By Jill Jackson
I remember when my local office supply store started stocking the big red “EASY” button on the counters near the register. I had visions of carrying it with me when I embarked on my weekly, travel-for-work exploits! Just the thought of stepping out of the line as my flight is delayed for the umpteenth time and finding a quiet corner at O’ Hare and smacking that “EASY” button seemed somehow soothing … if only it worked that way!

Oddly enough, I think that quite a few folks in education are trying to bring that “EASY” button into their offices or classrooms.

Here’s what the “EASY” button sounds like: “Gee, teaching didn’t used to be this hard; what happened to the good ole days?” or “Wow! I need to figure out an easier way to do this!” or “Isn’t there a way that I can make this faster?” or “If only the parents/prior teachers/board/administrators/community would do ____, then I wouldn’t have to spend so much time.”

Here’s the secret: THE EASY BUTTON HAS LOST ITS POWER! Well, it never really had any power, but let’s not get hung up on that.

The real deal is this: Teaching is hard. There, I said it! Teaching is hard, and it’s not for the faint of heart —or the faint of spirit, for that matter.

So we really need to level with ourselves and change the conversation from “How can I simplify this?” to “How can I make this more powerful for the students?”

By switching the conversation, we are placing the focus on the STUDENTS we serve. We organize around what is best and most efficient and effective for the kids—even when it’s tough on the adults … even when it stretches us and causes us to stay a little later, prep a little longer, ask a zillion more questions, or ask for help and risk admitting that we don’t have the answer. And who benefits? The kids AND the teachers.

Why is dumping the “Easy” button helpful to teachers? Because we gain confidence in what we’re capable of doing for our students. That’s the way confidence grows: by trying something you didn’t think you could do and actually doing it! And NOTHING tops a confident teacher!

So once we dump the “EASY” button, what will things look like on our campuses?

• We will discuss options for fixing teaching problems without the filter of “How much time will this take?”

• We will analyze our current practices and ask: What practices serve me well, but don’t necessarily pay off for my students?

Effective Models for Responding to Problem Behaviors in Students With EBD

By Dan Habib

Issues Summary

Over 2 million young people in the United States have an emotional/behavioral disability (EBD). Statistics released by the Southern Poverty Law Center and The Journal of Emotional and Behavioral Disorders reflect the grim outcomes for these students:

• Students with EBD have the worst graduation rate of all students with disabilities. Nationally, only 40 percent of students with EBD graduate from high school, compared with the national average of 76 percent.

By Sopris Learning

Sopris Learning is looking for passionate educators to share their views with an online community of colleagues through our EdView360 blog. Enter by blogging about your choice of three given topics and submitting of a short video explaining why we should hire YOU! The public will vote, and the winner will write for EdView360 at $100 per blog! Click Here for contest details.

By Anne M. Beninghof

In my workshops on inclusive schools, I frequently ask participants to complete the following simile:

The marriage between special education and general education is like …

After a few chuckles, participants silently begin to write their responses, some thinking of an answer immediately, while others stew for awhile. When it is time to share, the similes run the gamut from horror story to every teacher’s dream.

The marriage between special education and general education is like …

… peanut butter and jelly—each good on its own but better together.

… an elderly couple—constantly bickering about trivial details but dependent on each other.

… a fine wine—it gets better with age.

… a roller-coaster ride—sometimes thrilling, sometimes making you sick to your stomach.

… a hidden gem—just needs some elbow grease and polishing to make it shine.


Imagine doing this activity with your faculty. You provide them with blank index cards and ask them to complete the simile anonymously. When they are finished, you collect the cards and read the examples aloud. What would the overall tenor of the examples be? Mostly positive? Mostly negative? Somewhere in the middle? The vast majority of teachers believe that the similes would be heavily negative, reflective of their experiences. These similes reveal a pervasive problem in our schools—a climate of separateness between specialists and classroom teachers

Proactive steps can be taken to develop a new climate of collaboration and inclusiveness. Dozens of ideas for promoting a healthy school climate have been suggested and implemented by leading educators. Specific steps for developing positive inclusive climates include:

• Creating a vision and mission statement that embrace collaborative relationships. Which comes first—the vision or the mission—is kind of like the argument about the chicken and the egg. What is not in dispute is the fact that organizations need a heart and a head—a belief and a set of processes and skills—to bring about change.

