Notes from the School Psychologist

Officer Friendly Pays a Visit

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Tue, 22 May 2012 04:34:00 +0000

Anyone who has a baby and a dog knows that solicitors, mail delivery people, and UPS drivers have a knack for coming by and ringing your doorbell juuuuuuuuust as you finally get baby down for a nap. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad we have a barky protective dog and all, but the BARK to WAAAAAAHHHH sound is one that makes mothers across the country cringe. So, imagine my disdain when I get a knock on my door at 3am the other night. Or I guess it was morning. It’s the police. He looked like this Officer Friendly guy:

Not really, I just liked this google image that came up when I typed "Officer Friendly." But I have digressed.

I had called the police at 7pm the evening before because we have had several break ins in our neighborhood recently and there were some suspicious “solicitors” who were “selling magazine subscriptions,” but they only had one crumpled up piece of paper with them and no information about any of the magazines. So, I called to report them, because they were totally shady acres characters. I didn’t want to seem paranoid, but my hubby said to call anyway. What could it hurt?

EIGHT HOURS LATER the police responded. When I opened the door, the policeman said that they got my call and asked if I had any further concerns about the suspicious activity. Um, no, I’m pretty sure they got away in the past EIGHT HOURS. A blind and crippled snail could have gotten away in that time period. The officer sheepishly apologized and said that it had been a busy night and calls are put in order of priority, and he just got around to responding to my call. Immediately, I understood why our whole family was woken up, and I empathized with the cop.

I know this scene very well as a school psychologist—having too many cases and crises to respond to, having to prioritize crises, and often having to follow illogical procedures. I am certain that his ringing my doorbell at 3am was the result of some dumb rule that he had to follow like: “You must make contact with the reporter once you respond to the call” or something. I imagine him pausing before ringing the bell thinking, “this doesn’t make sense, but here I go.” As a school psychologist, have you ever been there, having to follow a district or legal procedure that defies logic?

The one that comes to mind in the world of school psychology is the manifestation determination rule. To oversimplify it, the law is basically that if a student with an IEP commits an expulsion offense or reaches over 10 days of suspension, then a meeting must be held to see if it was caused by the student’s disability or the team's failure to implement the IEP. Sounds like a perfectly reasonable law, right? I mean on the books, it makes sense that you should make sure that you aren’t penalizing disabled students for behaviors that are a manifestation of their disability. For example, a student with an intellectual disability might not fully understand cause and effect of his or her behavior and we wouldn’t want to go around expelling kids with intellectual disabilities for things they don't really understand. However, because this law extends to ALL kids with IEPs, I have found myself engaged in the most ridiculous conversations:

Me: We are here today to determine whether the child’s reading disability caused him to carry a knife to school.

Me: The purpose of today’s meeting is to decide if Johnny setting another student on fire was directly caused by his writing disability.

Me: Thank you for coming. As an IEP team, we need to figure out if Janice cut off Janie’s ponytail because she stole her boyfriend was due to our failure to implement her behavior plan of increasing her classwork production.

Me: Yes, Mrs. Jenkins, I understand that Frank has a disability, but I am having a hard time understanding how deficits in phonological processing cause you to threaten a student with a machete sword.

The manifestation determination law just never really seems to apply to the students with learning disabilities. I am basically the sheepish cop in these situations, trying to turn a stupid rule into something productive. At these meeting, I try to quickly get the dumb paperwork out of the way, and then work on the real intervention by discussing what is needed to support the offending student. Clearly, kids who are bringing weapons and hurting others need help.

As an aside, one good thing did end up happening as a result of our 3am wake up call (besides this post, obvi)—the cops ended up apprehending the suspicious gentlemen in a nearby neighborhood the next day, and they were found with stolen property from my neighbor’s house. So I wasn’t paranoid after all. But I am still paranoid of the UPS guy coming between 1-3pm and waking up Baby B...maybe it's a sign I should stop buying developmental toys online. I mean, Baby B kind of equally loves a tupperware container or a crumpled up piece of paper over the snazzy Baby Einstein stuff anyway.

Ma-ma!

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Mon, 14 May 2012 02:19:00 +0000

This is my first Mother’s Day as a new mom! When my husband asked me what I wanted to do, I told him, “I want to sleep in.” I added, “until at least 7am.” A mom can dream, right?

I got an early Mother’s Day gift of Baby B saying “Ma-ma” for the first time the other day…in context, not as she was gnawing on a wooden spoon or something. She distinctly said, “Ma-ma” and outstretched her arms to me. And I died.

But enough about my awesome baby (for now). Unless you want to hear about her latest developmental milestones, that is. *crickets chirp* Okay fine, I’ll tell you. She is pointing! I was so excited, I told my friend, Amber yesterday:

Me: Baby B has a new trick. She is pointing to indicate interest, which shows a burgeoning theory of mind, in which she understands that I have thoughts different than hers!

Amber: Does she have a burgeoning sense that her mom is a huge nerd?

Me: Probably.

But I digress. This post is about school psychology, not my mommy diaries. Therefore, for Mother's Day, I give you the top things school psychologists need to know about motherhood:

1) Kids do waaaaaay more at home than they do in other settings. I know, this seems obvious, but before Baby B, I would sometimes raise a skeptical eyebrow when parents would describe their kid’s behavior or skills at home as much more sophisticated than what I was observing. I sometimes found it hard to believe that the shy kid in my office was Chatty McGee at home. Then, I had my own kid. Baby B can be a straight up infant blob in public, and at home, she’s pointing and imitating language and crawling around like a genius child. She also does not perform on demand when I try to get her to show her relatives her new developmental skills. She’s not anyone’s trick pony, thank you very much. As a school psychologist trying to get a little one to perform on demand, I can see why parents say, “She can do it at home though!” It’s not always a case of the parent having a halo effect on their own child. Kids do better in familiar environments.

2) The instinct to protect your child from all things unpleasant is ridiculously strong. Before Baby B, I would sometimes catch myself judging overprotective parents. I would tell parents, "We can't smooth out the ocean for our kids, we have to teach them to ride the difficult waves." Good advice, right? Sure, but I totally get it now about how hard it is not to try to make everything happy for your child. When Baby B bonks her head, when a little boy takes a swat at her on the playground, or when she is crying because she can’t reach that toy, your heart aches to make it all better right away. I have to consciously stop myself from trying to save every wonky attempt at standing, doing a peer mediation with the swatting boy, or push the toy over to her to make it easier. Doing so would prevent her from learning.

The hardest thing was teaching her to self-soothe and fall asleep on her own. Any parent who has done some form of “cry it out” knows that you have to fight every instinct you have to swoop in and soothe your baby. It reminds me of that True Blood episode when the witches put a curse on the vampires to have a strong urge to go into the sun and they have to put burning silver chains on themselves to stop themselves. Hearing your baby cry and not going to her is like emotional silver chains. Or at least it was for me. And then, after a few nights, she learned how to put herself to sleep and it’s all good. So next time you think a parent is being too fiercely overprotective, know that it is hard not to be. I mean, I don’t want to be that mom who yells at the principal because during a fire drill, her daughter went outside without any sunscreen on or anything (true story), but I’m just saying I get the inclination to overprotect.

3) Mothers get judged all the time, unless it is Mother’s Day, and being a mom is hard. We do the best we can with the tools we have. Moms are often blamed for everything. If we do attachment parenting, we are smothering. If we don’t, then we are cold and ruining our children’s attachment. Many a therapist’s couch is full of someone complaining about his or her mother. I also find that school staff are sometimes quick to blame the mother for their kid’s difficulties. Sure, there are instances where there is a parenting issue contributing to the kid’s challenges, but it is far better to support the mom than to blame. As a mom, there have been many times when I don’t know what I’m doing, and one call to another mom for support is all I need. Because the problem isn’t that there isn’t a manual for raising kids, there are TOO MANY manuals with conflicting advice. Every mom has to discover what works for them in their particular situation. As a school psychologist, I now spend more time asking questions of moms instead of prescribing "easy" solutions. Moms know their kids best and what will and will not work.

4) Moms often know what to do to, but don't have the energy because they are teaching a human how to do everything all day. Give them a break! I have a school psychologist friend who has a toddler and her partner is also a school psychologist. I remember her telling me a story of how her kiddo was fussing for something and she gave in. Her partner said, "You know you just reinforced that behavior, right?" And my friend said, "I know, but I'm tired." As school psychologists, we talk to parents about being consistent. Yep, I totally get it, but sometimes you are just tired. And that's life. There's a difference between being consistent and being rigid. Sometimes, kids miss their naps and sometimes you give in so you can go to the grocery store with a happy baby instead of a fussy one. So perhaps school psychologists should be asking "what conditions and supports need to be in place to have consistency in [insert behavior]? instead of "are you being consistent in [insert behavior]?" Being consistent is hard. Especially because your little one has such a darling face and sometimes, you give in. Babies have darling faces that makes you want to bend to their will, even when they are being tiny tyrants.

So to all the mamas out there, I hope you have a wonderful Mother's Day today! And a special shout out to my mom for all she has done for me--thank you! Also, as a special treat, if you want to die of a cute attack on this fabulous day honoring moms, just google "mama and baby animals" like I did for the picture for this post. You. Will. Die.

It’s Shameless Self Promotion Month!

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 05:44:00 +0000

I promise, there will only be 75 more posts, tweets, and Facey Face status updates about my new book, The School Psychologist’s Survival Guide. I can’t help it, I am so excited that my book baby was finally born! It took longer to make this book than it did to make my actual baby. I wish I was Oprah so I could (as one reader put it), give out a copy to everyone and yell, “EVERYONE GETS A COPY!” I would totally put them under people’s chairs at NASP if I had Oprah money. I would probably put it in a gift basket with other survival tools, such as pens, pencils, energy bars, coffee, margarita mix…oh wait, cancel that last one. Not appropriate for work.

I’m loving the feedback on the Facebook page from people who have received the book. It’s kind of like when you’re driving and you let someone in and you are doing it because you want to, but then they give you the “thanks! wave” and you feel even better about your deed. I wanted to write this book forever to help out newbies and folks on the edge of burnout, but to get the proverbial “Thanks! wave” from you all makes it even more amazing.*

I am so glad that school psychologists now have a reference book to turn to when they have burning questions such as:

• What do I do when a principal calls me and tells me there’s an emergency at my school and asks me what to do?
• How do I react when a kid balks at testing with me? (like the time a girl screamed at me, “Go away! I ain’t no *bleeeeeeeepidy bleep bleeping” special ed!”)
• How do I delicately explain to a parent that their child has Autism? A Learning Disability? Emotional Disturbance? Isn’t eligible even though she is not meeting standards?
• What do I do when a staff member “goes rogue” in an IEP meeting and disagrees with my testing?
• How do I handle a group counseling session that turns into a WWE wrestling session?
• What do I do if a kid tells me she is suicidal?
• How do I find a space to work in that is a) not a janitor’s closet full of toxic chemicals, b) an old elevator shaft, or c) shared with 8 hojillion people with no privacy?
• How do I handle the stress of the job? (Hint: It’s not eating stray donuts in the teacher’s lounge at 2pm every day. Dang it.)

