Guerilla Education
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About this ebook
Education can be a battle, especially in the face of violent, aggressive and self-destructive behaviours. Patrick Thomas shares his 20 years of learning from the battles won and lost within the trenches of the alternate education system. He uniquely explains how and what these youths adaptive behaviours have not so subtly been communicating and how their identity development is the critical force behind their ability to change and achieving personal happiness. Within the guise of practical education strategies, he outlines the universal Adaptive Identity Model founded on the science behind his students successes and how the basic understanding of neuroscience can re-prioritize how we educate our youth by “giving them what they need, not what they expect”.
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Guerilla Education - Patrick Thomas PH.D.
Patrick Thomas, Ph.D.
Guerilla Education
For all those colleagues and youth who have waged war alongside me and those who were casualties and survivors of it, and to my daughter, Zoe, who is giving me the reason to document some of what I have learned.
Table of Contents
Forward & Acknowledgements:
1. Guerilla Education, The Chicken And The Egg
2. The Neuroscience Of Our Needs
Brain Surgery
A Bucket Of Panarchy - The Change-Stability Paradox
How The Bucket
Are You?
Give Them What They Need Part I - Teach Them To Walk
The Parts - Reverse Engineering The Need To Drop Out
Physical Health
Home
Attachment and Attunement
Learning
Mental Health
Belonging
Identity Development
The Irony Of Domains
Give Them What They Need Part Ii - Not What They Expect
3. The Brain And Our Knowledge Of It
Neurons
Sympathetic Versus Parasympathetic
Neuroplasticity
Neurodegeneration
Neuroplasticity And Neurodegeneration – Impact Upon Neurotransmitters And Neuromodulators
Glutamate – Excite Me To Build Me
Gamma Aminobutyric Acid – Calm Me And Mature Me
Serotonin – Give Me Confidence To Help Me Sleep.
Norepinephrine – Wake Me Up Versus I Don’t Care
Dopamine – Happy Factory Versus Addiction Disaster
Oxytocin – Trust, Verify and Repeat
4. Trauma – When Things Go Wrong
Signs Of Trauma
Suicide By Risk
5. The Adaptive Identity Model
The Model And Its Parts
Red Light Green Light - Arrows And Lines
Swimming With Sharks
Our Hammock
Applying Sunscreen
Hugging A Cactus
Lead-Er-Ship
Taking Versus Giving Leadership
A Conscious Leader
The Captain Of Our Lead-Er-Ship
6. Guerilla Tactics Part I – Safety
Greetings From Kinder-Garden
Do Not Just Predict Safety, Ensure It
Learn To Play Again
Healthy Biochemistry – Use Poor Building Materials You Get A Poor Building
The Brain Needs To Be Started
Drink Water, Listen To Water And Give A Hug
We Are All Crazy
Never Alone – Look Into Their Closets
Be The Adult, Not Parent Caveate
7. Guerilla Tactics Part Ii - Adaptation
Demystifying Our Labels – Universal Acceptance
Teaching How To Aim
Teaching How To Play
Hypnosis, Role Models And Mentors
Learning Resiliency (Neuroelasticity) In A Cave
Dewey Had The Right Answer, But Socrates Knew The Right Question
Practice Makes Perfect And Fat.
8. Guerilla Tactics Part Iii – Leadership
Universal Expectations To Give
We Are All Leaders
Leadership Is Painful
Leadership And The Big Lie
For-Give-Ness Of The Adults
9. Does Aim Work And Other Guerilla Systems Thinking
Don’t Just Think You Are Making A Difference, Know It
Adaptive Systems Identity Thinking
References:
About the Author
Copyright
Forward & Acknowledgements:
I have been working in the trenches of our education system for over twenty years. I have worked as a special education assistant, teacher, counsellor, principal and district principal, with all positions being in support of at-risk students and alternative education schools. I have attended all kinds of professional development, read a multitude of books, and continued my personal education as far as I could possibly do to try to make sense of it all. It
being the world of youth development, learning, educating and educational dogma.