By Dr. Dewey Cornell
A survey of school principals regarding school discipline found that there were two contrasting groups: some principals strongly advocated a firm, no-nonsense, zero-tolerance approach to discipline, while others favored a more supportive and understanding approach. Many adults could readily categorize their school principals into one group or the other. But which strategy is more effective? Are students and teachers safer in a school with strict discipline or one where there is a less punitive and more supportive approach

Although the distinction between strict discipline and a more supportive approach seems compelling, it is probably too simplistic. Decades ago, research by developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind at the University of California-Berkeley found that the best parents were both demanding and supportive, a style of parenting she described as “authoritative.” Later researchers more formally specified two dimensions of parenting that yielded four groups of parents. One dimension measured whether the parent was high or low in demanding appropriate behavior. A second dimension was whether the parent was high or low in being emotionally supportive of the child (also termed “responsiveness”). This generated four types or styles of parenting:

1. Authoritarian parents are high in demandingness but low in supportiveness

By Dr. Steven Richfield
Children challenged by the social interaction deficits of Asperger syndrome face daily trials and troubles within their family, peer, and extended social worlds. Difficulties with demonstrating empathy, understanding nonverbal behaviors, and producing reciprocal verbal responses are three primary inhibitions.

Parents witness these communication barriers and try to unlock and translate the social puzzle for their child. As discussion ensues, it becomes clear that the child with Asperger syndrome is mystified by emotion, and doesn’t use it as a compass for successfully relating to others. If this confounding circumstance describes you or someone you know, read on for some ways to help them become more emotionally attuned to others

As children with Asperger syndrome tend to be strong visual learners, use this pathway to identify and color code emotions. Display the “palette of emotions” by linking a color with familiar feelings, such as happiness, anger, fear, and sadness. Introduce different “shades” of feelings that are harder for them to decipher. Loneliness, shame, embarrassment, pride, surprise, confusion, and many others will need a color that displays the continuum of strong and stunning feeling vs. light and muffled expression. Encourage them to participate in this “color the feelings” activity so that they can better identify with the result.

Using the feelings palette as a foundation, identify past social puzzles, and link them with the appropriate color. Write a brief vignette of what happened to jog the child’s memory and explain, “Each color clues us to not only what the other person is feeling, but how we should respond to it.” Elaborate on the notion of color clues by identifying how a person with an angry (red) feeling is sending a clue that he or she wants to be left alone. Review the list of colors, add vignettes, and draw lines to the appropriate written response. For example, draw a line between the color of pride in an accomplishment with the response of “Say to the person: Congratulations for doing such a great job!”

Continue to add details to their relationship compass by demonstrating how emotions tell us even more about how we are to proceed with people. Stress how once a feeling is correctly identified, the conversation can flow in the direction of that color. This notion helps them understand the importance of not abruptly changing the subject “when a feeling is still flowing with color.” Provide examples of this conversational flow by having them observe others begin a conversation with a color and stick with it until it is clear that the feeling has faded out, and it is fine to change the subject. Look for instructional examples of this “flow to fade out” conversation in other places, such as television, car pool discussions, etc.

Hone the child’s compass by referring to the feelings palette as social situations provide a rich source for learning. Privately review these events and offer much praise for their movement toward more successful social understanding and interactions.

Dr. Steven Richfield is a clinical psychologist in Plymouth Meeting, PA. He has developed a child-friendly, self-control/social skills-building program called Parent Coaching Cards. He can be contacted at director@parentcoachcards.com or 610-238-4450. To learn more, visit www.parentcoachcards.com

About Steven Richfield

Products by Steven Richfield: The Parent Coach

By Linda Farrell
An almost universal habit that struggling readers exhibit is looking up from the page when reading. In my previous EdView360 post, I stressed the importance of teaching students to keep their eyes on the words when they read. I also noted that, when students stop looking up and start looking at the word in order to use decoding strategies, many show immediate improvement when reading.

A number of teachers responded to the blog. Many wrote that they had not noticed how often their students looked to them for approval or for help with reading. Several teachers asked what they could do to help their students change their habits so that they keep their eyes on the words when they read. This blog offers some suggestions.

Helping students change the “looking up” habit requires diligent attention and patience, patience, patience. It helps to understand the different reasons students look up so that we can respond in the most effective way.

Students look up from the page for three primary reasons:

1.    Students look to the teacher for approval. These students look directly at the teacher and wait for the teacher to say “good job” or something similar.

2.   Students look up to signal to the teacher that they don’t know the word or need help. These students also look directly at the teacher. In many classrooms, the teacher or another classmate tells the student the word.