These questions and more are covered in my book! It’s like having your own emergency go-to guide for the sticky situations we all encounter as school psychologists. And we all know it’s crazy season right now, trying to get everything done before the end of the school year, so couldn’t you treat yourself to a little something something off Amazon.com? Yes, I believe you could.

Also, know that proceeds for the book go to a good cause: Baby B’s preschool fund. Turns out one year of PreK is as expensive as all four years of my college education. Who knew!?! I just know you all support early childhood education, so order now!

*The BEST “Thanks! wave” of all is a review on Amazon.com. Um…erm… *shuffles feet and looks at floor* if anyone wants to write a review, I’ll be your best friend.

Madness, I Say. Madness.

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 02:59:00 +0000

Every year my husband thinks I’m going to get into March Madness basketball thingy and whatnot. Every year, I slightly glance at the TV while he is watching if one of my alma matters, UC Berkeley or University of Northern Colorado is in the tournament. I don’t care for sports, mostly because I feel badly for whichever team loses. I imagine the losers going home and crying because it’s their senior year, or the guy who misses the final shot at the buzzer goes down a shame spiral and replays the shot in his mind over and over. I guess it’s a work hazard to have too much empathy for people’s feelings sometimes.

Anyhoo, this year, husband printed up a bracket thingy for me to fill out in an effort to engage me in the tournament. I decided I would make my picks based on which mascot would win in a fight. As a former cheerleader in high school and college, I was subjected to hours of long boring games in between our fabulous performances. I often entertained myself by focusing on the mascots. My favorite mascot moment was in high school, when our Bear did a trampoline jump in order to dunk a basketball and his head flew off. Awesome.

So it appears as if I finally found a way to make March Madness interesting to me! Husband was trying to go to bed last night and I was all, “Honey, do you think a Longhorn or a Gator would win in a fight? Honey? Wake up. A longhorn could stab a gator with his long horns, but gators are sneaky and fast. What do you think?”* Suddenly, I have March Madness! I’m 1 for 2 right now, because I correctly picked that a Cougar would beat a whatever this guy is:

So how do we, as educators, engage kids in a similar way—finding something they are interested in and tapping into it to engage them in something they are not interested in? As school psychologists, we are typically at the front line of working with disengaged students, right? I find that when I have Sulky McGee in my office, I have to find that spark—that connection—on which we can build our rapport. I have to say (reluctantly) that it does help to have some basic sports knowledge sometimes. “How ‘bout those [insert local sports team]?” works with a lot of kiddos.

I also find that once I’ve found a connection with a kiddo, we end up using the topic as a metaphor for their school or social difficulties. With a kid who loved tennis, we discussed what is “in bounds” and what is “out of bounds” when it came to disagreeing with a teacher. With a basketball player, we talked about how you miss 100% of the shots you never take as a lesson on risk taking. And for a kid who liked aggressive video games, we talked about how you “use up your energy” fighting others, and sometimes it’s better to “go around” the guy to get to your goal.

I have seen skilled teachers engage kids in similar ways—they find their “thing” and work it into their lessons. I find that the strategy of “tapping into student’s interests” is one of those things that is easy to say and much harder to do without a lot of planning. Teachers may wonder, "How do I make quadratic equations relevant to a kid who just broke up with her boyfriend? How can a student in crisis possibly personally relate to the plight of the Pilgrams 400 years ago? Can we really make the Canterbury Tales something meaningful for the Facebook generation?" Yes! Yes! Yes! Hey, maybe each kid can make a mock Facebook page for each of the characters in Canterbury Tales and write what they would say, what groups they would join, and who they would be friends with or something. To reach a disengaged student, you often have to get creative.

Hey, if I can get into sports, then anything is possible.

What else have you seen teachers to do incorporate student interests and increase engagement? Have my fellow school psychologists been able to turn a kid's interest into an analogy about how to deal with challenges? You all know I love me some teachable moments and analogies, so share!

Also, if you must, you can also share who will win March Madness 2012. You can use my mascot decision tree strategy if you want. And good luck deciding if a Bearcat or a Wildcat would win in a fight.

*By the way, by my logic, Florida State Gators are going to win it all. I saw this special on how Alligators have basically been around since the dinosaur age, so they have some mad survival skills. I also remember them saying they can run pretty fast AND climb trees, which is unsettling because I always thought I could run to a nearby tree and climb it if I encountered a hungry gator.

This Is My Confession*

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 02:05:00 +0000

I have a confession. I have been writing for another. I didn’t mean to cheat on you, blog, it’s just that…just that…well, I met someone else. Her name is Jossey. Jossey Bass Publisher. That’s why I haven’t been around much this past year. Just know I was going down a shame spiral when I realized it had been weeks between posts and I was staying up late writing for Jossey. Of course, there was also that business of me not posting as much as normal because I was tired from making a person too...

You know you are my first writing love, blog. You will forgive me in a hot second though. I have exciting news that justifies my shameful lack of posting the last year…wait for it…wait for it…presenting…

The School Psychologist’s Survival Guide!

Oh snap! Finally! There’s a guide for school psychologists that is practical, time-saving, and useful! This isn’t the run of the mill “What is School Psychology?” textbook from graduate school, but a resource guide for surviving in the chaos of the job once you actually get in the field. Newbies will love the advice and time saving tips. School psychologists who have been around a while will get fresh ideas and strategies to continue doing their jobs without going crazy themselves! Think you're going to tear your hair out the next time you get an inappropriate referral? Do you want to poke your own eyes out if you have to write another psychoeducational report on the weekend? Fret no more! There is help in this guide. And of course, it is written with juuuuuuuust a splash of snark to keep it spicy and entertaining. Snarky? Moi?

The guide covers many different topics, including:

• Finding where you belong in the schools and successfully navigating your role
• Dealing with “Bureaucracy Monsters” that ruin your work flow
• Organizing and being strategic about your assessment caseload
• Tuning up your skills in individual, group, and crisis counseling
• How to be preventive when you have no time
• How to navigate changing policies around Response to Intervention
• How to deal with people with…uh…erm…“challenging” personalities
• Preventing burnout and increasing job satisfaction

There are time-saving reproducible worksheets, letters, spreadsheets, and organizational tools that are ready for you to Xerox and use tomorrow. Be still my nerdy heart!

I am SO excited to share this resource with you all and I hope you will find it useful as you start out in the profession or revive and improve your practice as a school psychologist. Know that this survival guide was a true labor of love for me to write**, and it was inspired by all of you readers with your great questions, comments, and posts on the Facey Face page for the blog.

You can pre-order it off of Amazon.com by clicking here. If you pre-order, I believe you get a better price. The book will arrive right in time for the spring freak-out when everyone refers kids to you and you can’t imagine how you will do all your work without going cuckoopants. Hey, maybe the book will even come on your spring break, and you can relax on the beach with it? Erm, maybe it’s not exactly a beach read, but you get the idea.

Now I can relax and not feel guilty about my lack of posting on the blog, right? I mean, you guys can now have hundreds of pages of school psychology fun at your fingertips! Wheeeeeee!

I sincerely hope you like mama's other baby!

*For those of you who read “This is my confession” to the tune of R. Kelly’s remix “Confessions” you get extra points.

**Labor indeed. This book and my baby were both due in August. I spent my final weeks of pregnancy frantically trying to finish edits while Baby B kicked (punched?) my gut. She was really helpful in the motivation department, giving me a kick start when I needed it. Get it? Kick start? Oh, nevermind.

My Titanic FAIL.

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 20:54:00 +0000

I have been noticing advertisements lately for a new 3-D version of the movie, Titanic. I don’t know about you all, but when I saw that movie in regular-D, it freaked me out and strengthened my vow to never go on a boat again. In 3D? Shudder. I know what you’re thinking. How can this woman possibly make an analogy or poignant comment on today’s yoots or school psychology by discussing the Titanic? Well, I cannot. But I can share with you my most epic fail in working with students with disabilities from early in my career.

I often get emails from young, perky students who are eager to be school psychologists someday. They ask, “what kind of experience do I need to be a good candidate for grad school?” The better question, I think, is, “what kind of experience do I need to know this job is for me?” It’s not for everyone. I remember being a bit stunned in my grad school program when a few fellow classmates in my school psych classes admitted that after the first year of practicum, they’d rather do research on education than work with kids. They transferred to the research-side of the building. Now, I love me some research, but I love me some kiddos much more. Shocking they didn't think about whether or not they liked working with kids before signing on to a school psych program, right?

I think the best experience I had to prepare me for the job of being a school psychologist was working in group homes during summers in college. I have worked in group homes for students with developmental disabilities and students with emotional disturbance, and after basically living with these kids for a few summers in college, I knew I could handle any kid (or flying object) heading my way. I found myself learning the on-the-job skills that are not taught in any course: how to get a kid with autism off the roof, how to handle a kid twice your height having a seizure in the middle of the street, how to keep a kid from trying to kill herself or run away, and how to anticipate when a large object is going to be thrown in protest. I would come home after days at the group home and lament on how I had actually used phrases like, “Jeffrey, put down the stove.”

Anyhoo, back to The Titanic. One day, while working at the group home for students with developmental disabilities, I decided to take 5 teenagers to see a movie. Movies were always a good way to kill a few hours on a hot, summer day. The kids were typically happy at the movies. So I picked the longest movie on the planet. I would surely get 3 ½ hours of happy time if we went to The Titanic. It turns out, 3 ½ hours is way too long. To make matters worse, I had an “aide” with me, who had autism. Sure, she was high functioning, but she wasn’t the best person to help when chaos ensued. She had a “thing” about countries, and she had memorized every country and their flag, capitol, and main exports and such, and every time she saw a reference to a country she would scream out the name of the country. I don’t know if you remember, but there were a lot of immigrants on the Titanic. IRELAND! AMERICA! ENGLAND!

About halfway through the movie, the kids were getting restless. I saw one kid’s glasses fly across the screen, because another kid had an obsession about throwing glasses. I fumbled for them in the dark and found 148 old pieces of popcorn and 276 old jujubes as well. Gross. Then, another kid began to masturbate. After a fruitless attempt to tell him “that is for private time” I gave up. We got to the most dramatic point in the movie—[spoiler alert for those who lived under a rock in 1997] Jack is holding on to a piece of wreckage and Rose says, “I’ll never let go, Jack! I promise,” and as I am tearing up at the moment, and I look over to the aisle to see a kid taking his pants off and then running out of the theatre. I quickly grab the other kids and get everyone back in the van to go home.

