadership; October 2012
- Dweck, Carol; Mindset; Ballentine Books, 2006
- Minahan, Jessica, The Behavior Code Companion, Harvard Education press, 2014
- Van Der Kolk, Bessel; The Body Keeps the Score; Viking 2014
