If you go to your physician you will generally get give to ten minutes to present your symptoms, which are then treated to ease your discomfort. With some physicians you may get a more thorough evaluation that looks at the underlying causes of your illness. Rarely however do you get a full work up that looks at all the various influences for your health and a proactive model to present future illness.

The same dynamic may be true in our schools. Few violence prevention efforts include a comprehensive view of organizational health or a systems level focus targeting the root causes of different types of violence in schools.  When the health of schools is ignored school culture is adversely impacted, giving way to greater potential for violence.

If we want to help our schools become healthier and safer, there are certain things we need to look at to accomplish this goal.

1. Nationally, the focus for education is becoming more outcome focused. Less attention and time is spent on the how of teaching in favor of outputs of test scores. Teachers are pressured to deliver more content in shorter amounts of time, leaving them fewer opportunities for forming individual relationships with children and developing ways to meet diverse learning needs.
2. Resources for schools become scarce and lead to increased competition.
3. The increase of social media allows for adults and children to have anonymous interactions, resulting in a decrease in personal accountability and increased sense of entitlement to a single position or opinion. ‘Right’ and ‘wrong’ thinking leads to increased ostracism of those who are ‘different’.   Children and adults have fewer opportunities for developing empathy.
4. As children’s needs become more complex, increase it becomes more difficult to know how to meet them. Time and resources continue to decrease so children’s behaviors become more challenging to address.
5. Most strategies for dealing with disruptive behavior focus on the child without taking into account the pressures of the larger school and community systems, leading to increased polarity and greater divisions between students and staff.
6. Teachers and educators are themselves under tremendous stress. Studies show a greater than 20% decline in teacher job satisfaction and a 50% increase in teacher stress.  Add to this the ongoing cuts in benefits and salary it is difficult to see how a teacher might have the mental health and wellness level to face these stressors.

The most crucial skill being left out of our children’s education is how to navigate differences. Without this skill, we don’t deal well with conflict, we lost the ability to get our needs met, and we are at a disadvantage with negotiating. Overall, we are less potent and more prone to acting aggressively to get our needs met. This concept is called constructive differencing. Next week’s blog will explain this concept and how it can be used to create learning environments that maximize children’s emotional safety.