I never got to see the ending of the movie. Do Rose and Jack end up together? I guess I will have to go see the 3D version to find out. And I will go alone with my box of Kleenex, thank you very much. I learned my lesson. I suppose the bigger lesson is that when you work with the most severe needs students early in your career, you have confidence that you can handle any kid that comes into your office after that. It also gives you empathy for all those special education teachers out there working with students with disabilities all day long. If I couldn't get 5 kids to watch a movie, I shudder to think if I had to teach them to read, write and do math. Here's to special education teachers!

I Need More than Inspirational Poster of Woman Scaling a Mountain.

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 05:34:00 +0000

As many of you know, I recently made a person. One of the things that I didn’t expect about pregnancy is that even after having a baby, I would still look pregnant for many months. I thought that maybe after 3 months post-partum, I’d be back to my normal shape. Ooooohhhhh no. When Baby B was 3 months old, I decided it was time to do something about it. I was determined. I took the advice of this mommy in my mommies group to try out The Dailey Method. For those of you not familiar, it is basically a core focused class that seemed to me to be like if pilates and ballet had a baby. Women I know have sworn it is the best workout on the planet. So I decided to try it out. I was fairly confident I could handle it, as I worked out my entire pregnancy, 3 days a week, before work. I know! Ridiculous.

I arrived to find my mommy group friend had picked the same class to attend. Hurrah! We would be fit yummy mummies together! The instructor was a perky lady with perfect hair and she welcomed me to the class. I mentioned it was my first workout after having my baby and she exclaimed gleefully, “Ooh! I just had a baby too!” This women looked like a fitness model, so I figured she had a baby a while ago. Turns out our babies were the same age. I hated her. But then again, maybe it was a good sign that she had rock hard abs already. It did make me feel like a 400 lb Schlumpelufagus though. And as I looked around the room, it seemed like I was the only one who wasn’t modeling professionally for Lululemon athletic wear.

Anyhoo, needless to say, the class was a disaster. Everyone knew what they were doing and I was desperately trying to keep up. The instructor just kept yelling out things I didn’t know how to do or could no longer do—“Tip your hips! Tips your hips! Bend! Squeeze! Lift!” I ended up doing this awkward thrusting gyrating movement in an effort to tip my hips. It was not cute. There were no modifications for someone with a jelly core. I peered over at my mommy friend, sure I would find a kindred Schlumpelufagus, and the woman was doing the full splits like it wasn’t hard at all. I started to tear up a little. I couldn’t do anything right. I felt everyone was pitying me. The instructor was moving so fast, I couldn’t get any help. It was the longest class of my life.

After the class, the instructor said, “You did such a good job!” and I felt like she was lying to me. She asked how it was for me and I welled up with tears. I sniffled, “I feel weak—physically and mentally--like a weak person.” I told her I couldn’t keep up and didn’t know how to do what she was asking. It was too fast paced. She was genuinely surprised. Then, I was annoyed at her. How could she not see me floundering around like a dying fish on the floor for an hour? I left. I got an email later with an apology that I had a bad experience, offering me a free class to try again. That was 3 months ago and I haven’t stepped foot in that place again.

I can totally see why some kids with learning difficulties give up easily. It is so hard to be the one left behind, the one who doesn’t get it, the one who feels dumb for not getting it. And it's not like my success in life depends on fitting in my pre-preggers jeans, whereas learning to read is pretty fundamental. As a school psychologist, I give the persistence speech all the time. I always say that the brain is like a muscle and you have to keep working it! I tell kids a mixture of mistakes and success is how you learn! And with older kids, I tell them the research on persistence and grit—that it may be a better predictor of success and high grades than IQ scores. Persistence is, after all, one of the “success attributes” for students with disabilities. However, after my experience, which is a fraction of the cumulative effects of struggling to learn, I wonder now if I should start with empathy about how hard it must be and THEN moved to the persistence speech.

So I’m thinking that I should walk the walk, show persistence, and get my jelly core back to the class. I have been slowly working on my core in the privacy of my own home (Baby B and I both do Tummy Time together—she works on pushing up and I do push ups. Then we both face plant on the floor and cry). I’m feeling a little stronger physically. It will just take the mental strength to go back to the place of shame, where I cried in public because I didn’t know how to tip my hips and was too weak to participate in most of the moves. It would just be so much easier to avoid it. If only I had a school psychologist I could go to, who could encourage me to persevere. She would tell me I will get better with each class. And maybe, just maybe, she would tell me this with a backdrop of a poster of a woman climbing a mountain or something inspirational, and I would believe her.

Every Child is my Baby.

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 17:41:00 +0000

To say motherhood changes you is a huge cliché, but it’s also true. I think of my life before Baby B as “B.C.—Before Children.” It’s a whole different world now. B.C., I promised myself I would never tell boring stories about my daughter. And yet the other day, I was telling my BFF that I was glad it was getting chilly outside because Baby B got to wear her new beret. I can’t help it; everything about my baby is interesting to me (and she looked smashing in her beret, by the way). Clearly, there are major physical changes in motherhood as well (my kingdom to fit back into pre-preggers jeans!). But there is another change that I didn't really anticipate, and that is my mindset about parenting.

To be honest, B.C., I always felt a little like a fraud dolling out parenting advice as a school psychologist, without being a parent myself. I was a fairly knowledgeable “fraud,” to be fair. I held parent nights where I’d give sound tips for parenting. I’d freely advise parents in meetings what to do. I even did an interview for Parents Magazine. I reasoned that my advice was actually superior to advice of a school psychologist with a child, because mine was completely objective. I never made my advice for kids about what worked for me or for my own child. I gave just the facts and research. So in this way, maybe not having kids was an asset in my job (not to mention the fact that B.C., I had waaaaay more energy and time to give to my job).*

Now that I’m a parent, I am very aware that there is a danger that I will project my personal parenting experience onto other parents. At one of my schools, there was a support staff member who had a child with ADHD and eeeeeeevery child she saw she thought had ADHD. She saw ADHD lurking under every rock, so to speak. She always recommended the same things that she did for her child to every family. I could have predicted what was coming out of her mouth before she said it at every meeting, because it was always really about her child. Worse yet, she was always recommending unproven, unresearched treatments. She meant well, but she didn’t understand the importance of keeping the focus on the child we were all talking about. Sure, you might have some personal experience in parenting that could be useful, but you gotta keep it in check.

Even in my pregnancy, I knew that being a mother would change my outlook on my job. When I was taking developmental histories, I had a renewed excitement for learning about the pregnancy and early years of the children I was working with. I found myself wanting to know more and more (“Um, tell me again about how you got your child to be a good sleeper?”). I was filing away experiences parents had with possible future scenarios I might encounter. And I thought I could detect that parents were a bit more open about sharing. Maybe my giant belly gave me some street cred?

Now that I have Baby B, I definitely see the world differently, as a psychologist. When I see a child with autism wring his hands, they become my daughter’s hands, and I wonder what its like for the parent to see their child this way. When a parent tells me their child is being teased, I flash to what it would be like to have Baby B to come home and cry because she was teased. Every child is now my baby, on some level. And I know I have more empathy and understanding with parents because we have shared the experience of looking down at a little darling all your own and wanting the absolute best for him or her.

I realize this may come off as me saying that psychologists without kids can’t fully understand the business of parenting. If someone had said that to me before I had kids, I would have been annoyed at him or her. It’s like someone smirking and patting you on the head and saying, “you’ll understand when you’re older.” That’s not what I’m saying; I think I was a fab psychologist before I had kids, I just think I may become a better psychologist now that I’m a mother.**

And since I am loving my new role as a mom and psychologist with parenting street cred, I am on a kick to get all my 30-something educator friends to have babies too. A few weeks ago, I brought Baby B to my Elementary School and told a teacher colleague she should get a baby because they’re so awesome (showing Exhibit B, wearing baby leg warmers and beret). My colleague mused that she was worried she wouldn’t have enough love and energy for both her students and children. Au contraire!*** Having a kid makes your love for students deeper. In my mind, every child is now someone’s baby. Sure, that “baby” may be getting in trouble or making bad decisions, but it makes you more empathetic toward the parents, who are often doing their best with the tools they have.

As a psychologist, I always intellectually understood a parent’s love for a child, but now I can feel it too. It’s an amazing, indescribable feeling. And I truly believe that the experience of motherhood will continue to make me a better psychologist. Now if we can just do something about fitting back into those pre-pregnancy jeans...

*Why do people say, “not to mention…” and then go ahead and mention it? Discuss amongst yourselves.
**Toot! Toot! What’s that? My own horn.
***That is what Baby B said in her head, while wearing beret.

Best of 2011!

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 04:40:00 +0000

It's time for the Year in Review post!

Needless to say, 2011 was a big year for me (and I mean that literally and metaphorically--I was a huge pregnant person for most of the year.) Towards the end of my pregnancy, I was getting that look from people. I know they were thinking: "Should she be out in public? Shouldn't she be in a hospital right now?!?" I know they were thinking that. But in the end, I got a perfect little baby girl, so it was all worth it. I have my very own developmental psychology project (n=1). Really, having a baby is easier than being a school psychologist. Caseload of 1, anyone? In my job, I was pulled in 8 hojillion directions to work with hundreds of students. Now I can focus on just one. It's a dream come true. Oh, and in case anyone is tracking her development, she is not only reaching for desired objects, but trying to move to get them (in 2 out of 5 trials as measured by mama charted records). Just kidding not really.

Once again, my love of writing about Baby B has distracted me from the real point of the post. I love writing the year in review post because I get to reflect on the year in the life of a school psychologist. Only this year, I also got to reflect on how I was too tired to write a lot of posts because I was busy making a person. I always thought about great posts and then I thought a post-work nap would be a better choice for a tired pregnant lady. I reasoned that I would not get many chances to nap at will once the baby was born. I was correct.

So without further ado, here are the best posts of the year (as measured by a weak measure of number of comments). New Year's Ressie for 2012 is to figure out how to read my analytics on feedburner to find the most read posts. That is if I'm not too tired from raising a small person...

January: My musings on the shooting in Tuscon. Not exactly an inspirational post, but isn't it interesting that the media has totally abandoned coverage of mental health issues since then? Now it's just cut cut cut mental health services from schools like nothing happened. Boo.

February: Default winner since I only wrote one post is the one in which I get spit on and then blamed for it by the police. My extreme reaction actually may make more sense now that you know I was pregnant during this episode and was a bit emotional...

March: A classic one in which I dance with a tiger mom.

April: A post about how kids should be like DIY projects.

May: The most commented on post of the year, probably because it was the most controversial. A post about who is best equipped to assess for ADHD

June: Yeah, June was weak. I only wrote one post because I was hot and fat (pregnant). A post on not posting.