It’s ironic that educators and others within big bureaucracies use the word trenches
when describing some environments within their organizations. Often these are the places battles happen every day that are essential to the success of the system or organization. In the case of the education system, most would say that the location of these battles is very much on the front lines of our culture: the everyday classroom.
If classrooms are the front lines, then I chose to hunker down in the Maginot line of the school system, the trenches of alternative schools. This is where students who have either rejected traditional education or have been rejected by it try to make sense of it all.
This is where I found my unifying bond with the students and the staff within these schools, and found my motivation to try to organize our mutual learning, the outcomes of the alliances of our war. A war that began rather instinctually with fighting the perceptions and accompanying labels of those who believed that students attending alternative schools could only handle basic
education, and just because staff within the system said so, where students were assumed to be less intelligent or capable. I wish it was a stroke of brilliance that my colleagues and I began with this basic premise of the capacity of all learners, but sadly, it was more a reflection of our own experiences within the same education system. Where we, too, had at some point someone use words or labels that may have negatively influenced our future and academic potential.
My colleagues are extraordinary educators and professionals who have overcome their own educational battles, and now we have collectively and collaboratively worked with students with almost every known label and diagnosis. Regretfully, not many of these labels or definitions proved to be particularly helpful; they forced us to continually experiment with best practices and innovations. My colleagues enlisted (some would claim were conscripted) in this war, a war to fight against the perceptions that take away youth and their families’ hope of something different. To fight against the very words used to describe these students. Labels and diagnoses youth then unknowingly adapted as part of who they were, their identities. Unfortunately, this adaptation worked against many children’s instincts and neurological predispositions. Once the labels, diagnoses and adaptations became established, a child’s identity was reinforced by a multitude of systems, and therefore became very resistant to change. That is why many of them became soldiers in their own war. They learned to fight for the survival of their identities and who they had become. They waged war through behaviours and habits that accomplished what their identities needed. As these behaviours became increasingly unhealthy and socially alienating, we were forced to either retreat or dig in for battle.
My colleagues and I spent many years trying every traditional intervention, with inconsistent success. Then we shifted our paradigm, giving the students what they needed, not what they expected.
We started to change the methods of battling for student engagement, and used every method we could think of to get youth to see who they were, not who they had become. None of the interventions were ever random. On the contrary, they were extremely thought out and tactical. All our methods have slowly become embedded in every aspect of our practice and our school.
I originally started calling these practices a metabolized therapeutic model
, which referred to the use of the biological system sciences research as a primary driver rather than mental health or educational ones. This being that our methods needed to reflect the students’ biological needs and their adaptation to their constant changing and developing brains, like all biological organisms and systems. Reflecting back, it was all too wordy and full of scientific jargon to be easily explained to others wanting to reproduce our success or broaden their impact upon the traditional education system. Then one evening, I remembered a philosophical and scientific concept called Occam’s razor. The premise is that if there are many complex explanations for something, the simpler of them is often the best and most reliable. Another way of saying it is that the more assumptions that are made, the more unlikely the explanation is accurate. In the words, of those wiser than I, keep it simple stupid
needed to be applied. Thus, the journey to create a unifying and simplistic model to help guide our approaches was necessary.
As our theories became practice, I started jokingly calling it Guerilla Counseling or Guerilla Education, making reference to the definition of guerilla warfare, a set of unconventional strategies of a small group of people. In our case, our strategies were for the purpose of keeping the negative identity development of our youth off guard, and to help build a more positive one.
The war against their negative identities was a war of attrition. Over time, every youth who walked through our door slowly shifted their perception and became less and less controlled by their unhealthy identity. Fortunately, we paid attention to the ways we created attrition and eventually we no longer needed to battle. We learned to become more focused on the maintenance of our culture. We avoided continually going to war against every negative identity and fighting against each youth by learning that the most effective approach was to enlist these youth in our war instead of seeing them as the enemy. Now, our youth have become actively involved in the development of our practices. They have helped to create every aspect of our models and approaches. They have taught us more than any book or research paper could have ever informed us. We have become a healthy community that can absorb almost any unhealthy soldier
with safety, respect, trust and acceptance. They now adapt into the healthy culture of students and staff who are accepting and forgiving of differences and who each day reflect upon the person they are today and who they will become in the future.
