There is only one type of special needs child integrated into mainstream schools in Russia: the child with deviant behavior. The main reason for this is that our special education science hadn't distinguished these children as those who need special help in education. Problems in behavior are always classed as a defect of parental upbringing and / or the poor work of the education establishment. In Soviet schools, all the arsenal of pedagogical means was directed, with conviction, at trying to enforce good behavior through negative sanctions. It was completely ineffective. As a result, every regular school had about 0.5% of children aged 11 to 14 "on the street" every year.
In Soviet schools, all the arsenal of pedagogical means was directed, with conviction, at trying to enforce good behavior through negative sanctions. It was completely ineffective. As a result, every regular school had about 0.5% of children aged 11 to 14 "on the street" every year. According to our education laws, school administrations can't exclude the deviant child from school. And there is no way, provided by the state, of getting an alternative education until the child reaches 15 years of age, unless, that is, the child has a serious physical illness: when the state will provide a 10 hours-a-week course at home.
So there is no choice for schools other than to keep working, and working, and working with these children. In conditions where there are no staff trained to deal with such children in school, the psychological mechanism of subconscious emotional suppression usually starts working. The relationships of teenagers with teachers, and other children, are increasingly affected by the constant small, but negative, signals. Both sides start to feel discomfort in the interaction process and then full emotional rejection. The child has no internal resources to change these neurotic circumstances and remove from the situation.
So the shortcomings in science and the law causes these underground processes in the organization to be difficult to control. The appearance and development of the psychological service in the education system within the last 10 years has changed the situation a little. Conceptions are changing. New psychological programs and managerial techniques for working with such children have been created. But still there is no organized pedagogical support.
Within each school, what should the administrators and a single psychologist do in such circumstances? We believe psychologists have to work with the resources available in the normal classroom situation, and focus on the interactions between teacher and pupils. In the classroom of course the teacher has the main responsibility for outcomes.
In Russian pedagogical, psychological and psychiatric scientific literature deviant children have been studied very well. But there is an obvious lack of articles about what is happening with teachers in this interaction. What stimulates the mechanism by which the child becomes emotionally excluded? Why is the interaction with them so difficult? What must we do to achieve long term interaction with deviant children?
We tried to identify the main psychological defence mechanisms, used in the professional work of the mainstream teacher, which help perpetuate an inadequate strategy in the relationship with deviant children. With this aim we organized a system of psychological support for teachers in three regular schools in Yaroslavl. We did this, because it appeared to us that there was no other logical way, in our circumstances, for improving the quality of interaction: this was the only way we could help both the teacher and the child.
We distinguished five internal conflicts that are commonly provoked in teachers by the deviant behavior of children. They are:
Conflict of values. Doctor N.Klueva performed an investigation based on a study of the personal values that characterize the contemporary Russian teacher. (Values are assumed to influence motivation. In this context we are not concerned with current emotions and tensions). The results show that teachers' values have a complex but antagonistic structure:
They result partly from the traditional values of Russian people: feeling of community, low level of pragmatism, orientation towards spiritual and creative development, wide extent of deep and close professional relations, high level of reflection. But today, the main priority amongst teachers' personal values, is the orientation towards personal success, comfort in their 'local world' and to health. There is therefore an obvious contradiction between their declared values and those that really exist in a teacher's life. The latter values influence the teachers' professional behavioral strategy. Children with deviant behavior prevent the realization of these values. The basis of an individual teacher's professional development is governed by the values and understanding they have of their professional life. The work of the psychologist involves helping the teachers' to raise their conscious understanding of the reasons for their feelings and actions. Psychological support involves looking for means of reflexive analysis: helping build effective relationships with others involved in the educational process.
Emotional conflict. As a result of eight years experience interacting with teachers in group-work we well understand the typical teacher emotional conflict. It is well known that deviant children actualize old emotional traumas and tension in teachers, who can then experience strong negative feelings: offence, anger, annoyance, malice, and impotency. The difficulty is that teachers have to suppress these feelings, and often, simultaneously, deny their existence. They are convinced that they have no right to emotionally reject a child; a mechanism of displacement is working. It means teachers do not work with their feelings and are therefore unable to manage them. It usually leads to an accumulation of them. This process manifests itself in the development of unproductive communication strategies: rejection, avoidance, victimization (bullying). These strategies are formed on the back of strong feelings. Progress is made only once there is acknowledgment and acceptance of these feelings. So, professional development of the teacher usually requires the management of these feelings, acceptance of strong feelings and acceptance of the variety of children's behavior. This is one aspect of the psychological support permanently needed by teachers from psychologists.
Cognitive conflict. Our colleague from Yaroslavl State University, U.Metelskaya, has investigated the differences between teacher's perceptions. She has used Kelly's repertoire grade technique. Comparison of the results between two groups of teachers showed that so called 'group discordant' teachers have the following characteristics: 1) They have a lower coefficient of cognitive complexity than the control group. This means these teachers see mainly negative, as opposed to positive, facets in deviant children. 2) They have higher levels of egocentrism in their perception of the child. J. Piadje described egocentrism as "the putting of self-image into the focus of attention, the subjective projection of this focus, and the distortion of all perceptions that seem unrelated". Teachers' perceptional egocentrism causes perceptional distortion of the child and produces systematic mistakes in dealing with other people's images and practical interactions with them. The conflict arises because of the teacher's mistaken perception of the child: which adversely influences the choice of communication strategy. Hence the interaction with the psychologist has the objective of correcting the teachers' perception of the child: through giving them insight of the child's viewpoint.