July: Here was a post on my dogs, but not really. A post on Banning the L word from kids' vocabularies.

August: It was a tie between a post on my battle with mindfulness and my love of working with students with oppositional behavior.

September: My Labor Day Confession about why I didn't go back to work in the fall. Hint: 9 lbs, 1 oz. Seriously. I told you I was huge. My family is full of small women who make huge babies. It was genes, not ice cream! Sort of.

October: Here was a post on how Halloween messes up assessments.

November/December: Actually, the most commented on post was a contest that required one to make a comment, so I'm gonna go with my favorite instead on Baby Leg Warmers.

There you have it! Here's hoping that 2012 is full of informative, provocative, and useful blog posts. In related news: here's hoping that in 2012 Baby B becomes a longer napper...

SPAW! SPAW!

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 17:18:00 +0000

I hope you all read the title "SPAW! SPAW!" to the sound effect of a large predatory bird cawing. No? Well I did in my head. SPAW stands for School Psychology Awareness Week, in case anyone was wondering. So, how was your SPAW? I spent mine on maternity leave, making informal Individual Education Plan goals for my baby daughter in my head, as in: "Baby B will reach for a desired object on 4 out of 5 trials as measured by mommy charted records."

Since I was not at work this year for SPAW, I thought I'd do a little recycling for those who haven't been with the blog since 2007, but are too daunted by the hojillion posts to go searching for what the days of a school psychologist are like. Here's a hint: never the same. You never know what will present itself when you walk in your school doors, and chances are, your plans for the day go out the window within the first hour or so. It's what I like about our profession--never a dull moment. So here are some oldies, but goodies, about the day in the life of...moi.

A typical day, full of children trying to run away from me and foreign objects being thrown.

Another day, another quest for a pen and additional time to do my job.

Three days smooshed into one, full of cold pricklies (guns and whatnot) and warm fuzzies (kids making real changes).

Top 10 things I do as a school psychologist

Fuzzy math: why we never have time to do our job

Somebody, hug me. I hate when advocates get unnecessarily saucy in meetings.

And to spice it up with something new, here is a sample of how your friends at the NFtSP Blog Facey Face page spent their SPAW:

Teaching social skills, counseling, and behavior plans.
Sat on teams for inclusion, Positive Behavior Intervention System (PBIS), and "yellow zone" behavior interventions.
Provided parents with the information that they need to ensure that their child receives accommodations when writing SAT and other necessary exams, and when attending post-secondary school.
Giving a questionnaire to fifth graders to assess for the prevalence of bullying at their school.
In my current job I rarely ever test anymore. This week I was schooled on the most effective way to steal cars. (I work in a juvenile jail)
Implementing check-in/check-out program for the district! Oh, and in Response to Intervention (RtI) meetings out the wazoo.
Started a group for 5th grade girls targeting current relational aggression issues
I spent 5 hours of my day today in a student crisis situation...
Created a "Manners Jeopardy" game for our middle school counseling groups... in light of thanksgiving coming up. Doesn't hurt to remind 7th and 8th graders about table manners, conversation manners, etc!
I had a rather humorous counseling session, followed up with the student showing me his sticker chart for good behavior later in the day.
Helped a life skills student conquer his bus phobia with a get on the bus, get off the bus, ride laps around the parking lot with a very patient bus driver yesterday. The kiddo took a mass transit bus to a field trip today and the school bus back.
I attended a full day of training on the iPad. We just got them to use to administer AIMSweb probes to our elementary students (and to have a little fun with!)
Helped a first grade classroom teacher plan a re-entry plan for a student with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) returning to school from a partial hospitalization program
Prepared for and led a middle school team meeting to prepare for the admission of a student with autism and is non-verbal moving to our district from a foreign country at the end of the month. I had requested translated reports and video of the student in his current educational setting from his parents and shared all this with the group today. I told them they were going to do amazing things with this student, who to this point, has not received much in the way of meaningful instruction. And I meant it! They are pumped!
RtI meetings, threat assessment, behavior plans
Wrote 2 behavior plans, manned a school-wide community service project, and managed data and made decisions about students on our Check-in, Check-out Tier II PBIS program.
I have the Michael Franti "Be a Learner" song from third grade Second Step stuck in my head after doing the same lesson in three classrooms. It's catchy!
Provided Grief/Crisis Counseling Support and drove a parent to visit a program for their child.

See, we are more than just testing and IEP machines! Spread the news!

Oh, and in case you were wondering, Baby B is at 80% mastery on her IEP goal, as she reached for her Whoozit toy four times today. Genius child.

You Are All Winners. But Only One Gets A Prize.

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 18:35:00 +0000

Last week, I ran a contest to win this fabulous classroom observation app for the iPad. Using a random number generator, the winner is... "JFValerie"! So if you are JFValerie, send me your email at rebecca(at)studentsgrow(dotcom).

Thanks to everyone who participated...I loved reading about your best classroom observation moments! Hope you all are having a fabulous SPAW (School Psychology Awareness Week)!

Little.

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 18:14:00 +0000

I warned you guys that since I’m on maternity leave, posts were going to be a bit baby-o-centric. Today’s post is about baby laundry. But not really.

They say to nap when the baby naps. But I see her naps as my only opportunity to get the laundry done and eat with TWO hands. I am getting rather babydexterous in that department, but it’s just more fun to eat without holding a baby. Today, I was folding the baby laundry when it was done, and I just love how little everything is. Little baby socks! Little baby leg warmers!** Little t-shirt! I die. I love all things little. People are always telling me to enjoy my baby because they grow up so fast. No problem! Do you see that little face? I'm soaking it up all the time. It is true that they grow so fast though. I was initially bummed out when she grew out of her bassinet, but then I got to put her in her crib and voila! she looked super little again. Yes!

My friends know about my love of little. When I moved to Cali with one of my best friends, she was in charge of stopping me from buying little things for the apartment, like mini-spatulas and itty bitty useless cookware. Whenever I showed her such things in the store, she would make me answer the question, “Are you buying that because you need it or because it is little?” Most times, it was because it was little. And little is cute. I would say, "Gah! Fooled by the little again!" and put it back.

This is why it is surprising that for most of my career as a school psychologist, I have worked with middle and high school students. They are decidedly not little, and let’s be honest, not so cute. One would think I’d be a preschool assessor with my preference for little. But there is something awesome about working with the adolescents, even if they can be rude or standoffish.*

I wrote a series on middle school students when I first started my blog. As a sidebar, I think my writing has evolved from then. I used to be super researchy and informative. Now I’m trying desperately to connect baby leg warmers** to school psychology. Anyhoo, my point (I have one, I’m just sleep deprived and it takes me a while now) is that I think people are much less forgiving of adolescents’ developmental mistakes than younger students’ mistakes, because younger students are still cute and little. It is kind of cute when a Kindergartener uses faulty logic to explain their actions, and not so cute when a 13 year old does it.

I find that as a school psychologist, while teens are not little and cute on the outside, when I am working with them one-on-one, I find the cute on the inside. So many times, adolescents have presented as hardened and aloof, and then when I get to know them, they surprise me with saying funny things or sharing a the softer side of Sears (e.g. A 10th grader dressed like a thug sharing he loves poetry, or an 8th grade girl who initially acted snotty to me admitting she wants to be a vet because she loves fuzzy animals). You have to look for the cute in teens, it’s not in your face.

Please remind me of this when Baby B is an adolescent and makes mistakes that are not cute. I have a feeling though that even when she is 16, I will still secretly think of her as my cute little girl, even though she will have long grown out the baby leg warmers.**

*One of my friends teaches 7th grade, and she told me once, “I can’t help it. I love teaching the little bastards. I don't know why.” I wouldn’t have put it in those terms, but I agree that I too love adolescents’ sauciness.

**Baby leg warmers. I die.

Go On, Win Yerself Something Purdy.

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 18:49:00 +0000

I love getting emails from readers, especially when they offer something pretty for my readers. I tend to not pimp out things to buy on my blog, unless it is shamelessly something I wrote, of course. But in this case, you get something freeeeeeeeee and who doesn't like free? You guys don't have to pay $29.99, I give it to you for FREE99.

Enough hooplah. Enter my contest and win an app for tracking behavior during classroom observations! Some momtrepreneurs/school psychs in my home state of Colorado developed this app and wanted to share it with all y'all:
The Behavior Lens app. The app has four observation types: Interval Recording, Duration, Frequency, and ABC. The look and design is very sleek and sophisticated, yet extremely intuitive and easy to use. The best part is that it automatically generates graphs from your data which can be easily shared with parents and teachers through email or attaching them to documents.

Now, of course you have to be fancy and have an iPad to use it. I am still sans iPad, and I do think people kind of rub it in my face when their emails end with "Sent from my iPad," but who am I not to share the iPad app love?

So how do you enter the contest? You can enter in one of three ways (or all three!)

1) Write a comment at the end of the post telling a story about the craziest or most inspiring thing you have ever observed in a classroom (don't use names or identifying info, please!)

2) Pick your favorite post on NFtSP about behavior and share it on Facey Face or Twitter. Use the button at the end of the post. Be sure to tag @Notes from the School Psychologist Blog (Facebook) or @studentsgrow (Twitter) so I will be able to see who re-posted it.

3) If you aren't already a fan of the blog on Facey Face or Twitter, sign up and then return here and post a comment that you are signed up.

I will then put your names in a numbered list and use a random number generator to pick the winner. I will announce the winner of the app on the blog. The app is valued at $29.99 so go forth and enter! Or...is it actually priceless because you get to show a fancy graph on your iPad at IEP meetings? So jealous.

My Favorite Halloween Game.

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 16:25:00 +0000

I have this game I play whenever I’m testing students around Halloween. It’s called “Halloween or Emotional Disturbance?”* Around this time of year, when I ask students to draw for me, I often get some pretty disturbing stuff—zombies eating people, ghosts, headless horsemen—and it begs the question, “Is the child emotionally disturbed or just thinking about Halloween?” I was reminded of this problem in assessment when a friend of mine posted this picture on her Facebook and asked, “Should I be concerned?!?”

She of course was not concerned because she knew her little treasure was going to be a vampire for Halloween. Yes, yes, that makes a difference in context. Now if her kiddo made that drawing on a random Tuesday in March, it would be a different story, no?

I have a memorable assessment from last Halloween time to illustrate the point…I was walking this kiddo to the testing room, when I spotted a huge spider web and a spider was chilling in the middle. I am not a huge spider fan, but I do anthropomorphize every spider into being that nice spider from Charlotte’s Web, so I said, “Oh look! That spider made us a web for Halloween!” The child turned to look at the spider’s web and then started spitting on the spider, yelling “Die! Die! Die you mother*#(%#@!” Whoa. I did not see that coming. Later, when I asked him to draw a picture of a person, he drew a vampire with a machine gun, blasting all the spiders in the world. Soooooo, you’re not a fan of spiders, eh?