The resulting successes we had were soon followed with an almost greater challenge: people started asking me how we did it – having students who had disengaged from the educational system suddenly, and not only re-engage it, but be part of building it. Naively, people have often just assumed and claimed that we were naturally good with these students and had the right people educating and counseling them. The challenge with that is there are good people doing good work all over the world, but these small alternate programs often have limited lifespans. They work until staffing changes, funding becomes a challenge, or philosophical support systems collapse.
Is there a unifying model that can be applied within these alternative schools that can help create a better foundation that the bigger system can learn from? Ultimately, to prevent young men and women from hating school. This book, which I prefer to call a manual, is intended to help people understand the major theories behind our work, like our Basic Needs Model and our Adaptive Identity Model, but also the specific ways that our practices align within them. With a few guerilla twists.
I’ve kept the science and theory to a minimum and have included real, well-practiced methods used in our war against the unhealthy identities of those labelled troubled, at-risk, vulnerable or lost
who come into our education systems care. You can decide if the title of Guerilla Education was the right choice or not. I hope for feedback on this work upon its completion.
Thank-you for taking the time to read and hopefully, contribute to these ideas and practices. My colleagues and I are always learning and hopeful that the voice of many will make sense of it all.
Patrick
1. Guerilla Education, The Chicken And The Egg
The chicken or the egg causality dilemma is stated, Which came first the chicken or the egg?
The critical reason for starting with a seemingly basic causality dilemma (or cause-effect dilemma) is where Guerilla Education began twenty years ago, when someone posed a causality effect to me my very first day as a teacher. They told me that the students I was working with were too violent and dangerous, and thus making them uneducationable
.
The teachers within the program informed me that these students were receiving life skills basic education
only. I remember how angry I felt. At the time I didn’t know why, but my nervous system was reacting. I remember thinking, isn’t life skills working through our challenges? In my mind, the choice definitely wasn’t giving up and only giving them basic
education. When I brought this forward during a meeting, I was told that the basic education model was a result of these students aggressive and violent behaviours. I was still angry, but realizing my limited experience and knowledge; I shut up and did what I thought they wanted and instructed me to do. That lasted about a week.
After doing a week of shoveling manure with these students at a farm (I’m not making this up…) under the premise of work experience
, I asked what educational materials they had access to and were using. I was handed a set of books called ABE English and ABE Science. The ABE stood for Adult Basic Education. These materials were wonderfully laid out and simple to work on, but again my nervous system complained: I was anxious, nervous and angry. I didn’t know why then, but my instinctual, first reaction was to photocopy the packages and remove anything referring to adult
and basic
out of them.
Weeks went by and I got to know the students and the staff working at the school. The staff worked incredibly hard on creating safe and consistent reactions to these highly aggressive and reactive youth. These students loved the staff at the school. They had good and bad days, always based on what the students were thinking and reacting to outside the walls of the school. The staff did an amazing job of walking the line between the students’ behaviours and their reactions to them, a cause-effect dance like no other. For someone new to education, I was amazed watching it.
A critical element of the staff’s communication and planning was a daily staff meeting at the end of each day. After one staff meeting when all the teaching staff left, I sat in the almost empty room with the counselling coordinator and the custodian-yards keeper. We started talking about what these students needed. It was an amazing conversation that went on for an hour. We talked about how each student needed more from us. Some of the needs could be grouped into educational needs, some grouped into counseling needs, and others were just basic human needs. Ultimately, this conversation continued over the next few months with them and other members of the staff, regardless of their job title or training. My nervous system was reacting again. Instead of being angry, I was excited. I was having fun and experiencing another effect; I loved going to work every day.
I was a substitute teacher (teacher on call), and eventually the teacher I was replacing returned to work. I was fortunate that the principal of the school