Department of Education co-hosts first UK workshop by leading child behaviour expert
Posted on 16 December 2013
Ross Greene, an Associate Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is prominent in the United States and Canada as the author of the acclaimed books The Explosive Child and Lost at School.
The free one-day event at Derwent College attracted over 300 delegates, including education colleagues, parents and foster carers, and professionals working with children and young adults in areas such as the probation service and the criminal justice system.
Organised by Dr Jo Clarke, from York’s Department of Psychology, with Dr Poppy Nash from York’s Department of Education, the event was designed to introduce the concepts of Dr Greene’s approach as a precursor to a three-day advanced training course next year.
At the fully-booked workshop on Thursday, 12 December, Dr Greene described his Collaborative and Proactive Solutions approach for working with behaviourally challenging children.
A key theme of his approach is that ‘Kids do well if they can’ – that if a child could do well, she/he would do well. Based on research in the neurosciences over the past 50 years, Dr Greene suggests that lagging skills (rather than lagging motivation) underlies challenging behaviour.
“Kids with behavioural challenges are not attention-seeking, manipulative, limit-testing, coercive or unmotivated,” he says. “But they do lack the skills – such as flexibility, adaptability, frustration tolerance, and problem solving – that make it extremely difficult for them to respond adaptively in certain circumstances. Adults can help by recognising what causes their difficult behaviours and teaching kids the skills they need through the process of solving problems collaboratively.”
For further information on Ross Greene’s model visit the Lives in the Balance website www.livesinthebalance.org.