3.   Students look up to think about what the word might be. These students are trying to pull the word from memory and generally look into space, not directly at anyone.

1.   Students Who Look Up for Approval

Looking up for approval is the easiest of the three behaviors to correct. Please don’t mistake “easiest of the three” to mean easy. As with any habit, this one can take time to change.

One respondent to the blog wrote about a technique we also use: “We emphasize maintaining focus on the word from beginning to end with a few simple techniques. For those students having difficulty breaking the habit, I’ve tried standing/sitting behind them while they read! Worked like a charm—it was very evident to the student how often they broke focus, how reliant they were on teacher approval and how self-sufficient they became so swiftly.”

Some students look up for approval just two or three words before they finish reading. Often, this causes them to misread one or more of the final words. To change this habit, every time a student looks up before finishing reading, the teacher reminds the student he or she looked up, and then has the student reread. The teacher has the student reread whether all the words were read correctly or not. Doing this each time a student looks up will foster the habit of keeping eyes on the page at all times. We have found that if we have the student reread only when words are misread, the habit doesn’t change nearly as fast, if at all.

Some students have a difficult time recognizing that they look up before finishing the sentence. In this case, the teacher can put a hand lightly on the student’s head and tell the student not to look up until the teacher takes the hand away. Another technique is to have the student say “period” when he or she comes to the end of the sentence, then tap a fist on the desk before looking up. We have used both these techniques successfully with a number of students.

2.  Students Who Look Up Because They Want the Teacher to Tell Them the Word

Students who look up because they want the teacher to tell them the word need to be reminded to keep their eyes on the word. The teacher can say, “Remember that you need to say ‘Word, please.’ Start from the beginning and say ‘Word, please’ when you come to any word you don’t know.”  Many students start by saying “Word, please,” but still look up as they say it. Teachers need to remind students to keep their eyes on the word, even after they ask for help, and then follow up by having the student repeat “Word, please” with eyes on the word.

After a student asks for help with a specific word, the teacher can elect to (1) have the student sound out the word if the spelling patterns are ones the student should know or (2) provide the word if the student is not expected to know how to read it.

3.   Students Who Look Up to Think About the Word

Students who look up to think about the word are perhaps the most difficult to train to keep their eyes on the page. These students generally have very poor decoding skills and strong language skills. Their experience has taught them that glancing at the word and thinking about possible words is easier and sometimes more successful for them than taking the time to decode the word.

Students who look up to think about the word are different from those who look up because they want teacher approval or want to be told the word. They think that they can “find the word in their heads.” Therefore, teachers need to ask these students to continue to look at the word as they try to read it. If they can’t read the word, they need to say “Word, please.”

Kindergarten and first grade teachers can keep the “looking up” habit from developing. First, they can teach that accuracy is critical when reading. All teachers can help students achieve accuracy by insisting that they look at words the entire time they read. When any student misreads a word, the teacher can stop the student at the end of the sentence or word list, and follow these steps:

1. Tell the student the number of words read correctly (or say, “You read perfectly up to this word” as you point at the missed word).

1. Ask the student to sound out the word if it is decodable or give the word if the student hasn’t learned its spelling patterns.

By Dr. Steven Richfield
Among the challenges of raising children with Asperger syndrome are the emotional ones placed upon the family. The collection of glaring social issues, mixed with subtle thinking variations and occasional unpredictable emotional swings, transforms parenting into a confusing trip of trial and error. When errors mount, family life is often mired in conflict, and the child’s issues are exacerbated. Parents may resort to blaming one another, leading to further downward spiraling.

To guard against this dysfunctional family dynamic, consider the following coaching tips.

Increase awareness of how Asperger syndrome places a child or teen in a handicapped position with respect to many circumstances in life. The nature of the disorder makes it difficult to readily adapt to change, recognize the subtleties in circumstances, take the perspective of another, and resist reacting to any perceived injustice/false accusation. As events unfold at home, these troubles pop up without warning, eroding smooth discussions and ensnarling the family within the world of Asperger syndrome. It’s easy for family members to unwittingly precipitate more conflict due to an approach that shows little Asperger IQ (AIQ).

Developing AIQ entails using your awareness of the typical impairments that place those with Asperger syndrome at a distinct disadvantage in life—and being prepared to effectively navigate around them. For example, those with Asperger syndrome tend to process emotionally laden events in “black and white” terms, making it hard for them to attribute meaning to the weight of circumstances. This sets them up to react emotionally and without sound perspective when accusations fly, family conflict stirs, etc. This can easily translate into them blaming the person who is yelling the loudest. Parents and other siblings can use their AIQ to reassure them that some conflict is normal, curtail accusatory tones of voice, and model reparative tones and behaviors.

