Unwrapping the Thick Coat of Armor: A Conversation With Susan Albrecht

How did you get into the field of educating children with emotional/behavioral disorders (EBD)?

I’ve always said that I came into the field of EBD through the back door. I started out as an English teacher a couple years before IDEA [Individuals with Disabilities Education Act] was passed in 1975. In addition to my regular English classes, I was teaching what was called “vocational English” for students who were academically challenged, weren’t identified for any specific program, but needed a different curriculum and approach to teaching. I had a couple of sections of that. I found that I really liked the challenge of making educational and academic content relevant to these kids, who, for the most part, weren’t engaged in school, weren’t affiliated with the curriculum in middle school and later in high school.

When I went to graduate school the first time, I did my first work in school psychology. I then worked as your basic school psychologist, carried my test kit around, and wrote lots of reports on kids. What I found was that I was really drawn to the recommendations section in the report. Since I got to leave the room after the case conference meeting and everybody else had to stay and work with the student, I took very seriously what I was writing in recommendations, particularly for kids with behavioral and emotional challenges. I felt that somehow that was the challenge for me and it was of interest to me. I felt like the teachers of those children needed realistic strategies and support.

That certainly hasn’t changed.

No, it hasn’t. From that role, I morphed into the behavioral psychologist for the school district, then for the county, and later became the coordinator of the program for students with EBD. I supported teachers in the classroom by helping set up behavior management strategies, programs, level systems, self-contained classrooms, and even started programs in alternative schools in the juvenile justice facility for incarcerated youth who were obviously there because of behavioral difficulty. We also started a mental health program from the schools to the mental health center. I worked with that staff to identify and establish supportive strategies for the students for a good 10 years. Then I went back to graduate school for my doctoral work in special education with an emphasis in EBD and earned my EBD teaching license.

In higher education, I’ve been teaching courses in the field, and I’ve also had the opportunity through my university to take an assignment at the laboratory school as a consultant for the special education program and specifically as teacher of record for 9 or 10 students with EBD.

So, I’ve had the best of both worlds: to practice in the field, to train preservice teachers in what the literature says is best practice and what I know from my own experience is essential, and I still get to work with students. I’m very fortunate.

How would you describe your career in the field?

I feel like every job I’ve had has led me to the next one. And all the experiences I’ve had have been cumulative to bring me to the next point, this point. Like I said, I’ve been very fortunate to have had the intensity and variety of experiences with children with EBD and then being able, I hope, to empower the next generation to work directly with these students.

What events, policies, innovations, and people have had the most influence on your professional life?

As far as people, I’ve been fortunate to have some wonderful mentors in my career along the way. Many of them have come out of relationships that I’ve developed at the conference for Teacher Educators for Children with Behavior Disorders and through working with Council for Exceptional Children as the advocacy chair. These mentors have invited me in, not only to practices in the field, but also in my commitment to the field and in my emotional attachment to the work that we do.

So, it’s back to those relationships.

It is, it is always back to those relationships that you have up, down, sideways with everybody that you come in contact with.

Are there particular mentors who you would like to mention?

One in particular was Eleanor Guetzloe (Kaff, Teagarden, & Zabel, 2014). I miss her dearly. Eleanor and I had known each other through conferences and affiliations, but I once had a wonderful opportunity to drive her to an airport from a conference. It was a 2-hour drive, and to have 2 hours of uninterrupted time with Eleanor was such a gift. Her guidance about my career, my choices, my decision to go into higher education and to stay in higher education, was invaluable. Another mentor was Mary Margaret Wood (Teagarden, Kaff, & Zabel, 2012). When I think about Mary Margaret and her work looking at teachers as therapists and building those relationships with children has been guidance that I’ve been grateful for as well.

I also want to mention Sheldon Braaten (Zabel, Kaff, & Teagarden, 2016). Sheldon is everyone’s mentor, I know, but particularly, he was chair of my doctoral committee and I learned so much from him about the field, about the content, about how to work with these kids, how we feel about them, our advocacy, our commitment to them and to this field. In the same way he mentored me, I feel I have responsibility to pay it forward and mentor others.

You’ve mentioned people who have been important. What events shaped your career?

Events that shaped my career have probably just been by circumstance. I was invited to apply for the position at Ball State University and was fortunate to obtain that position. That’s just part of bringing my experience to where I was and being given that opportunity. One influence that has been really valuable is my experience on the Executive Committee of CCBD. Specifically, I served as Advocacy and Governmental Relations chair for about 7 years. One of the projects that we worked on was drafting the position paper on restraint and seclusion. This paper became kind of the foundational document for the U.S. House of Representatives for developing procedural recommendations. While that is still working its way through Congress—we’re still trying to get the Senate and the House to pass it—a concurrent agreement has been the mandate for states to adopt restraint and seclusion procedures. In large part, I think that goes back to the testimony of the CCBD Advocacy Committee as well as others on Capitol Hill and at the White House. We always had a CCBD representative at those tables.

