The "Why" Behind Classroom Behaviors, PreK-5. Jamie Chaves
face daily.
Let me give you a little background to help you see why I can so wholeheartedly endorse the authors of this book. I’ve known and worked with Jamie and Ashley for years. They’ve both served in leadership positions at The Center for Connection (CFC), an interdisciplinary clinic I founded and direct, where we’ve gathered a team of experts from various fields such as mental health, neuropsychology, educational therapy, occupational therapy, and speech and language therapy. Jamie and Ashley have made enormous contributions to the success and vision of the CFC, where we ground everything we do in the science of interpersonal neurobiology (IPNB), an integrative field that looks at the findings of many fields of science—neuroscience, psychology, education, etc.—that help us understand how we function in the world. One of the primary foundations of the framework of IPNB is a concept called integration, which describes the process of different parts becoming linked together while maintaining their distinctiveness. For example, different parts of the brain that are specialized to perform specific processes are also functionally linked with one another, so the student can function with a whole brain instead of just responding in a moment from only part of the brain. Integration matters, because when students are in states of integration, they are more flexible and adaptive. They can then be more regulated and stable, making better decisions and more effectively addressing obstacles that appear before them. Being in states of integration leads to well-being, receptivity to learning, and many other positive outcomes. Therefore, we want to promote integration in our classrooms.
Integration is actually a great way to think about mental health, whether we mean a healthy mind, a healthy relationship, a healthy classroom or school community, or a healthy world. With this information, along with another big foundational concept of IPNB—neuroplasticity, the process by which experiences change the brain—we can begin to examine whether a particular type of intervention might be promoting integration within a student in a specific way or getting in the way of integration, and whether there might be a more effective way to help a child regain balance—in a particular moment, and in her life overall.
Guided by the principles of IPNB, everything we do at the CFC proceeds from this unique, integration-based way of viewing individuals who are facing obstacles in their lives. Traditionally, adults who have worked with struggling kids have focused on symptoms and behaviors, diagnosing a problem and then creating the appropriate interventions. That makes sense from a certain perspective, but the problem is that too many times, this process occurs without deep attention to the “why”—what’s causing the symptoms? The way I talk about it, and the way Dan Siegel and I explain it in our book No Drama Discipline, is that it’s important to “chase the why.”
Chasing the why changes how we work with kids and the kinds of outcomes we achieve. For example, I once worked in therapy with a third-grader who was experiencing a lot of anxiety. He felt paralyzed any time he was asked to speak in front of his small class, made up of kids he’d known since preschool. He was also having trouble sleeping and was experiencing almost daily stomach aches, and every day he would cry, not wanting to go to school, even though he loved his teacher and had been primarily happy at school before third grade. As I began to explore his individual anxiety experience—its severity and frequency, when it started, what triggered it, what gave relief, how his parents amplified or calmed his states, and more—I also talked with his teacher and asked his parents about his daily schedule. I was chasing the why.
I discovered that while his teacher and parents were suggesting that he “try harder” because he wasn’t completing much work during the school day, he was actually working harder than any other student, spending as many as three to five hours after school each day trying to complete his homework. My mental health lens helped me understand the issue from the anxiety disorder theory and see that as anxiety would go up, it was harder for him to concentrate and complete his work. But I needed more than that knowledge: I needed curiosity. I wondered about anxiety as evidence that a nervous system is in hyper-arousal, and that led me to ask the next question: What’s causing or at the source of that hyper-arousal? Why was his nervous system sending out threat and reactivity signals, when all the other kids were experiencing his classroom as a safe environment?
The thinking that he experienced anxiety because he had an anxiety disorder seemed like circular reasoning. But worse, where did that diagnosis leave him? It wasn’t very helpful to me, either, as I sought to help him. Sure, I could work with him using “top-down” interventions, where I would give him experiences that would activate the top parts of his brain, like his prefrontal cortex, to encourage insight and problem-solving. And I could also work with him using some “bottom-up” interventions, where I would give him experiences to regulate and calm the more reactive, lower structures of his brain, his nervous system, and his body through movement, rhythm, guided breathing, or sensory input. Those were helpful strategies, but they didn’t really address the issue.
As I chased the why, I began to wonder what was preventing this child from managing the demands of his classroom. Luckily, at the CFC I worked with and learned from neuropsychologists and brilliant educational therapists, and as a team we explored some possibilities of some learning challenges. Could he have an attentional regulation challenge, maybe? Or perhaps a significantly slower processing speed, compared to his other cognitive skills? After a psychoeducational evaluation, and a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), inattentive type, and a processing speed percentile in the teens, along with the rest of his cognitive profile in the 80–90th percentile, it became clear that the anxiety was communication. It was telling us, “Something isn’t working here for me. Doing well is unachievable for me, and I keep feeling like a failure. I try really hard, and still I can’t keep up.” He wasn’t articulating that message with his words, but his behavior was definitely telling us. Of course he felt anxious! Anxiety was an appropriate emotion, given the discrepancy between the demands and expectations of his classroom and his current capacity. The anxiety was a symptom, and one that should not have been seen as pathology, but rather helpful information, leading us to a deeper understanding that would allow us to better support him so he could thrive.
Peeling back the layers to get to the why led us to discover some really important things that allowed him to realize that he wasn’t “dumb” like he thought he was. On the contrary, he simply had a powerful brain that had strengths as well as challenges that made parts of school more difficult. With the right accommodations in the classroom, combined with working with an educational therapist for a period of time to learn how to capitalize on his gifts and find work-arounds for his areas of difficulty, and eventually going on a low-dose stimulant, everything changed. The adjusted perspective turned out to be transformative for this kid, who, I’m happy to report, thrived, achieved, and even spoke in front of the whole school the next year without much trouble. That’s what chasing the why can do for us.
For another student, years earlier, I was asked to observe and make some suggestions for a first grader—I’ll call her Lila—who refused to walk, but would instead stomp everywhere she went. She would not sit on the rug but would hide under her desk with her hands over her ears, sometimes plugging her nose. She had such intense emotional storms that at times she looked almost dissociated. She was very smart, yet she couldn’t get ideas down on paper if she had to use a pencil to write. At times she was a model first-grader with lovely collaborative social interactions, then the next moment she’d be oppositional, dysregulated, and inconsolable. Her experienced teacher’s strategies that were consistently effective for most students didn’t make even a tiny bit of difference in changing how Lila behaved day after day.
There was no trauma history, and Lila was fortunate enough to have engaged parents who were both providing her with secure attachment. Her environment seemed “just right” in terms of providing developmentally appropriate stimulation and challenge. She lived in a safe neighborhood, and after ruling out pervasive developmental disorders, the only way I knew to view her actions was as evidence of some sort of mood or behavioral disorder, neither of which really fit. I could see that her nervous system was experiencing a threat response, but I couldn’t figure out what was going on.
Chasing the why, I went down the rabbit hole of researching and reading about what I was seeing. That’s when I discovered the phrase “sensory processing” and learned about