Of all the initiatives, special events and programs we ran at the last two schools where I was the principal, Pine Grove and Palermo, I believe the one that truly impacted the school more than any other was Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS). CPS is not something you only refer to each day on the announcements or highlight with hall posters; it has the potential to make a significant impact on student (and adult) social-emotional and academic growth.
CPS was originated by Dr. Ross Greene and further developed by Dr. Greene and Dr. Stuart Ablon at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University. The approach was developed to treat extreme, challenging behaviors seen in children. It requires us to look at these behaviours through an unconventional lens. The CPS approach was articulated in Greene’s books “The Explosive Child,” “Lost at School” and Greene and Ablon’s book “Treating Explosive Children: The Collaborative Problem-Solving Approach”, and “Changeable.”
The CPS philosophy states that, “Children (people) do well if they can.” Children do not wake up each morning feeling that their aim that day is to be miserable and make everyone else’s day miserable too. They want to be happy, have good relations at home and school and achieve success. If they are not doing well then it is up to us as teachers, parents and caregivers to find out what is getting in the way so we can help them. How we see challenging behaviour, or how we explain it, will determine how we deal with it. If we believe “kids do well, if they can” then we deal with the problem in an unconventional way with CPS. If we see it in the way conventional wisdom views problems that “kids do well if they want to” then our logical intervention or solution will be to try and motivate the compliant behavior through rewards, punishment or ignoring. These are approaches that most teachers and parents have tried, rarely with durable, long-lasting success.
Proponents of CPS believe “Kids do well if they can” so they approach the problem in an unconventional way. We believe that these children “lack the skill, not the will” to behave well. The children lack important cognitive skills that are not developed enough to handle some of the expectations set by their parents, teachers or society. Ablon believes that they suffer from a kind of “Learning Disability.” Not a reading, writing or math learning disability as we see in schools but a disability of sorts in areas like cognitive flexibility, frustration tolerance and problem solving. Back in the 1960s when I was a student, we did not have knowledge of learning disabilities. Children were either “smart” if they succeeded or lazy or “dumb” if they didn’t succeed. Now we know this condition exists and presents real challenges for learners of all ages. Now schools develop Individual Education Plans (IEP), based on student strengths and needs, to help students achieve. We believe everyone can learn. Dr. Stuart Ablon has stated that he feels in the next 25 years or so we will come to commonly accept that the lagging skills identified by CPS are a type of learning disability. We need to help kids by teaching them the skills they lack by using Collaborative Problem Solving.