Psycho-Education for Teachers: Understanding the Child Guidance Process Part 1-Definition, Elements, and Steps

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Kottler and Kottler (2000) define the child guidance or counseling approach as those interactional skills that teachers need to relate with children in a helping capacity. Simply put, child guidance skills are helping skills. According to Kottler and Kottler, teachers equipped with basic helping strategies like listening and responding therapeutically to students gain better clarity of childrens feelings, better understanding of their motives, and greater resolve in following through a plan to change childrens behavior. The authors conclude that adding child guidance or helping skills to any teachers educational repertoire helps the teacher create better relationships with students in a shorter period of time, improve all relationships, including personal ones, as well as becoming more influential (i.e. being able to persuade) in interacting with students (p. 3). In addition, state Kottler and Kottler, child guidance or helping skills will be critical in helping teachers resolve discipline problems and in conflict resolution, enabling teachers to move troubled students from a stage of confusion to some sort of problem resolution, or at least some degree of understanding. Students in general and special education classrooms who are dealing with challenges such as low self-esteem, poor peer relations, deficits in social problem solving, poor self-control, low self-awareness, and habitually disruptive behaviors are in

need of socio-emotional support and interventions way beyond what any extra academic remediation can provide. With the proper training and psycho-educational skills, teachers can have the therapeutic impact that makes a difference in the lives and behaviors of children struggling socio-emotionally. More specifically, child guidance skills are skills in relating with students in a helping capacity that supports, challenges, and encourages children while they resolve their own socio-emotional issues. For students with recurrent -and in some cases severe- behavior problems, the guidance process is kept apart from disciplining the child; that is, we do not guide and discipline at the same time. Concentrating on rapport and empathy, the teacher conveys the willingness to understand the reasons behind the students disruptive behavior without judging or blaming the child for the disruptive behavior. Teachers proficient in child guidance skills find resilience and self-motivation in the psycho-educational principles that students do their behavior but they are not their behavior and all students can learn to self-manage their emotions and behaviors. The psycho-educational teacher sees habitually disruptive students as decision makers who have reasons for their choices; the teacher works on recruiting the student in the process of behavioral change, helping the child see the costs or negatives and benefits or positives of his behavioral choices, and guiding the student in using his strengths and abilities in resolving his socioemotional needs. An essential role in child guidance is to help students see things clearly and rationally when troubling feelings and social problems are present. Using the child guidance approach, the teacher helps the student in helping himself or herself. Meier and Davis (1997) identify several elements that need to be present in this helping process. From Meier and Davis we adapted to school age children the following list.

Child Guidance Elements 1. Making personal contact by communicating and connecting emotionally with the student. When we connect emotionally with a troubled and/or habitually disruptive student, we build trust and rapport. The teacher should remain open to the childs lead; for example, if the child chats, we chat for a minute, and then we return to the issue or concern at hand. 2. Developing a teacher-student working alliance where we motivate and engage the student in resolving the emotional and/or behavioral issues interfering with her learning. As

Meier and Davis say, alliances do not work if the child lacks motivation or we demand and force the student to change. 3. Pacing the student or following along in terms of the students expressed concern and feelings. When pacing, the teacher restates the childs concern, without any judgment or interpretation. As the authors state, in pacing, we do not add to the childs thinking and we give no direction to the child. Pacing is simply the stage where we let the child know that we are listening and that we understand the childs concern. The authors identify two methods of pacing: a. Reflection of feeling or recognizing the childs feelings and subsequently mirroring the feelings, and b. Restatement of content, or noticing the childs thoughts and restating the content of those thoughts. Meier and Davis state that troubled individuals may be unaware of their feelings and experiences until they hear a restatement or paraphrase of the content. 4. Speaking briefly. To be helpful and therapeutic, the teacher should always talk less than the student talks. The authors recommend communicating using one or two sentences at a time, except when summarizing. It is the students job to talk, not the teachers job. Sometimes, listening is all that the child needs. 5. Using benign confrontation, keeping in mind that we confront a student in the same proportion that we support the student. In other words, if we support the student, we can confront; if we never support the student, we do not confront. As Shertzer and Stone explain (in Meier and Davis, 1997), confronting does not mean opposing the child, but pointing out discrepancies between the childs goals and the childs behavior. For example, the child wants to have friends (goal), something that she will not accomplish if she continues bullying other children (behavior). According to Shertzer and Stone, confronting is a way of telling the student, Stop a minute! Look at what you are doing (p. 11). 6. If we expect the student to change his behavior, we must help the student process his behavior. Processing or discussing with the student his feelings about the event