Are there other policies and innovations that have had an impact on your professional life?

To say that I remember the passage of the Education of All Handicapped Children Act will date me enough, but that’s okay! Of course, to watch that over time, the influence that had on our practice, from bringing our programs out of the basements of other buildings into schools, going from mainstreaming to full inclusion, and then back to inclusionary practices with support systems not only brought in, but available outside of classrooms, a full continuum of services, has been a wonderful experience to live through. As I now look over these past 40 years now, I can say that we are in a better place.

What do you believe has had the greatest positive impact on the field of EBD?

I think the ideas and practices of inclusion have been very positive. When I started working in the field, I worked totally with self-contained classrooms. We did a lot of good work in those classrooms. We did help the kids engage, and many of them were successful in the school environment. Still, they were missing, I think, a lot of the important educational context—not just academic, but the social element as well—and the peer modeling that would be available in general education classrooms. I think that an important evolution has been the integration of students with EBD from self-contained environments, whether they were in schools, juvenile justice, or mental health facilities, into general education environments with support services wrapped around them.

What do you believe has had the greatest negative impact on the field?

I think a continuing negative impact is the stigma attached to students with EBD. They are seen as somehow inherently not on par with students who are not disabled or who have better self-control. I’ve looked at this and felt like the student with EBD has a thick coat of armor wrapped around him or her and that it’s our responsibility to peel off those layers of armor. At the core is a child, a student, who’s just like all the rest of us and all of his or her peers and who wants to be accepted and wants to do the right thing and wants to be in the mainstream. I think what hinders that is the perception of teachers, administrators, peers, that these students are inherently different. I don’t believe they are. I think they are more like us than they are different.

What do you see for the future of education of children with EBD?

I think it’s a bright future because we see so many preservice teachers coming into this field. We know about the attrition of EBD teachers and how hard it is to stay committed in the field. We know—part of my research has been on this topic—that if we can just get past those first few years, EBD teachers are committed. They’re going to stay for the duration. I’m encouraged with the teachers who are coming into the field when I hear their enthusiasm and their commitment for this work.

I think in our preservice teacher programs, we need to be careful that we’re not offering generic special education degrees. We’re short-changing our preservice teachers when we combine all of these different licensures into a “mild intervention” or “mild disability” category. We lose a lot of the valuable content that they won’t get until they enter a graduate program specifically for EBD.

I also think that we have a continued advocacy role to play for these students. It would be very easy to let the gains we’ve made slip back. We need to keep focusing on academic standards and push toward academic excellence but not let our commitment to social and emotional development slide.

We have had conversations with several leaders in our field who have said that generic licensure isn’t sufficient to teach kids with EBD. What kinds of curricula, skills, and strategies do you think teachers need to work effectively in this field?

All general and special education teachers need to have at least a foundational understanding of the challenges that these students face—not the challenges the teachers will face, but the challenges the students face every day just getting to school and trying to get through the school day and coping with the demands that education puts on them. I think this content is needed by all general and special education teachers. Programs that offer dual licensure, I think, are positive. Within that curriculum, we need to make sure we give a foundational course in understanding the etiology of EBD, best practice recommendations, and characteristics and needs of children who present these disorders. I also believe that a preservice curriculum should include, at least as a component of their student teaching, some opportunities to work with students with challenging behaviors. I say “challenging behaviors” because whether they are identified as having EBD or not, every teacher is going to have experiences with challenging behaviors and needs to be prepared for that. They need the book learning but also some practical experience trying to enhance educational opportunities for all children.

What advice would you offer to those just entering the field?

My advice would be to embrace the opportunity to work with students with EBD. They present many challenges, but they also provide many opportunities for self-satisfaction, for reward, for feeling good about your day and the work that you do.

I’d also encourage people coming into the field to network with others who are in the field. This can be a very lonely profession. There aren’t many of us who do this work. A special education teacher’s day is very different than a general education teacher’s day. There may be only one or two teachers in a building who are working with children with disabilities. So I would encourage teachers coming into the field to start establishing networks of connection with special educators and general educators.

For folks going into higher education special education programs, I think we must recognize our responsibility to address academic learning as well as social and emotional development. No matter what the disability, the label a particular child might or might not carry, it’s our responsibility to keep this field current, to keep it vibrant, to keep it active. We do that through mentoring our students as well as through the curriculum that we teach.

Do you have any additional comments you’d like to make about your career?

I would say I feel very fortunate that I can look back and look forward and know that what I am doing is meaningful. Not just to me, but it’s meaningful to the students who I mentor, to the students in the classrooms whom I’ve had the privilege to work with. I feel very fortunate that I can say that and I hope that any one else in this field would have those same feelings, whether you are at the beginning or you’re looking at your end game, that you look at your career and say with enthusiasm and with gratitude that you’re very thankful for these opportunities.