Conflict of behavior. "I really do not know how to react". This is a request for interaction with the psychologist. Teachers value very highly the respect they get from children. When meeting disrespect and strong resistance, most teachers regress into a parental (Berns) or infantile mode of response: taking offence, feeling resentment, embarrassment. Whilst discordant behavior is normal for deviant children, the resulting conflicts severely frustrate most teachers who's normal communication methods are inadequate for such children. It is only teachers with a strong "self-conception" and can understand the way the child will "read" their actions and words, who can avoid such frustration. As regards their attitude to conflict, teachers need to realize that conflicts are an unavoidable reality: that quiet, professional, conflict resolution is a part of teaching. Hence, for the realization of the behavior tool, there needs to be development of the professional "I-conception": one more goal for the psychological support of the teacher.
Conflict in inter-professional interaction. A teacher's work is usually very individual and unique: they stand alone with their class, and are not oriented towards teamwork. They start realizing the necessity for teamwork when they need to deal with the problems of special needs children. We undertook a sociometrical investigation of the teaching staff in three Yaroslavl schools: and developed a picture of interaction inside the teacher groups. Computer processing of the results gave us the following picture, summarized in table 2:
| · | The teacher groups realized the personal value of belonging to some group, and most of the teachers accepted, and were accepted by, the other individuals in their group. |
| · | Teachers were open and relaxed in these groups and felt appreciated there. (CA, CN, SA, SN). |
| · | But the atmosphere was not one that encouraged interaction. The parameter for interaction measured very low: on the level for students in the 7th grade (about 13 years old) |
| · | Perception of the situation through intuitive use of all senses. Some teachers do not show 'signals' to and / or notice 'signals' from their partners, and cannot therefore improve the situation through communication with others. (RM, RAM). |
| · | On the other hand, they can signal / notice trivial details (L1); |
| · | Each of them imagines their own individual approach in working with children is the only option. (RAK); |
| · | Most of them are poor at informing their colleagues and others about their feelings, intentions and ideas (RK); |
| · | Actualization: the level of information processing in these groups are on the level of children in the 3rd grade (about 10 years old): Teachers are working and living out behavioral stereotypes: not by thinking (L2); |
| · | In interaction with each other, teachers are usually very restrained (L3). |
These findings show why the computer graphic of the teacher group results is a wide and crumbly picture. We can say that there is no constructive interaction here.
The work: We offered the directors of these three schools a program of psychological support for their teachers. Over a period of two years we provided three training programs and regular individual teacher consultations. These provided help with personal problems, and in dealing with children with behavior problems (BP). All the teachers in these schools participated in the training programs; which covered the subjects:
| · | "Communication without pressure" |
| · | "Re-evaluation co-consulting" |
| · | "Conflict resolution" |
The goals of this work are summarized in table 1.
Table 1:
| Teachers Internal Conflicts | The goals of the psychologist-teacher interaction |
| Conflicts of values | Nurture of conscious aims and foundation of the professional activity |
| Conflicts of emotions | Acceptance of the feelings, development of the capacity to manage them |
| Perceptual conflict | Comprehension of own defensive mechanisms and transfer reactions |
| Conflict of behavioral strategies | Development of communication skills and professional "I-conception" |
| Conflict of interactions | Development of team values and co-ordination skills |
The effectiveness: The new discovery for us was finding a method for measuring the effectiveness of our work. Yaroslavl's "social environment monitoring laboratory" has created a computer program for processing sociometric information. Thanks to this, psychologists now have a real opportunity to observe the results of their work.
This is what we discovered: There were three aspects:
Table 2:
| Measured Parameters | ID | Before | After |
| Quantity(amount) of choices of the individual | n> | 87.8 | 91.7 |
| Quantity of choices, received by the individual | n< | 87.8 | 91.8 |
| Social Activity | CA | 0.8 | 1.0 |
| Social Status | CN | 0.7 | 1.0 |
| Attentiveness to each Other | SA | 0.9 | 1.0 |
| Extent of Common Perceptions | RM | 77.7 | 80.7 |
| Ability to Inform Colleagues about feelings, ideas etc | RK | 1.5 | 2.3 |
| Level of Information Exchange | RAM | 62.3 | 53.0 |
| Perception that own methods = only option | RAK | -0.1 | 0.0 |
| No. of 'Rejected' Persons in the Organization | L0 | 8.1 | 7.9 |
| Volume of Trivial 'Signals' Given / Perceived | L1 | 58.2 | 32.6 |
| 'Signal' Processing Ability | L2 | 19.3 | 46.1 |
| Volume of Impulsive Reactions | L3 | 14.4 | 13.3 |
They show the whole picture of the team has changed. One can see changes in most of the measured parameters:
| - | teachers social activity become higher (CA) |
| - | the social status of many teachers' changed positively (CN) |
| - | teachers became more attentive to each other (SA) |
| - | common perception of situations has appeared (RM) |
| - | increased levels of information exchange (RAM,RAK) |
| - | teachers created more common sets of values |
| - | the number of rejected persons in the organization reduced (L0) |
| - | 'signal' perceptions became more accomplished and of practical value (L1) |
| - | processing ability doubled (L2) |
| - | there was a reduction in impulsive reactions (L3) |
Analysis of the teachers' written reflections showed the following changes in their requests for further work:
The final key statistic relates to the change in the number of children, over the period, who where considered to have behavioral problems: they were reduced by 60%.
Our conclusion was that psychological support for teachers could give highly positive results in reducing the psychological suppression mechanism and in reducing the numbers of children with behavioral problems.
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