Kids’ drawings are awesome. They are one of my favorite parts of the assessment process. Aside from the comorbidity of creepy drawings and Halloween, drawings can reveal a lot about our students. I especially love the Kinetic School Drawing, which is basically a way to see how the kid feels about school. You just ask them to draw a picture of themselves at school at any time of day and see what they come up with. I wish I had kept this drawing of this 10th grade student I was assessing for ADHD (who later cornered me on the streets of SF with his pack of friends yelling, “Hey, that’s the lady that put me in special ed! Thanks lady, special ed is way easier!”). His drawing was a cartoon-style sequence of him getting in trouble (“Here’s where my pencil accidently flies out the window, then here is me getting kicked out, and here’s me going down the stairs to the dean’s office, and here’s the dean saying to get a pass, and here’s me going back up the stairs, and here’s the teacher saying I can’t go back to class without a pass, and here’s me going back to the dean’s office…”).

Another kiddo who I was assessing for Asperger’s syndrome drew the most literal interpretation of the drawing I’ve ever seen. He started drawing every facet of the school building, including the irrigation system out front. When I asked him to draw a picture of himself in the drawing, as if I had a camera and took a picture of him at school, he drew a picture of me jumping out of a locker with a camera, taking his picture. HA! I love it.

My absolute favorite drawing was actually of me (not a Me-Monster story, I promise). The kid was 6 years old and in a school for students with emotional disturbance. The kid hated testing so much, it was torture to get anything done. After daaaaaays of trying to get something out of the guy, I finally asked him to draw a picture and tell me a story. He drew this monsterously fat and ugly person and said, “This is Dr. Fat, no I mean, Dr. B. She was a horrible fat person who made kids do stuff. She has a timer and her pencils and a monster ate her.” Soooooo, how do you feel about testing, little buddy?

So, as you go forth and test students on Monday on Halloween, look out for ghosts, goblins, spiders, and creepy drawings! You might also want to look out for REDRUM as the answer on a spelling test. Now that's a scary reversal...

*My friends and I also played a related game around Halloween when we were in grad school at Berkeley called “Normal dress or Halloween costume?” So, when a cloaked man entered the “Games of Berkeley” store, was he normally dressed for his fantasy board game club, or was it a Halloween costume? Is that a hippie costume or an actual hippie?

Bullied.

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 20:48:00 +0000

I just received a threatening email from Amazon Kindle. They (the royal “they”) said they noticed I hadn’t posted in over 30 days and they threatened to cancel my Kindle account where people can subscribe to my blog. Apparently customers want to read posts. Humph! Don’t they know that I am trying to raise a tiny person? I’m kind of busy. But I do suppose it is time to get back on the blogging wagon, and it is Bullying Prevention Month, so ironically, I’ve been bullied back on the blogging scene.* And yes, I realize there are only 4 days left of Bullying Prevention Month. For anyone who thinks “I can always work from home when the baby sleeps!” I laugh in your naïve face. I said that before I had a baby and I laugh at my own naïve pre-baby face. But I digress...

I am glad that bullying is becoming an issue that educators are taking on. I endorse prevention programs and intervening early when bullying behavior is discovered. I especially like how school psychologists can take on a preventive role in the creation of a positive school climate. A recent poll of the fabulous folks on my Facey Face page showed that school psychologists are active and involved in the prevention of bullying. A few resources they shared for you to check out:

• National Bullying Prevention Center
• Cruel’s Not Cool
• Teaching Tolerance Website
• Second Step Social Emotional Skills Program

I find that my role in the schools when it comes to bullying prevention actually sadly tends not to be in the prevention area, but in the psychological cleanup and intervention area. I have the distraught student in my office, who finally admits she is sad because she is relentlessly teased. I get the iChats emailed to me by parents to prove their child is being cyber bullied. I get the middle of the night emails from parents worrying their child is being bullied, and requesting a meeting. I get bombarded in the mornings before school starts to talk about bullying. And yes, I even got a parent showing me her secret iPhone video of her daughter being excluded on the playground. It seems like the bullying awareness campaigns at my schools are working.

I am glad that bullying is no longer being written off as a developmentally appropriate “kids can be cruel, what are you going to do?” kind of thing. The problem is, we have gotten so good at raising awareness, but we really haven’t taught the students (or adults for that matter) what to do once we see bullying behavior. By the way, I usually use the term “bullying behavior” instead of “bully” because bullying dynamics are really complex. I have seen kids be the "victim" one day and the "bully" the next.

Addressing bullying on the individual level is hard, especially since much of the behavior is hidden or underground, and there is typically a “he-said she-said” quality to the conflict. How we respond to bullying behavior is really important. While we can’t ignore it, we also can’t jump in and try to solve all of kids’ interpersonal problems for them. Sometimes, when we intervene, we even give lame advice (see: My Words Taste Yucky, by yours truly).

We also need to be careful not to see “bullying” under every single interpersonal conflict. In some of my schools, it has become a catchall for all negative peer interactions. Unfriendly look in the hall? Parent meeting about relational aggression. Child not invited to play tetherball? Request for anti-bullying intervention. During fantasy play, one child pretends to kill off another child’s unicorn? Two hour meeting with parents and students.**

Please don’t get it twisted. I’m not saying to ignore bullying behavior. Chances are, if its reached the level of involving you as a school psychologist, it’s serious, or at least the subjective experience for the student is that it's serious. As school psychologists, we must treat each incident brought to our attention as “bullying” seriously, but also not jump in when it’s not necessary. The problem is, it is hard to tell in advance how serious an incident is. One incident could be the tip of the unicorn’s horn, or it could just be kids playing make believe and having normal conflict. I remember one kid who reported to his teacher that he was being bullied and was scared and she wrote it off as him being “sensitive” and then the next day another student brought a knife to school and threatened him in the bathroom.

So while we can’t jump to intervene at every peer conflict, we should listen to kids when they report bullying behavior. It’s a unspoken challenge for school psychologists to decide what requires individual intervention. That is why I'm a huge fan of prevention programs that teach actual skills to kids, rather than waiting until there is a school culture of bullying behavior that requires a ton of individual intervention.

Now, the real truth about how I feel about bullying will come out, from a new mom’s perspective. If Baby B grows up and someone is mean to her, I like to think I would gently coach her to deal with peer conflicts, and only intervene if necessary, like I do with my students. I like to think I would calmly alert the school to the incident and trust them to handle it. But it’s equally possible that I might just do the same thing as the parents I work with and flip out and call an emergency meeting. I might even turn all Mama Bear protective and demand a school-wide anti-bullying intervention, I don’t know. I just know that when I look at my baby girl, I want to protect her from all things mean. It’s unrealistic, but it’s totally different when you are the parent. This may be the beginning of a series of posts entitled: “Things I recommend to parents as a school psychologist that would be way harder if it were my own child.” I think I’ve figured out a way to be a secret mommy blogger with that series of posts…

*By the way, it takes every fiber of my being not to turn into a mommy blogger. I mean, who doesn’t want to hear about Baby B’s latest developmental milestones? Posts about her visually tracking objects and crossing midline, orienting toward sound, and reaching for objects have broad appeal, right?

**I am not making this up. Happened to a school psych friend of mine. I asked him if his advice was to teach the other kid to make believe their unicorn had a protection spell from all harm. It wasn’t. It should have been.

“Labor” Day Confession—Why I Didn’t Go Back to School This Year

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 01:16:00 +0000

I have a confession. I didn’t go back to work as a school psychologist in the public schools this year.

You may or may not have noticed an absence of back to school posts and tweets and Facey Face posts about how the school year has gone so far. No Kindergarten quotes of the day, no status updates or posts about vermin in my office, no posts about cute attacks in the Kinder class, nothing. In fact, you maybe noticed a general drop off in posts over the past, oh, 9 months…

That is because I was busy making a person! Who knew making a person with your body could be so exhausting? (Besides anyone who has been pregnant before). This was my first, so it was all new for me. I mean, wow. It really wears a gal out. It turns out that blogging is the last thing on one’s mind after working AND making a person all day. I am fairly proud of myself for posting anything at all last semester! During my pregnancy, while I didn't enjoy the fatigue and weird comments adults would make about my weight (e.g. "Whoa! There's a 3000 lb weight limit on this elevator, you might want to take the next one!" or "Are you sure there's only ONE in there?" and "Hey, Fatty! Waddle waddle!"), I did enjoy the comments made about my pregnancy by the kiddos...

• A 2nd grader and I were playing a board game and she gave me two turns because I was “playing for two people.” Cute attack.
• Around month 5, a kiddo asked me if my baby had a head yet.
• A teenager I was working with told me I should name my baby “Aquafina.” I think she was inspired by my water bottle in my office.
• A teenage boy said, “Ooh! Having a baby is gonna hurt, you should get high before you go into labor, that’s what my mom did!” Um, pass.
• A first grader shushed the whole class when I entered the room and said, “Shhhh you guys, the baby can hear you!”
• Every day in my last trimester, as I waddled into my school, a kindergartener asked, “Have you had it yet???” (clearly not!) and worse yet, “How did it get in there?” Um, ask your mom…
• A kindergartener eyed my giant belly suspiciously and asked, “What happened there???
• And finally, as I waddled into a classroom in June, looking humungous, a 7th grade boy said, “Dude. It is so messed up that they are making you work still!” Amen, little brother!

After spending most of the school year preggers, my due date was three days after I was supposed to report back to work this fall. I had my baby girl two weeks ago, on the first day of school.* Sure, I’m totally biased, but I think Baby B is perfect. I just stare at her all day (and at night, every two hours) and marvel that I made a tiny person. It's my greatest accomplishment to date.

It is quite strange to not be back at school though. I must forewarn you, I will not have any amazing material or stories to share with you for a while (unless you want to hear about diaper changes, sleep training, and my baby's sensorimotor development?). I will count on you all to keep the torch alive on the Facey Face page by sharing with everyone how back to school has been, and posting intriguing questions for the group to comment on. I will join you in the fun in a few months!

Oh, and Happy "Labor" Day! Get it? Labor? Oh, never mind, its the sleep deprivation, I think I'm being clever.

*Hey, fun fact about having a baby: Natural childbirth is no joke. I had the baby in Berkeley, and felt a bit of peer pressure to go natural (not like, a home birth with a doula/lotus flower bath natural, but like no drugs natural). After the birth, I told my husband, “Oh, look at our precious only child!” But only 2 weeks later, I have labor amnesia and could have a whole litter of newborns, and just stare at their tiny hands and button noses all day and night.

My One-Woman Fight to Call It Something Else.