(emotional and behavioral issues), it is not the same as content, which is the overt topic of the conversation. For example, Student: I punched Justin because he cursed me.

Content: The students belief that the other childs behavior caused the problem. Process: Teacher: The teacher focuses on the students feelings. Seems that it is difficult for you to talk about this. What were you

feeling when he cursed? 7. Focusing on feelings. Learning to recognize and express feelings in socially acceptable ways is the greatest challenge of troubled, anger-prone, and acting-out students. Meier and Davis advice that we focus on the Big Four: anger, sadness, fear, and joy, helping students recognize these feelings and the reasons for them. Teach children to use the sentence, I feel _____ (e.g. angry) because _____ (e.g. I did not get the ball when we were playing basketball). According to the authors, teaching troubled students to pay attention to their feelings increases their motivation to change their behavior. 8. To help children increase awareness of their feelings, a popular technique in the clinical setting is to use our own feelings as a guide. As the child talks, we share our emotional reaction to the childs situation; for example, I feel sad when I hear that, or I dont know about you, but I am feeling irritated right now. When we define, explain, and model a variety of feelings, we help students having difficulty experiencing or recognizing feelings, and we reassure students that all feelings are okay. 9. Individualizing the child guidance process to adapt the rules and techniques to each particular child. As the authors state, we should talk with the student, not to the student (pp. 2-19). The purpose of the child guidance or helping approach is to initiate changes in how the child perceives the event (e.g. from troubling to challenging), influencing the way the child thinks, feels, and behaves. In other words, using child guidance techniques and procedures, we influence the childs belief system and persuade the child to change. This is what Kottler and Kottler (2000) call consciousness raising, or promoting more self-understanding and self-discovery by

altering the way the child sees himself, others, and the world. From Kottler and Kottler, we add the following elements to the original list: 10. We are dealing with concerns, not problems. A problem implies that there is one solution; however, according to Kottler and Kottler, most personal issues have no single answer or just the right solution, and people deal with the same issues or concerns for the rest of their lives. 11. Do not give advice. Even when you give good advice, you are reinforcing the belief that the child cannot make her own personal decisions. It is the students decision, not the teachers decision. 12. Do not try to do too much; it is the childs behavioral or emotional issue, not your issue. 13. Slip into a helping mode; that is, focused concentration and nonjudgmental. Stay as neutral and as accepting as you can. 14. Increase the childs awareness of the world, but also of himself in relation to others. 15. Use coached dialogue, helping the child articulate what is most important to him, giving feedback on strategies that the child might try, and providing opportunities so that the child practices the new behaviors in ways that are more positive. 16. Provide task facilitation, encouraging the child to try new and positive ways of behaving. 17. Define success as making an effort and trying your best, so that the child feels better about herself and her choices no matter what the outcome is.

Child Guidance Steps Kottler and Kottler (2000) identify five main steps in the child guidance or helping process: Step 1: Assessment or identification of the present complaint. During the assessment phase, we get an idea of what is happening; we help the child identify what is bothering him and collect the important background information. We accomplish this by asking questions, reflecting on the childs feelings, and clarifying the content of what the child says. Child guidance or helping skills that we use to assess are attending, listening, focusing, and observing. Step 2: Exploration or digging deeper. Child guidance skills that we apply here are reflecting feelings, responding to content, probing, questioning, and empathy. Through reflection, we help

