Working with students who experience trauma with Paul Baker
Students who have experienced trauma need adults in their lives who act as “therapeutic helpers”. In our ongoing series exploring restorative practices, our guest Paul Baker describes describes his experiences as a teacher, alternative school administrator, foster parent and adoptive parent and how these experiences, along with academic research, informed his understanding of working with students who experienced trauma.
Links
The Georgia Network for Educational and Therapeutic Services (GNETS), which we both mention, in the podcast is a statewide network of alternative schools that provide intensive educational services to students with disabilities in Georgia. Dr. Baker is a former director of the Northstar GNETS program. More information can be found here: GNETS page at Georgia Department of Education
Urie Bronfenbrenner who developed the Ecological Systems Theory was mentioned in our discussion. More information can be found at Cornell University Bronfenbrenner Center website
Bronfenbrenner also influenced the work of Nick Hobbs who authored The Troubled and Troubling Child and developed several early psycho-educational programs. More information is provided by Pressley Ridge
Transcript
Scott Lee 0:01
Greeting friends and colleagues. Welcome to the Thoughtful Teacher Podcast, a service of Oncourse Education Solutions. I am Scott Lee, I hope you are safe and well. In this episode, we continue our ongoing series on restorative practices with a discussion about working with children and adolescents who have experienced trauma with our guest, Dr. Paul Baker. Dr. Baker is a developmental neuropsychologist, former special education administrator, and foster and adoptive parent. He is the developer of the Personbrain Model, a neuro-transactional behavior support model, co-author of the books, The Hopeful Brain: Neuro-transactional Repair for Disconnected Children and Youth and The Minded Brain: A Social, Emotional, and Culturally Responsive Curriculum. His experience in merging brain-based science with trauma informed strength based psychological treatment has been instrumental in changing mental health and educational programs across North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. Dr. Baker's dynamic professional development engages participants across a wide variety of cultures, and encourages them to work with troubled children in more innovative and brain friendly ways. We will begin our discussion today, talking about how work as a substitute teacher led to finding new ways to support students who experienced trauma. Welcome, Paul Baker to the Thoughtful Teacher Podcast.
Paul Baker 1:46
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
Scott Lee 1:48
Well, thank you for joining us. Let's get started. First off with a little bit of your journey, how does somebody who's a special education teacher end up as a developmental psychologist?
Paul Baker 2:01
Well, it's an interesting thing, because when I was in undergraduate school, I had no intention of even going into education. So we kind of start, there might be the best place for me to begin to the kind of the story. When I was in college, I actually added on a degree and education, and I wasn't ever sure if I would ever use it or not. And so when I came out of school, an opportunity arose to go and work at a program at that time, that was known as the Georgia Psycho-educational Network. And now it's called the Georgia Network for Education and Therapeutic Supports [GNETS]. And I came in as a long-term substitute. I went for the interview, and I had no idea what kind of school I was going to I didn't know what exactly the situation was. And the person interviewed me and told me about it, and started saying, Are you going to be working with, you know, children who have troubled pasts. And that, you know, in many cases, they may be involved with the law. And this was really something that was very unfamiliar to me, I certainly had not trained to do that. But when I got in, and I started doing some substitute teacher work for a lady who had gone on maternity leave, I got in and I found out that it was really, really intrigued by that whole practice of working in special ed with children that I don't remember ever seen growing up, you know, I'd never seen children that had run out of a classroom or thrown a desk across the classroom or said, you know, F-you to a teacher or something significant like that. And when I was in there, I started to realize that I had a little bit of a knack to be able to dialogue with these kids and to deescalate them. And I don't know how that came around, because it's like I said, no prior experience, personally or professionally, but it was something that really, I found to be quite engaging, and felt pretty good at that about doing. And as that kind of surface, I found myself, just about a year and a half later, I was not only had been a teacher, but I also ended up becoming the principal of the school by the age of 23. And so, it was kind of a unique situation. And so that kind of began my journey, as I started to have to look at