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 16:28:00 +0000

It’s back to school “professional development” time! In my district, we call them “PD Days” and in my mind, every time, I call them P. Diddy Days because if you say PD Days fast, that’s what it sounds like. I only wish we were learning how to be the richest figures in hip hop. That would be entertaining. You see, after 10 years in the profession, I have to say, I typically am disappointed in professional development activities. I usually pull out a few gems here and there, but it is rare to have a P. Diddy Day totally rock my educational and psychological world with new ideas.

UNTIL… (anticipation builds)

I went to the Ross Greene Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS)* conference, which is a model for understanding and helping kids with social, emotional, and behavioral challenges. Ross Greene, for those who don’t know, is a psychologist who has written the books The Explosive Child and Lost at School and developed a non-profit organization called Lives in the Balance. The website (and the book Lost at School) are both excellent resources that can explain the model far better than I can. But let me give you the gist:

• Kids do well if they can. If they are not doing well, the traditional framework is that they are not motivated to do well, and we as educators and psychologists need to find the proper rewards and consequences to motivate them. Sounds a lot like every behavior support plan I’ve written—we usually frame the behavior as resulting from the kid getting something or getting out of something. This is faulty reasoning because doing well is always preferable to not doing well. I mean, why would a kid really be motivated to do poorly?

• Challenging behavior in kids is best understood as the result of lagging cognitive skills (in the general domains of flexibility/adaptability, frustration tolerance, and problem solving) rather than as the result of low motivation or passive, permissive, and non-contingent parenting. The best way to reduce challenging episodes is by collaboratively solving the problem, rather than imposing adult will. This helps explain why we have what one of my administrator calls “frequent flyers” to the office for discipline referrals. If imposing adult will (e.g. rewards and punishments) was going to work with challenging kids, then why is the kid being sent to the office every day? We are doing the same thing over and over, and not teaching the kid the problem-solving skills to change his or her challenging behavior.

• Imposing adult will or trying to correct the behavior through rewards and punishments is considered “Plan A.” It is the predominant model in most schools, and the model we were probably all trained on in doing functional behavioral analysis and behavior support plans. But if we continue to try to solve the behavior problem unilaterally, we will continue to see the same poor results.

• In Collaborative Problem Solving, we move toward a collaborative endeavor with the student to solve the problem(s) in a model called “Plan B.” Plan B starts with the understanding that problem behavior comes from lagging skills, not lagging motivation. The book and the website (especially the great little video models) goes into the components of Plan B in depth, and in your free time, I highly suggest you check them out. In essence, you go through a few stages with the child—empathy, defining the problem, and inviting the child to come up with a collaborative solution.

Since going to the conference on Co-Pro-So*, I have totally changed the way I consult about and frame discussions about kids with challenging behaviors. I have changed the way I interact with students. Here’s just one example of a technique that I got from the conference, called “tabling.” It is used in the Plan B “Empathy” step, to really try to understand the student’s perspective of the unsolved problem. In the case of my student, it was a middle school girl who refused to write during journal time. We had set up a behavior plan in which she got points for doing the journal and the points were tallied and sent home to parents, etc etc, and there was no change in her behavior. After the conference and my new framework for understanding the problem, I interviewed her:

Me: I notice that during journal time, you are not writing. What’s up? I’m not mad, I’m just noticing this.

Girl: I don’t know.

Me: Hm. What do you think is the reason if you had to guess?

Girl: I don’t have pencils.

Me: Great! So lets say your teacher went to Office Depot and got you tons of pencils. Then would you write during journal time? [note: here is the “tabling” part—you table their first reason, because its usually not the only thing going on]

Girl: No.

Me: What else is getting in your way of writing?

Girl: It’s too noisy because my friends distract me.

Me: Okay, great! So lets say you have all your pencils and all your friends are absent from school one day. Then would you write? [table each idea]

Girl: No.

Me: Okay, what else is keeping you from writing?

Girl: I don’t like it [okay, this went on and on for about 10 minutes, and we tabled other ideas too, like she doesn’t like writing fiction, she doesn’t have paper, the room is too hot…and so on and so on. We finally got to the “aha!” moment at the end]

Me: Okay, so lets say you had pencils and paper, all your friends have the flu, you get to write non-fiction, and the room is 68 degrees, then would you write at journal time?

Girl: No, because the teacher has us read what we wrote out loud and my heart starts to beat fast and I think everyone is looking at me and that they all are thinking I’m a bad writer.

AHA. So if we had continued down our current theory that she had a lack of motivation, she would have likely continued to balk at writing, because it wasn’t a motivation issue at all. It was a performance anxiety issue, and the lagging skill was her actual writing skills, or she wasn’t confident in her writing skills, or she was not able to regulate her anxiety about presenting her work. This changes the intervention, right? We teach writing skills and coping skills for anxiety.

This is why I heart Co-Pro-So. I swear, if you have the chance, go to the trainings. If you don’t, then go to the website and learn more. It may not change your life as a school psychologist, teacher, or parent working with a student with challenging behavior, but it may just be another great tool to have fresh in your mind as you begin another school year.

Oh, and have fun at your P. Diddies this week. Do post what you’ve learned on the NFtSP Facey Face Page for all to enjoy!

*Herein lies my only issue with the model. I hate that the shortened version of it is called “CPS” because it reminds me of Child Protective Services. Therefore, I am on the one woman fight to get Ross Greene and others to call Collaborative Problem Solving “Co- Pro- So” Instead. It sounds like a trendy neighborhood in New York. Please start referring to it as such. Join my one-woman fight.

Mindfulness. So Hot Right Now.

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 16:57:00 +0000

I am not a trendsetter. I am a reluctant, late adopter of newfangled technology, and I want to see the research before I try something with my students. True, in the tech realm, I have had a blog for over four years, which in blog life, is kind of long, but it's because my trendsetter friend, Jennifer, encouraged me to start it. I was late to join Facebook because I thought it was like MySpace, and thought MySpace was dumb and basically just for tweens and bands. My bestie, Kendra, encouraged me to join Facey Face and I can't believe I resisted so long. I even copied the trends of Mrs. Mimi of It's Not All Flowers and Sausages Blog by starting a Facebook page, twitter page, and Amazon.com links for my blog. If we weren't Internet BFFs, she might say, "Seriously. Stop copying me."

Now, I come to you with my latest reluctance that I know is supported by research, and is so hot right now, but I can't find myself jumping on board to use it: mindfulness. In essence, mindfulness is a practice in which we teach students (and adults for that matter) to be aware, present in the moment, and non-judgmental through a variety of techniques (e.g. deep breathing, meditation, visualization, etc.) I'm sure there's more to it, but like I said, I'm not that into it. I do know that research is emerging that mindfulness techniques have been shown to reduce stress and increase positive feelings. I am totally on board in theory, but when I try it myself, I am mindful of how lame it seems. I just don't feel happier or more centered listening to a Tibetan singing bowl's vibrations or really feeeeeeling what it's like to wash my hands (seriously, it was a "tip" at a conference to be really aware of the sensation of having soap trickle off your hands when you are washing them).

But I can't run from mindfulness practice anymore. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, after all. It infiltrates my life. For example, the last several professional developments in my school district have had mindfulness themes. We listened to drums, singing bowls, did deep breathing, and visualization exercises. I was only mindful of how friggin' hot it was in the room and started making my mental to-do list instead of feeeeeeling my brain waves align with the drums. You can't blame me for not trying. I tried Tae Kwon Do, which is all about eastern patience and such. I quit it though because it didn't move fast enough for me (what? after a month I just get a black mark on my white belt? I just kicked a board! Upgrade me to a yellow belt, at least!). I also tried yoga, and after 30 minutes of listening to the Aboriginal didgeridoo in child's pose, I excused myself to go to the bathroom and never returned. Next pose! Next pose! Let's keep it moving, people.

Sigh. Perhaps this is the very reason I need mindfulness meditation?

I shouldn't deny the children the benefit of mindfulness though, right? So last school year, I went out and bought a deck of mindfulness cards and plopped them on my desk for kids to choose from if they wanted to. One day, after getting kicked out of class for laughing hysterically for no reason, a middle school girl came to my office and took the mindfulness bait. Together, for 30 minutes, we went through several of the mindfulness cards together. She went from hysterical to calm and at the end of our session said, "I feel like myself again" and skipped off to class. She did fine the rest of the day. Now I realize this is a sample size of 1, but I may, just may dust those cards off for this year too. I may not be down with alternate nostril breathing and imagining my heart is a flower, but I can't deny that there's something to this mindfulness practice for some students.

Namaste.

Pulling Your Weight.

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 18:23:00 +0000

I have a confession, which long time readers will already know. I can’t stand icebreakers. It dates back to college when I joined a million clubs to bulk up my resume for graduate school* and every single group had the stupidest ice breakers (e.g. what is your favorite scab or scar?). Gross. But in education, we just love the ice breaker, so each year as I gear up for back to school meetings, I gear up for ice breakers.

I also do not care for the forced team-building activities, like untangling the human knot or doing a ropes course (or, for that matter, going to hippie education conferences with interpretive dance, labyrinths, and sacred objects**). Perhaps it says something deeper that I really don’t want to do a “trust fall” with people I just met? In any event, I think unstructured team building with the theme of “let’s eat this food and talk” is better.

A few years ago, I was asked to go on a team building 20-person kayak situation for one of my schools. The symbolism was so great, I couldn’t turn it down. I mean, 20 people working together for one goal? It could be a motivational poster. What would it look like if the school psychologist declined to be part of a synchronized, effective team of educators? Plus, it was better to be outside in nature than in a stuffy hot professional development room talking about writing rubrics.

It was a disaster for me, psychologically speaking.

We had our practice session in the morning, where we all got on indoor stationary kayaks. I can be competitive from time to time, so I was there, trying to go faster than everyone else, making the strongest whooshing sound and getting the most rotations per minute. The coach reminded me that the objective was to all row together. Fine. So I slowed down and we got in a rhythm, rowing together (symbolizing shared work load, common goals, and something else).

We finally made it out on the water. We were ready. Our multidisciplinary team of cohesiveness was ready to set sail on a new school year. (why isn’t there a sarcastic font? I’m going to invent that). Anyhoo, it started out pretty shaky, and the instructor started guiding us with her words (pull, bend, release, pull bend release) and 19 out of the 20 staff got it. The one who didn’t was right in front of me. No matter what the instructor said, she was totally off and she didn’t even realize it. I found myself getting super annoyed at her. I reminded myself about learning curves, and tried to focus on keeping time with the others. But she was distracting me with her inefficiency. I started to superimpose thoughts about her performance as an educator on to her performance as a rower. She doesn’t pull her weight! She's holding back the whole team! I know! It’s not cool, but I couldn’t help myself. I was thinking in metaphors all morning and I couldn’t stop.

