Empathy, not Expulsion, for Preschoolers at Risk

A few years ago, a boy here was on the verge of being expelled because his teacher felt he was a danger to his classmates.

He was 4 years old, in preschool.

This situation is all too common. Preschoolers are expelled at three times the rate of children in kindergarten through 12th grade, with African-American boys being most vulnerable.

This boy — I’ll call him Danny — was lucky, though. His teacher received assistance from a specialist, Lauren Wiley, an early childhood mental health consultant. Wiley started off by listening. The teacher had said she thought Danny (not his real name) needed to be medicated for attention deficit disorder, or A.D.D. Then she admitted she was angry with him. Her job was to keep her students safe, she said, and the boy’s aggression made her feel like a failure.

Next, Wiley and the teacher met with Danny’s mother. It came out that Danny had witnessed his father beating his mother and then being taken away in handcuffs by the police. No one had talked with Danny about the event. As with many children, what was thought to be A.D.D. was actually a result of trauma. Danny needed his teacher to empathize with him, to give him warmth and a sense of safety — not to wish to be rid of him. After the intervention, she warmed to him, and gradually he warmed to his time spent in the classroom.

Danny’s case is like others that prompted Walter Gilliam, a Yale professor, to begin conducting preschool expulsion research. After releasing a landmark report in 2005, he convened focus groups of teachers to find out why, in mixed-age classes, he was seeing 4-year-olds expelled at higher rates than 3-year-olds. The replies were consistent: Teachers perceived the 4-year-olds as more likely to hurt someone because they were bigger. “That’s when it dawned on me that expulsion is not a child behavior,” Gilliam said. “It’s an adult decision.”

For the problem to be resolved, he realized, teachers needed to learn how to make different decisions.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/20/empathy-not-expulsion-for-preschoolers-at-risk/?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region&region=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region