Question: “Thank you for all the wonderful work that your team is doing in support of students with mental health needs. I review your site on a regular basis to parallel the work we are doing....

One of the biggest issues that I deal with between the partnerships with school teams and mental health/clinical services is the perspective of learning needs vs. social emotional needs; systems have appeared to see this as an ‘either/ or’ vs. a ‘both /and’.

Approximately 70% of my referrals are requests for a diagnosis of anxiety or depression because of school refusal /avoidance issues. When I review the school history, it becomes very apparent the student has a profound learning need and/or areas of cognitive weaknesses (learning disability) that the school team seems to not be addressing or have ever diagnosed. How we see it from the mental health perspective, is that the anxiety and or depression is secondary to the learning issues. The school system seems to see it as – until the social/emotional mental health needs are addressed, they can’t teach the student – and the debate continues, with families usually ending up with no supports, and these students tend to ‘disappear’.

Unfortunately, the majority of supports and funding seem to go to protecting the public from the externalizers that are aggressive, violent and sexualized. The students that are internalizers, and cause no ‘problems’ to the general public, can easily fade away. This is a sad message we send out to our families and students. I advocate for a more balanced team approach; every student that I have ever met in my career wants to learn;2 only about 20% want ‘counseling’ and every student that I have ever sat in on during a systems meeting would rather have spent the time completing an academic assignment then ‘talking’ about ‘issues’. I would love to see more resources around specialists such as reading clinicians and resource experts in the area of learning disabilities and expertise in the area of academic adaptations and differentiated instruction in our school systems and start shifting away from school based personnel feeling the need to be ‘therapists’ first and teachers second.

It sounds ‘old school’; however I believe that boundaries between home, school and community need to be re-aligned and balanced back to clearer purpose and roles within each system; a challenge that is nothing new to the educational, family and community systems. I look forward to continued attention to these challenging issues through your network. Thanks for the tremendous advocacy for students and families.”

Response: We certainly share your perspective. That’s why we focus so much on using each opportunity that comes up in classrooms and schoolwide to strengthen student success. Strategies for valued success at school and especially in the classroom need to be a major focus in planning how to help students who are not doing well academically, socially, and emotionally. In this respect, we hope that Response to Intervention will be used appropriately to help teachers personalize learning and implement as many special interventions in the classroom as needed and feasible. (Note: The upcoming federal grants for Race to the Top for districts stresses personalizing learning, but gives short shrift to student and learning supports; this is also true of the common core state standards for curriculum.)

All this calls for teachers to invite others into the classroom (e.g., other teachers, support staff, volunteers) so that classrooms can better meet each student where s/he is in terms of both motivation and capability. We see this as a major opportunity for all student support personnel (including mental health providers) to spend some time in the classroom working with the teacher to explore the best strategies for engaging and re-engaging students who are seen as having learning, behavior, and emotional problems. Support staff also can play a greater role in professional development helping teachers see the connection between the struggle to learn and the related emotional dynamics. And given the inevitable emotional and behavior reactions to learning problems, mental health providers need to use their expertise to help establish greater emphasis on prevention/early intervention in the classroom and schoolwide.

The following resources may be useful in helping teachers and support staff understand how to work together on engaging and re-engaging students in classroom learning and enabling their success:

(1) Enhancing Classroom Teachers? Capacity to Successfully Engage All Students in Learning: It is the Foundation of Learning Supports

http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/pdfdocs/enhanceteachers.pdf

(2) Implementing Response to Intervention in Context

http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/pdfdocs/implementingrti.pdf

Response to intervention is meant to be broad-based and preventative. However, as formulated and practiced the approach often is too limited in how it frames what needs to go on to enable learning, engage students, and keep them engaged. In particular, it pays too little attention to the need to strengthen the classroom and schoolwide context in ways that enhance the effectiveness of response to intervention. This brief highlights ways to transform the context for implementing response to intervention. The emphasis is on a sequential classroom approach that personalizes instruction, then, if necessary, pursues specialized interventions in a hierarchical manner. Moreover, classroom interventions are understood as embedded in a comprehensive and systemic schoolwide framework for addressing barriers to learning and teaching and re-engaging disconnected students.

(3) The Relationship of Response to Intervention and Systems of Learning Supports

http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/pdfdocs/rti.pdf

The intent of "Response to Intervention" (RTI) is to use "well-designed and wellimplemented early intervention" in the regular classroom as a way to deal with a student's problems and enhance the assessment of whether more intensive and perhaps specialized assistance (and perhaps diagnosis) is required. That is, the process calls for making changes in the classroom designed to improve student learning and behavior as soon as problems are noted and using the student's response to such modifications as info for making further changes if needed. The process continues until it is evident that it cannot be resolved through classroom changes alone.

(4) Personalizing Learning and Addressing Barriers to Learning: Two Continuing Education Units

http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/pdfdocs/personalizeI.pdf

This set of continuing education units is designed to help schools move forward in personalizing learning as an approach that reflects the reality that learning is a nonlinear, dynamic, transactional, and spiraling process, and so is teaching. Personalized learning is placed within the context of other conditions that must be improved in classrooms and school wide to address factors interfering with student learning and performance.

Unit I: Personalizing Learning

Unit II: More is Needed to Address Barriers to Learning

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UCLA Center for Mental Health in Schools
Dept. of Psychology, P.O.Box 951563, Los Angeles, CA 90095.
tel: (310)825-3634
email: Linda Taylor ~ web: https://smhp.psych.ucla.edu