Fast forward a few years. She was still struggling as an educator (I can't speak for her improvement in water sports). She seemed impervious to suggestions, coaching, modeling, peer support, anything. Her classroom was so chaotic, I had difficulties being in there for more than 5 minutes. Then, in her fourth year, things began to click for her. She turned a corner in her learning and seemed to get in her rhythm.

I have never been a teacher, so I can’t say what a normal learning curve is for getting in the rhythm. I just know that during this year’s ice breakin’ team buildin' time, my New School Year’s Resolution is to be more patient and understanding of those who are still navigating those bumpy first few years waves. I know if someone had put me under a microscope in the first few years of my practice as a school psychologist, they would have likely been annoyed at my incompetence. Thankfully, I stayed the course and rode the waves of my learning curves-—now I’m sailing away, with my course charted and…oh forget it. I’ve filled up my metaphor quota for the year.

* If you can get your hands on a PsiChi Psychology Honor’s Society recruitment video, circa 1998, you will see me with ugly hair and bad acting trying to promote membership.

**I had forgotten to bring a “sacred object” to this educational conference, so 2 minutes before the “ceremony,” I rummaged through my car and found my coffee mug. I looked shallow and weird as I described how important coffee was in my life as an educator, and the next girl brought an amethyst necklace that was given to her by her grandmother, a teacher for 45 zillion years or something.

Back to School Readiness—For Kindergarteners (and Educators!)

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 16:57:00 +0000

I recently posted on the NFtSP Facey Face page that I thought it was bit premature to see Back to School advertisements in July. To my horror, many people responded that their report back to work days were in early August. Yikes!

Perhaps because our district tortured the children into Bikram-hot learning through late June, we don’t report back for another few weeks. Mind you, August is often spent having my own internal "I’m-ready-I’m-so-not-ready-to-go-back" ping-pong battle in my mind. August is typically educator purgatory in that you are finally relaxed but there’s this nagging feeling it’s all coming to an end soon (insert collective tiny violin playing from people with jobs that only allow two weeks a year of vacay). I don’t need to tell educators that when you are instrumental in shaping the young minds of the future, you need the summer to recharge for that kind of societal pressure. I see your tiny violin, traditional workers, and I raise you a symphony of miniature violins that you aren't responsible for whether or not future generations can get along with each other and be educated, well-rounded lifetime learners.

Anyhoo…I digress. The real point of today's post is back-to-school readiness. Today, I was taking one of my daily walks with my lazy dogs and I ran into a neighbor who is sending her little one to Kindergarten this year. She was asking for advice about the transition, wondering if he was “ready.” So, I thought I’d whip up a little list for parents of activities and routines they can build into their schedules in August to prepare. If anyone else has suggestions for Kindergarten parents sending their little ones for the first time, feel free to add them in the comments section.

Tips for Transition to Kindergarten

1) Get into a “Kindergarten Routine” in the month leading up to Kindergarten entry. This means establishing a morning routine, an evening routine, and a bedtime routine.

2) Assess your morning routine: How similar is your current routine from the Kindergarten program your child will be entering? Are you already in a Pre-K program that is 5 days a week, from 8:00-2:30? Is your child entering a morning Kindergarten program and you have been going to afternoon Preschool? The more similar your routine is now, the easier the transition. If your child is unaccustomed to getting up and being ready by 8am, and their new Kindergarten starts at 8, start practicing being ready by that time now.

3) Evening routine: Even in Kindergarten, your child will begin to have homework if they are in a traditional program.* It is important to begin establishing a “Homework Time” in your evening routine, separate from the “bath-book-bed” routine. Since they will have homework the rest of their school careers, explore when works for your family (e.g. After dinner, before bath? After school before dinner?). During that time, you can play a game that involves sharing or turn-taking, or if you really want to, buy a Preschool workbook and do one page together. The game may be better than the worksheets though, because it reinforces social skills of losing gracefully, not cheating, taking turns, etc. They will get plenty of worksheets in their school careers.

4) Bedtime routine: Have a consistent bedtime, and think about how your child will probably not be having naps in a traditional Kindergarten. If you haven’t already, wean them off naps in the summer time (I know, it’s not fun, but it will help in the long run).

5) Self-Help Skills: There is no potty training in Kindergarten. Wiping is important. No one will wipe your child’s tush in Kindergarten. Also, teach your child how to zip, button, and tie/Velcro (added bonus, improving fine motor skills). Teach “practical life skills” like pouring, opening food containers and drink boxes, etc.

6) Anticipatory Guidance for you and your child: About a month before entry, read getting ready for Kindergarten books (e.g. Mrs. Bindergarten Gets Ready for Kindergarten, Kindergarten Rocks!, The Night before Kindergarten). Also, know that your child may “fall apart” at home for the first 2-3 months of Kindergarten, and this is typical, especially for kids unaccustomed to long days of instruction. They hold it together all day and then when they come home, they lose it. Acknowledge that you see how hard they are working to be a student all day.

7) Reinforce Reading Readiness: If your child went to a play-based preschool and didn’t get much exposure to pre-reading skills, don’t worry. Reading is supposed to be taught in early elementary. It’s harder to teach social skills and behavioral control skills to a kid who is reading than it is to teach reading to a kid with lagging social skills and behavioral control. Remember, kids have to be able to listen to the teacher and control impulses in order to profit from instruction!

You can reinforce reading skills at home by developing print awareness, playing simple phonetic awareness games, and practicing reading comprehension skills during story time:

• Point out environmental print (e.g. stop signs, names of businesses, menus)
• Point out that print occurs on different surfaces (paper, computer screens, billboards, books, iPads) and make a distinction between pictures and print.
• When you read, put your finger on each word you are reading, so they can make a connection that print corresponds to speech.
• Read nursery rhymes, sing songs, and clap along with the rhythm.
• Play games with words that sound alike as you experience them in everyday life (e.g. We’re passing Mike’s Bikes, that’s a funny name because they sound alike!)
• Demonstrate how sounds blend together in familiar words (e.g. Let’s sign your name on Grandma’s card, T-o-m --- Tom)
• Play a game where the goal is to find objects with names that begin with a certain initial sound. This is a great game for walks or car rides.
• Play clapping games and clap with each distinct sounds (e.g. “C-a-t is a three clap word; so is fam-i-ly”)
• Practice attention to stories by reading short stories, high interest books, and reading the same favorites over and over
• Connect stories and titles by predicting the story from the title. Ask your child to make predictions about stories and follow simple plots by asking questions while reading (“What’s going to happen now?”)
• Allow children to retell stories

One final note about readiness: As a school psychologist, I often console “criers” on the first day of Kindergarten. It’s about equal whether I am consoling a parent or a Kindergartner! Your child will take your cues too. If you are emotional and crying as they enter the class, they will tend to be emotional and turn into little barnacles you have to pry off your leg. Model calmness and a positive attitude! Also, don’t be surprised if they are fine the first day and then after a few days or weeks, they start to have difficulties. If I could interpret their tears on days 3 or 4, they would probably be, “OMG, I have to keep coming back every day???” They will get used to it. If the transition difficulties are ongoing, consult with your child’s teacher or the school psychologist.

Oh, and its worth noting for all you educators and school psychologists going back to work this month (or very soon!) that you may want to start weaning yourself off of naps and getting back in a regular schedule too! Here are some tips for educators making that transition back to work from the archives. Of these tips, I find B2S shopping to be the most therapeutic. ;)

*Kindergarten seems to be the new 1st grade, so it may be more academics than you anticipate. I think this is why there are kids rolling around on the rug during whole group lessons and kids start resisting pencil-paper work—they’re not always developmentally ready for it. The main skills I would hope they learn in Kinder are all social-emotional (e.g. following rules, playing well with others, working independently with supervision). But that’s a soap box speech for another time.

Lazy Dogs…and Children?

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 16:01:00 +0000

I don’t know why I continually find myself writing about my dogs over summer break. But it has been a while since I had to use my “children aren’t dogs” disclaimer, so I thought I’d dust it off for olde timey’s sake.*

Since I’m home now, being a lady of leisure, I have had the chance to observe my dogs closely. I used to feel badly about leaving them all day for work, but it turns out they actually just sleep all day. This morning, I thought I’d be a good puppy mama and take them on a walk, and I got out the leash for my greyhound, and he didn’t even get up off the couch. I called to him, and he closed his eyes, as if to say, “Please. I’m sleeping in.” This dog is LAZY. In fact, greyhounds are nicknamed “the 45 mile an hour couch potato” because they are really lazy animals. I guess they are storing up for the big sprint, but still, what dog doesn’t want to go on a walk? I used to be alarmed by his lethargy. I even took him to the vet once because I thought something was wrong with him (clinical depression? Thyroid problem?) , and after $300 of lab tests, the diagnosis? Greyhound. Awesome.

I only bring this up my lazy dog because a) he’s right next to me, being lazy, and I’m out of school so what else can I write about? And b) because it burns my soul when kids, parents, or teachers use the word “lazy” to describe a student. To me, the word lazy is used not as a transient state of being (see Bruno Mars’ “Lazy Song” for detail--Today I don't feel like doing anything), but it is often used as a personality or character trait in a student. It kills me when kids describe themselves as lazy in school, as it suggests the whole problem is a motivation or personality issue.

I was working with this teenager a while back who ended up having a pretty severe language-based learning disability that had gone undiagnosed until high school. During the social-emotional section of the testing, I asked him if he had one wish, what would it be. He said, “To not be lazy. I’m super lazy.” *soul burns* I ended up asking him, “Were you born lazy?”** and he laughed and said, “No.” I took it a step further. “When you were a toddler, did you sit around on the couch and not do anything?” He laughed again and said, “I don’t think so!” So I asked, “When did being lazy start for you?” He then really opened up and said that it started in 5th grade when school work got “really hard and they moved too fast.” He went on to explain he ended up not studying because he felt he couldn’t learn anyway.

I had my “aha moment” and so did he—it wasn’t that he was personally a lazy person, it was that he was struggling with his learning disability and didn’t have the tools or support to push through it, so he avoided studying. I sealed the deal: “So if you were a lazy person, would you have just spent the past 3 hours doing really hard tests with me and not giving up, so we can figure out how you learn best?” He said, “I guess not. Can I go now?” I will take that as a teenager version of a resounding, “you are right.”

*Dogs are not children, and children are not dogs. See Psychologist vs. Puppy for more information.

**I love this question. It can be adapted for all things. Were you born hating school? Were you born hating math? Were you born being angry at your parents? You can really start to pinpoint when attitudes and feelings about things started for students. I tip my hat to Ross Greene, of the Collaborative Problem Solving model for this one. It’s a gem.

Yes, I Still Have a Blog.

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 13:46:00 +0000

Friends,

I have been going down a shame-spiral for not posting lately! The weather is hotter, the kids are crazier, and yes, I am STILL working in the school district even though the official first day of summer was yesterday. I spent yesterday in a room that had a temperature roughly the same as the surface of the sun doing professional development.