what are the best ways to intervene and support and to provide some transformation for kids in school. And, you know, I started to realize that a lot of the practices that were being used at that point were very punishment based when we weren't getting very good results. And so, I started to look around at strategies and techniques that maybe alternatives to punishment and, you know, things like restorative justice started to come out. And then at that time, I found the Circle of Courage Network and Reclaiming Youth Network at that point. And really the practices back then and this was, gosh in the late 1990’s and the early 2000’s, and probably when most of this I would say was starting to take hold, really started to resonate with me. And when we started to bring that thinking back to the school, it really transformed the culture in which we were within which we were working. And that transformation involved now seeing instead of teachers walking children down the hall to come to my office, I saw them walking down the hall, therapeutically dialoguing with these kids, and the change was just absolutely significant. And back then, it was very common for children in these types of settings to be frequently, they would be restrained, or we've been back in that time use timeout rooms. And in 2004, we had made the decision that we wanted to drastically reduce our restraints, and drastically eliminate the use of timeout in any form. And I remember the time bringing that back to my staff, and you know, some of them even saying, Oh, I'm gonna quit if you take these things away from us, because there's no way we'll be able to support these kids, they'll start to, they'll start to take over the school. But the opposite happened, actually, we saw restraints go down dramatically. And we completely eliminated the use of restraint by means of seclusion, and timeout rooms, just by simply saying, it's not an option anymore. And people now had to look for some other things. While I was in that time, I was also going to graduate school, and I was getting my PhD in psychology. And I started to take classes that were oriented around the brain. And as I was taking these classes in psychology, and thinking about the work that I was doing on a day-to-day basis, as a professional, I started to realize how absolutely critical it is that we understand the brain, and that we needed to be able to understand basic systems of the brain. Because if you understand the basic systems of the brain, then it's a lot easier to try to identify interventions that are work and found out that it really does matter what interventions you use, based on the brain state of the child at that moment. You know, there are brain states that are our logical brain states where your thinking brain is actually in play. But then there are also brain states where your survival system is in play. And the unique thing about of survival-based behavior is it has no thinking attached to it. It's very, very reactive. And so these come from our experiences from this survival type of reaction, and the experiences of our ancestors, in some cases, the things that they've handed down to us. And so intervening in those different ways. Were very different. And so people would ask me, I'd say, what I'm doing is not working. And it was a lot easier to explain the why behind it not working through brain-based applications, because I would say you're using thinking strategies in a situation where the brain is no longer thinking it's reacting. And when we were able to stop and have people pause and say to themselves, or ask the question, what's happening? What am I observing? Where does this behavior appear to be coming from based on what's being said or being done in the moment, people started making better decisions, and we started seeing a better, happier professional culture. You know, the greatest thing is that for 10 years, we maintained a 94% retention rate is state of staff. And that's really unheard of in that field, because it's a high burnout field. But when people felt like they were supportive and supported, then the job was very fulfilling to them.
Scott Lee 8:51
That is really interesting. The effect on the professional staff, I mean, a 10-year 94% retention rate is almost any school, even the ones that are considered the most easy where they have the easiest students to work with would have trouble doing that. So that is really, really interesting. So the other thing that I wanted to ask, I know, in addition to, to your work in teaching, and your graduate work, you also were a foster parent.
Paul Baker 9:22
Yeah.
Scott Lee 9:22
And I have done some training and consulting work with a couple of foster care groups, primarily with helping with prepare for IEP s for your kids or, you know, ways to help with homework, those kinds of things. And I've got to say being a foster parent is about the toughest thing that I can imagine doing. Can you tell us a little bit about how your family decided to take this on, and then how it affected the work that you do and the way you approach the way you approach your journey and the experience working with kids.