Keep in mind that Asperger syndrome tends to magnify emotional reactions and restrict social understanding. Therefore, it is critical for other family members to consider these tendencies and to recognize and review common themes that have triggered past meltdowns due to limitations imposed by the disorder. Typical themes include misunderstanding the intention of jokes or sarcasm; expecting past events to always repeat themselves within similar circumstances; failing to consider timing, present company, and privacy matters when social boundaries are to be heeded; and tendencies toward excessive preoccupation and trouble refraining when enjoying something or somebody.

Using a loving tone of voice and tender words, discuss these issues with the family member who has Asperger syndrome. Explain how the tears in the family relationships can be repaired if everyone takes responsibility and works together. Describe how past conflicts have demonstrated how helpful it will be for everyone to develop stronger AIQ—including them. Suggest mantras they can call up in their mind, such as “My family loves one another, even when we don’t get along.” This can help restore emotional balance. Introduce “no-conditions time-out requests” where any family member can put interaction on pause for five minutes in order for cooler heads to prevail.

Dr. Steven Richfield is a clinical psychologist in Plymouth Meeting, PA. He has developed a child-friendly, self-control/social skills-building program called Parent Coaching Cards. He can be contacted at director@parentcoachcards.com or 610-238-4450. To learn more, visit www.parentcoachcards.com

About Steven Richfield

Products by Steven Richfield: The Parent Coach

By Carla Garrity, Ph.D., Mitchell Baris, Ph.D., and William Porter, Ph.D.
Many things have changed in the bully field in the 12 years since we wrote Bully-Proofing Your Child: A Parent’s Guide, and soon we will be updating the book. Bullying takes place in even more ways today, at younger ages, and it is more difficult to spot.

In this blog, we will discuss three key areas that parents need to understand today: climate, cyberbulling, and being an upstander instead of a bystander.

1. Climate

The climate of the individual school is an essential piece of bully prevention. Climate means engagement with the school community. Think for a moment about whether you, as a parent, feel connected to your child’s school. Is there a community that welcomes you? Do you feel a connection to at least one person in the school? If your child has special needs or special interests, do you know if there is a sense of belonging, be it a teacher who listens and cares, a club, athletics, cultural arts, or anything that represents the uniqueness that defines your child?

The past 10 years have taught us that students who feel engaged, have a sense of belonging, and experience a welcoming school climate are far less likely to experience bullying. Parents must feel connected as well as model respect and engagement with the school. Do you know what is happening at school? Are events held at a time you can attend? Does someone speak your language, respect your culture, and listen when you express concerns? These are all aspects of a positive school climate.

2. Cyberbullying

Anything transmitted electronically is likely to be permanent and to spread quickly, whether it is true or not. Many students do not grasp the risk associated with social networking, online groups, and Internet communication. Parents must teach their children that there is no privacy. Rumors can spread at the touch of a cell phone button, lies can be perpetrated and spread, and pictures can be manipulated. The most common methods of cyberbullying are:

• Sending text or digital imaging messages that are mean or threatening

By Kayla McCarnes and Nancy W. Sager

In the midst of the rigor of a twenty-first century curriculum, can we squeeze in a few lessons on empathy and compassion? “Touchy-Feely” activities seem like an unwise use of time as we plow through multiplication algorithms, written language activities, and scientific investigations. Yet, we want all of our students to score “well above average” on state standards AND be able to play well with others.

Taking into consideration the time constraints on all educators, there are some strategies that can be embedded into daily lesson plans and the overall school environment. Helping children to care is a foundational piece for success in school and in life.

The capacity for empathy and caring behavior comes early and comes young. As author and beloved kindergarten teacher at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools Vivian Gussin Paley once said, “Children are always on the edge of committing an act of kindness.”

As they grow older, however, this natural tendency for kindness is gradually eroded as children are desensitized by certain cartoons and movies that tend to show that hurting someone is a humorous or legitimate way to gain power.

We can counter these messages by providing students with a safe, respectful, inclusive environment where teachers can teach and students can learn.

Five Strategies to Promote Compassion and Caring in Students

1. Create a Caring School Climate: Provide students with a physically and psychologically safe, caring environment. You then have numerous opportunities to make a difference daily—while maintaining your standards for discipline and classroom management. The more secure a student feels, the more potential there is to show kindness.