The previous weeks were full of trying to tie therapy bows on all my counseling kiddos (FAIL) and finishing up assessments with kids who wanted to be there as much as I did. I also got a few crises thrown in the mix, because we just can't hold it together in June, can we? Sigh.

Soon, friends. Soon I will be able to start the summer recharging process...will this be the summer I actually meet my goal of learning how to reupholster vintage furniture? Will I write meaningful blog posts again? Will I finally learn how to post resources on my blog for people to download, like I've been wanting to for 4 years? Stay tuned...

One thing I can say I have been doing regularly (not posting, clearly) is keeping up with the Notes From the School Psychologist Faceyface Page. I am loving the dialogue and tips from people across the country. Also, loving the commiseration of folks who are making up snow days right now and feel my pain. Come join the awesomeness.

I should also note that I am on twitter too, and if you follow me, I promise you I don't tweet what I had for breakfast and stuff. Mostly I re-tweet interesting articles every week or so. And yes, articles on the Onion count as articles.

Pay Attention.

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Sun, 08 May 2011 16:46:00 +0000

Lately, I find myself giving the same speech. It takes me a while to get the language right in explaining difficult concepts about child development, so when I do, I like to make it count and use my new speech whenever possible (apologies to people who attend meetings with me on a regular basis and get to hear me say the same thing). Anyhoo, I think my latest speech/analogy is a fairly decent one, so I will share it with you.

At my school sites, I have been getting a lot of requests for assessment for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) that sound a little like this: “So and so is inattentive and hyper. Does she have ADHD?” It’s a legitimate question, but it is not an easy answer. As in previous posts, like the one where I went to a Circus School to assess a student for ADHD (true story), ADHD is a complex assessment. Especially if you yourself are distracted by trapeze artists during your “school observation.” But I digress.

My new speech/analogy is:

“Attention is the ‘fatigue’ of the psychology field.”

Here is what I mean by that. I want you to imagine you have fatigue and you go to your doctor and say, “Doc, I have fatigue. Do I have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?” The doctor (if they are any good, of course) would have to investigate all the potential causes for fatigue before concluding anything. Offhand, (and I’m not that kind of doctor), I can think of about a hojillion reasons for fatigue besides Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: the flu, cancer, pregnancy, working in a school district, depression, hyperthyroidism, hypothyroidism, anemia, seizure disorders, poor sleep…..and it goes on and on. “Fatigue” is a non-specific symptom.

The same is true for attention. Offhand, the “causes” of inattention can be: (um, all medical conditions above), ADHD, difficulties focusing because of a learning disability, anxiety, depression, low IQ, high IQ, autism, social-emotional distraction, situational factors, psychosis…..and it goes on and on. So, when people ask me if I will “test for ADHD”, they are really asking me to test for everything else as well. I enjoy ADHD evaluations. I feel like a detective looking for clues and hitting a bunch of dead ends until I get to the bottom of the inattention symptoms.

That is why it burns my soul just a little bit when I get reports from outside professionals who give one rating scale to the parent, and if it is elevated in attention problems, they get the diagnosis. They don’t interview the teachers, they don’t observe the kid at school, and they don’t rule out the other causes of ADHD-like symptoms. Really, it gives “my people” a bad name to do an incomplete evaluation like that.

Second pet peeve about ADHD evaluations is when a doctor then “prescribes” an IEP or Section 504 plan based on their results, without seeing if the inattention is really having an educational impact that requires special education or accommodations. I have had students with ADHD on the honor roll, earning all As and Bs, and the outside professional recommends an IEP. I always wonder what service they think the kid needs. Then I have a fantasy of calling them up and telling them what psychopharmacological medications to prescribe. Because you know, if they’re going to tell me what to do in my school without knowing what their talking about, surely I can pretend I’m a medical professional and tell them what to do. It’s only fair.

I realize that doctors and outside professionals are only trying to help. But I think that school psychologists are the ones best equipped to assess for ADHD (given they have had training and aren’t super old school psychs who should have retired during the Clinton administration or sooner). In some districts, school psychs are not allowed to assess for ADHD, and in some they are. In some, they do screenings and send the information to a doctor. In my private practice as a clinical psychologist, I do ADHD evaluations all the time. In my role as a school psychologist, it has gone back and forth about whether or not I am allowed to do them, even though I have the training. I feel bad for parents, whose doctor says to go to the school for an evaluation and the school says to go to the doctor. It’s confusing, and then the kids with legitimate issues get bounced between professionals.

I am curious how other school psychologists and districts handle referrals for ADHD. I find that it varies from district to district, school to school, and even by school psychologist comfort level in assessing for ADHD. I would be curious from other school psychologists what your district policy is on how ADHD evaluations are handled in your district. Discuss amongst yourselves...and feel free to try on the fatigue analogy at your next meeting!

Emotes.

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Tue, 03 May 2011 22:08:00 +0000

Anyone who has been a therapist or counseling with kiddos for a while will appreciate this post. I don't know about y'all, but there are some things in my play therapy kit that I kind of want to throw away because every kid seems to want to play it and I'm so over it (Uno and Connect Four, I'm looking at YOU guys!). I often need play therapy toy "crop rotations" to mix it up. Of course, sand tray is always a classic that never leaves, but sometimes I throw a new dinosaur in there to see if it morphs into the principal or a bully at school. It's a good time.

There are some kids though who don't play with anything in the room or get bored easily with the materials you have. I had such a kiddo a while back. He was a kindergarten kiddo who was referred because of impulsivity and aggression in the classroom. He spent most sessions complaining about my toys and asking why he had to be there. At the same time, I had his middle school equivalent in my office a few hours later. Only instead of aggression in the classroom, he also showed aggression in the community. And would you believe I found a series of toys and activities they BOTH liked???

I think sometimes that boys present an extra challenge when it comes to helping them express the range of feelings they have. They tend to endorse "anger" pretty easily and the other stuff takes a long time to get to. That is, unless you have this fabulous tool called "Emotes".*

I was at a convention and was drawn to these little guys who each represented a different feeling, positive, negative and nuanced. For example, "Boom" is the angry one, "Joi" is the happy one, and "Can't" is the frustrated one. I bought the starter kit and the introduction book to try them out. My boys LOVED them. My kinder poppet wanted to read the story every time, and he loved finding the ones that matched his feelings (he gravitated toward Imp-the mischievous, Boom-the Angry, and Super-the confident). He started drawing them in class spontaneously and would do almost anything for a sticker of one of his guys. He even referenced them in reflecting on his own behavior (e.g. Dr. B, I was like "Hype" today in class and got in trouble) Como se dice AWESOME?

My middle schooler, who was notoriously "too cool for school" ignored their pointy little faces for about 2 weeks, and then finally gave in. He started playing with them and wanted to draw them and go on the website and find coloring pages or more stories about them. I did not see that coming! It gave us a way to talk about the feelings that underlie anger without him feeling like I'm a cliche "How does that make you feeeeeeeel?" counselor. Genius.

So after testing them out on my two toughest customers, I contacted the Emotes peeps and asked for them to send me more goodies so I could start integrating these little guys into the Kinder and 1st grade classes as class-wide feeling vocabulary lessons. Okay fine, I guess I am a "How does that make you feeeeeeeel?" kind of gal after all. I just think this is a more fun way to go about it. Plus, they have the books in Spanish. Holla.

Check out their stuff when you get a chance at www.emotes.com. Oh, and if you're looking at it at work, turn the sound down because it starts off with a jaunty little song and a loud exclamation, "How are you feeling today!" It made me feel like "Jumpi" the first time. But the kids love the website because they have comics and whatnot. Enjoy!

*Note: Not related to the term "Emo". When the term "Emo" first started percolating a few years back in the lexicon of my yoots, it took me a while to figure out what they were referring to. At first, I thought a group of students was calling a girl "Elmo" from Sesame Street, and I couldn't work out what it was about, until I asked. It's very different than Elmo, trust me. When I say Emotes, I also over-enunciate the "-tes" part of the word EmoTES to make sure I am clear. Emo has a bad connotation for kids.

Ain’t Nuthin’ But an Educator Paaaaarty

noreply@blogger.com (Rebecca) — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 01:20:00 +0000

This week was my spring break (yes, this late). It was so late this year, I almost tricked myself into thinking it was summer break. The good news is, when I go back to work tomorrow, it is practically May, so it won’t be long. You think kids are the only ones who get Spring Fever? Ha!

Anyhoo, I spent my spring break in NYC. I had only been one time before, in February, and I wrote off the entire city at that point for being a miserable place. Turns out, in the spring, it’s lovely! Who knew? Everyone but me, probably. I had a great time touring the city with my husband when the weather was nice enough to enjoy it. But by far the best part was meeting up with my Internet BFF, "Mrs. Mimi" for the first time.

People, if you don’t know “Mrs. Mimi” of Its Not All Flowers and Sausages blog, you simply must. She is a teacher who GETS IT. We became Internet besties a few years ago and we are just one broken heart necklace away from being Best Friends in real life too. We met on the Upper West Side (West Siiiiiiide!)* for brunch. It was totally an East Coast meets West Coast Educator Party. It was kind of like when 2Pac and Snoop Dogg got together to make Gangsta Party and they done just put two of Amerikaz most wanted in the same *bleep* place at the same *bleep* time. Wait, they were both west coast rappers. Nevermind. But kind of like that, but not. I digress. ANYHOO, it was a bi-coastal urban-education-love-fest. My husband couldn’t believe we had never met before, the way we were talking nonstop for two hours.**

And I won’t steal her thunder, but DO check her blog in the next few weeks, she has some fabulous things going on right now. Even though she is no longer in the classroom, she is doing some great things in the world of education. Sure, we miss the stories of her getting a g-string for Christmas from one of her students, stories of administrative dysfunction junction, and bodily fluid stories***, but she has some fabulous new projects in the works we will all be excited about. Plus, she has such fancy news from just this past week, I’m dying to congratulate her publicly! But you know how BFFs are, we keep these types of pinkie swear secrets quiet, and we don’t gossip into the blog-o-sphere. We just allude to them so you’ll check out her blog.

After we talked shop over brunch for over an hour, she suggested we go eat the world’s best chocolate chip cookies together (seriously, she’s a gal after my own heart). Could she be more fabulous? The cookies were a.ma.zing. And so was meeting the infamous Mrs. Mimi.

*Sorry, I have 2Pac Tourettes from time to time. RIP, 2Pac *tips 40 to his mem’ry*
**Hubby is such a trooper. His eyes only glazed over a few times as we talked about the state of public education today.
***For more stories, get her fab book by the same name—just clicky click here or on the right side of my blog under “Buy Yourself Something Pretty.”