Paul Baker 9:55
So you know, being a foster parent was probably one of the most enlightening, things that I've done in my life. Because, you know, as a as an educator, you know, as you said, you know, every day, I would be talking to people about their IEP s, I would be talking to parents, foster parents, Department of Family and Children's Services, whoever it is that might be attending a meeting, we were talking about all the work that we were doing in school, and I know that conversation sometimes would happen at tables, where we would often say, Well, if the parents would only do this, or if the parents, you know, were able to support the school things would be so much better. Becoming a foster parent helped me to understand a lot more of that home life, that was extremely critical. Because not only was I doing this from seven in the morning, until whenever I got home at five or six o'clock at night. But the minute that I got home at night, I became a therapeutic helper, as we described in my book in The Hopeful Brain. And I was a therapeutic helper, meaning that I was still doing therapy all night long. And sometimes when these kids would wake up at three o'clock in the morning, I was doing therapy. And so it really provided me with a different perspective. So I had 29 different foster kids that actually came through my home over the years and ultimately ended up adopting four of those kids. And that last adoption was 16 years ago, which we were just thinking about that yesterday, and my boys are now grown. And two of them are, well, actually one of them is married. And I have two grandkids already. So that's how much time has elapsed during that. But, you know, he's just by chance that I became a foster parent, one of my kids from my school was actually in court. And during the court proceedings and juvenile proceedings, obviously, they're, they're held very confidentially. And I had been waiting outside, because this young man had asked me to go into court, at least to talk about him being a good kid. And that's what he said, he goes, can you come and tell the court that I'm a good kid, because no one knows that I'm a good kid. And so I've gone to the court and basically had some charges that have been brought up against him in the community. And I was able to share some of the good things that we knew about this child, the strengths that he had, and, you know, our perspective of being able to look at some of his behaviors that he had, were actually what we identify as survival strengths. They were they were things that he had developed in order to survive in his life. And I felt like the court needed to know that, because some of those troubling behaviors actually helped keep him alive when he was living with his biological family. And so, he was just really starting to learn that he didn't need to have those behaviors in the school environment, where he was in right now. And, and so the judge ended up asking me to go to foster care training. And he said, Hey, would you do me a favor? And I said, What is that? And he said, would you think about becoming a foster parent, and I said, I'm too young, I don't know, I'm in graduate school, you know, I don't know that I'm the best person to do that. And that really said pretty heavily with me for a couple of weeks. And then finally, I found that card again, in my desk and called him up and went to the first training. And well, as you would say, the rest is history. And as kind of, but it's been a massive shaper in in looking at what we do in the Personbrain Model.
Scott Lee 13:34
It continues to bother me, you know, when I when I hear something like that, a kid said, you know, they call me a bad kid, can you come in and tell them that I'm a good kid. And I just sometimes you don't even know what to do with with, with the way we describe kids is just so wrong.
Paul Baker 13:54
Right. But well, you know, even back in the 1940’s, Uri Bronfenbrenner told us that kids need at least one adult who's just really emphatically crazy about them. And I think a lot of times kids are looking for that adult who can be the president of my fan club right now. And they're really looking for that. And this young man actually ended up being my first foster child, he actually became my my foster child. And so it's really helped to shape what we've done in in designing the Personbrain and even looking at kids through what we identify as a neuro-transactional model, trying to take a look at all aspects of them, not just their behavior, but everything that's helped them to become who they are, you know, I I say to people, if you're ever challenged by a child, and you're not sure what to do, start to think about the sights, and the sounds and the smells and the tastes and the touches of that child's life and that will start to help you can conceptualize the why behind this behavior. There was one child that I remember to this day he he was the most challenging child that I've ever had in my career. And I think I would probably not say that if I have the knowledge that I have now
Scott Lee 15:17
is this a student or one of your foster?