the child clarify what he is thinking and feeling. Our empathy helps the child reach the hidden nuances of the experience. In other words, with sensitivity and understanding, we help the child explore the depth of his feelings; for example, how embarrassed or anxious the child is feeling, how much the child misses his old school, and how strongly he wishes he could feel less vulnerable or behave courageously. Step 3: Understanding. According to Kottler and Kottler, the deeper the exploration of feelings, the more profound the insight. This step requires child guidance skills such as confrontation, interpretation, challenging, self-disclosing, and giving information. In this step, we help the child understand why and how the problem developed, the childs role in creating her difficulties, what the child is doing to sabotage improvement, and what topics or themes appear repeatedly. The authors identify seven kinds of personal insights that we can help students develop: 1. Becoming aware of deep feelings or I did not know I felt 2. Grasping unconscious desires; for example, When I cursed Mr. Evans, I was really mad at Justin. 3. Learning to be vigilant about certain behaviors, e.g., I was not aware that I demand to be the leader every time we work in cooperative groups. 4. Owning denied parts of self, e.g., Sometimes I can be 5. Understanding the hidden pay-offs of self-defeating behaviors; for example, the benefits of her recurrent angry feelings for an anger-prone child or the benefits of acting-out behaviors for a chronically disruptive student. 6. Helping the student identify, debate, and replace the irrational and self-defeating thoughts that maintain her troubled feelings and negative behaviors. 7. Constructing an alternative view of personal reality; for example, It is not so much that Im a failure as I sometimes dont end up finishing what I start. (p. 23). Step 4: Action. As Kottler and Kottler state, without action to change behavior, understanding and insight are useless (p. 23). The action step is where we help children translate what they know and understand into a plan that will get them what they want. The action step divides into two sub-steps:

Sub-step 1: Goals establishment, helping the child define what each goal means, and if necessary, breaking bigger goals into smaller goals or smaller steps. Sub-step 2: Generating alternatives by helping the child create a list of alternative behaviors, narrowing the alternatives to those that seem more realistic, and finally, asking the child for a commitment to follow through on the plan. The child guidance skills that we apply in this action step are goal setting, problem solving, roleplaying, reinforcing, and decision-making. Step 5: Evaluation. As a final step, we need to determine the extent to which the child has reached the goal. Here, we assess what the child has accomplished, and take note of what the child still needs to do. During the evaluation step, we apply the child guidance skills of questioning, summarizing, and supporting. In summary, child guidance is the process where the teacher systematically observes the students behavior, narrows possibilities, and finally helps the student take action. Kottler and Kottler (2000) describe the main job of teachers in counseling or helping capacities as one of showing students that we are a concerned and skilled listener, that we can demonstrate our understanding of their experience, and that we are someone on whom students can count (p. 26).

References Kottler, J. A., & Kottler, E. (2000). Counseling skills for teachers. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Meier, S. T., & Davis, S. R. (1997). The elements of counseling. Third Edition. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.

About the Author

Carmen Y. Reyes, The Psycho-Educational Teacher, has more than twenty years of experience as a self-contained special education teacher, resource room teacher, and educational diagnostician. Carmen has taught at all grade levels, from kindergarten to post secondary. Carmen is an expert in the application of behavior management strategies, and in teaching students with learning or behavior problems. Her classroom background, in New York City and her native Puerto Rico, includes ten years teaching emotionally disturbed/behaviorally disordered children and four years teaching students with a learning disability or mental retardation. Carmen has a bachelors degree in psychology (University of Puerto Rico) and a masters degree in special education with a specialization in emotional disorders (Long Island University, Brooklyn: NY). She also has extensive graduate training in psychology (30+ credits). Carmen is the author of 60+ books and articles in psycho-education and in alternative teaching techniques for low-achieving students. You can read the complete collection of articles on Scribd, or her blog, The Psycho-Educational Teacher. To download free the eGuide, Persuasive Discipline: Using Power Messages and Suggestions to Influence Children Toward Positive Behavior, visit Carmens blog.