2016 Foxborough Summer Institute

Behaviorally challenging students can exhibit intense temper outbursts, oppositionality, and verbal and physical aggression. Behavioral difficulties like this in the classroom are the leading cause of teacher stress and burnout as well as the primary reason for departures from teaching the academic curriculum. Yet, traditional school disciplinary strategies tend not to work with the students to whom they are most applied and are often associated with significantly increasing risk for dropout and juvenile justice involvement.
At the same time, there has been renewed interest in the effects of chronic, overwhelming stress and trauma on children’s development, learning and behavior. Schools and classrooms strive to provide a trauma-informed teaching and school discipline. Yet, educators, counselors and school safety officers often still struggle to understand the impact of trauma on brain development in a concrete and tangible way and long for concrete strategies that operationalize what brain science tells us will be helpful to facilitate development arrested as a result of complex developmental trauma.
Dr. Stuart Ablon, Director of Think:Kids at Massachusetts General Hospital and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, will provide an alternative conceptualization of the difficulties of these students; namely, that their difficulties are a byproduct of lagging skills in the domains of flexibility/adaptability, frustration tolerance, and problem-solving. Based on this conceptualization, he will introduce an approach to transform school discipline called Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS). CPS provides replicable guideposts for adults to build helping relationships with children while fostering a relational process that develops flexibility, problem solving, and emotion regulation skills. The CPS model has helped adults teach these lagging cognitive skills while reducing the frequency and intensity of challenging behavior in diverse settings, including families, schools, group homes, and inpatient and juvenile detention facilities. In the course of this training, Dr. Ablon will make complicated neurodevelopmental concepts accessible and provide a practical evidence-based process for trauma-informed teaching and school discipline that everyone at school can follow (grades PreK-12).