Paul Baker 15:19
child's actually one of my, a student, actually. Thanks for clarifying that was actually a student. And I remember just how challenged I was by him. Because you know, back in that day, we didn't conceptualize trauma, and how trauma might impact things. And so we saw behaviors behavior, and we were trained to see behaviors, behavior, behavior modification, that's what he talked about, modify that behavior at any costs, set the limits be strict, and then everything will kind of come around. But as I look back, and I think about the behaviors that that young man would be showing in the school, they were behaviors that people identified, as you know, oppositional defiant, he was a juvenile delinquent. He was a quote, budding sociopath. I remember them saying all of these things. And I remember, you know, he would come into school, and within just the first five or 10 minutes, he already had the school disrupted, and he was doing things to get as much attention as possible. And we didn't even say things like, he's doing this for attention. He's just doing this for attention. And back, then we would say, we would think that was a really bad thing. Now we understand that, yeah, when a child is doing something for attention, you need to tune in, and you need to be you need to be thinking, and I say, think about those sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touches of the child's life. Because if you're wondering why that behavior is happening, those are the things that usually can tell you about it. In this one particular child I was thinking about, if I were to think about the sites that he saw at home, well, the sites that he saw was a mother who was continuously beaten by her boyfriend, he would have seen kids, like kids and other adults coming in and out of the house continuously, because they're the boyfriend sold drugs. You know, if you think about the smells, that he smelled, as he was growing up, as a child, he smelled meth being cooked in the back of the house, the house smelled like cat urine, the house smelled like beer house smelled like cigarettes, you think about the touches that he had, they were punches to the face. They were burns by adults. And he start to think about those things, and helps you to understand the why behind some of that behavior. You know, some of the behavior of why he kept all of his belongings close to him, were easily explained that he had to keep everything close to him at night, because people were coming through the windows of his bedroom to get in to try to get to some of the drugs in the house. And if they couldn't find drugs, they took valuable things. So he kept things that were close to him. Really close to him physically.
Scott Lee 17:58
I was thinking about your comment about Bronfenbrenner. And this morning, actually, I'm working on an article, and I'm writing about a similar experience with a student like that. And you know, I have the Nick Hobbs’ The Troubled and Troubling Child out, because I cited that you know, about needing to find joy every day and building trust. You know, in my case, the particular student, the other adult in the school that he trusted was actually the school resource officer, the resource officer was the only person in the school who ever had anything good to say about this kid, always he had something good to say about this kid. And every other teacher was like, why can't we get rid of him, and they wanted to send him to a GNETS program to get him out of my class as it turned out. Nothing should ever surprise us when we're dealing with kids who have had a difficult time. They're telling us what, what their life is, oftentimes.
Paul Baker 18:59
And I think that, you know, the point that you made too, is it's important that when people don't know what to do, they always think that it can be done in a better place. And thank goodness for places like g nets that do exist that have been able to become safe haven for many of these kids where they can come and be understood differently. And I think that that's the important thing where that the history of their experiences can come back and be included in the understanding of their behavior today.
Scott Lee 19:31
Yeah,
Paul Baker 19:32
I think that that becomes so important to do.
Scott Lee 19:37
We will continue our discussion with Paul Baker in the next episode, where we will discuss strengths-based interventions and developing relationships with students who have experienced trauma. The Thoughtful Teacher Podcast is brought to you by our partner Oncourse Education Solutions. If you would like to learn more about how we help schools and youth organizations implement high quality equitable interventions, please visit our website: oncoursesolutions.net. This has been episode number 28. If you have enjoyed this podcast, please tell your friends and colleagues about it either in person or using social media. We also greatly appreciate positive reviews on the podcast app you use. The Thoughtful Teacher Podcast is hosted and produced by R. Scott Lee, who retains copyright. We encourage diverse opinions, however, opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of producer, partners, or underwriters. Guest was not compensated for appearance, nor did guest pay to appear. Transcripts are available following podcast publication on our website, thoughtfulteacherpodcast.com. Sponsorship opportunities or other inquiries may be made on the "Contact Us" page at our website thoughtfulteacherpodcast.com. Please follow The Thoughtful Teacher Podcast on twitter @drrscottlee and on facebook at facebook.com thoughtful teacher podcast.
