The Gift of Competence: A Conversation With Michael George

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

I think what drove me toward this field was my wife, Nancy, who was already in the field. She had been a teacher for a year. Watching her, visiting her classroom, and watching the children who all had EBD reminded me of when I was younger. I had quite a temper when I was a young child. I coached baseball teams and soccer teams. I was always attracted to the child who had the least skill, thinking that if I could teach him, then the whole team would be better. In fact, that’s what would happen. I always liked working with children who provided challenges, and it seemed natural to me. So, I went back to school and haven’t changed my mind or looked back once. It’s just been great.

Would you describe your career in the field?

I began as a teacher in a self-contained day school in St. Louis. The next year, because I apparently impressed those around me, I was offered a more administrative type position to help run the entire school. I accepted the offer and I operated that school. In those days you didn’t need an administrator license to do that. I didn’t have one, so it was trial by learning. We did some things quite well. I recall one memorable day when it snowed and it snowed a lot. The buses weren’t running and something like 3% of my students showed up. They walked to school. I’ll never forget that day. We sat on the steps and made sure everyone was safe, I made hot chocolate, we had a great day, and sent them back home.

Later, I did go back and get the coursework necessary to meet certification requirements. I got my doctorate from the University of Missouri in Columbia where I studied with Judith Grosenick and Reuben Altman. I learned a lot from those two individuals about the importance of good preparation. When we have well-trained teachers, we tend to do a lot of good for our students, their parents and families. Nancy and I spent about 5 or 6 years working on grants with Dr. Grosenick.

Once those grants ended, I wanted to get back into the schools. I was fortunate to acquire the administrative position at the self-contained day school, Lane School, in Eugene, Oregon. It was the alternative day school for ages 12 and up in Lane County. We stayed there for the next 7 years. I’m proud to say that in those 7 years we did not restrain one child.

Now, I always thought nothing of that until I came to Centennial School. When I asked, “Do you restrain children?” they said things like, “No, not too much.” “No, just the little ones.” Well, when I got there, I realized that there was a lot more restraining going on than they let on. In fact, the year before I came, there were over 1,000 physical restraints. I embarked on a program of positive behavior support, put it in place, and we took those restraints to near zero.

That’s quite a change for a school.

In one year, we had 233 physical restraints. They were nasty, basket holds, three-person holds, loud, very raucous type affairs that would interrupt all instruction. We’ve kept restraints at a very, very low level ever since. Last year, for example, we had one physical restraint and one basket hold. This year, we’ve had none so far.

What events, policies, people have had the most impact on your profession?

I think the event that has had the most impact is the introduction of positive behavior interventions and supports (PBIS). It meshes well with my own personal philosophy about how we should treat youngsters with disabilities-children who are truly incapable of doing better until they learn appropriate responses. PBIS has had an enormous impact on our field overall. I’ve watched changes in the field of severe disabilities, where we went from using obnoxious sprays to restructuring the environment in ways that elicit appropriate responses that we can reinforce so that teaching and learning will occur.

Who are some people who have been influential in your career?

There have been a lot, really too many to start mentioning. I’m always hesitant to do that because I will leave some people out and undoubtedly they would be people who were so dear to me. I’ve mentioned Judith Grosenick already. Hill Walker, at the University of Oregon, has been a great influence. Lee Kern at Lehigh University is such a remarkable researcher. Her first year at Lehigh was my first year at Centennial School. We were connected and worked closely together transforming the school. She has had a terrific impact on me. My wife, Nancy, has worked with me side by side for the past 45 years. Together, we’ve accomplished a lot, had a lot of fun, and met a lot of people in the field. It’s been a good life.

Sounds like a wonderful partnership.

It is.

What has had the most negative impact on the field?

I think the field suffers from a number of threats. One is poorly prepared teachers. When Nancy, Judith, Russell Gersten, and I were examining teachers’ perceptions about how well they were prepared, we asked a simple question: “How well were you prepared to meet the exigencies that you faced when you went into the field?” In a nationwide sample of 127 teachers of EBD students, 66% said, “Not at all.” That’s shocking! If we asked heart surgeons how well prepared they were, that response would be shocking. Yet that was the response. Our teachers feel ill-prepared. From my experience, ill-prepared teachers, teachers who don’t have the necessary skills, can do more harm than good. They exacerbate the symptoms of our children. Then that justifies the introduction of intrusive techniques, such as seclusion and restraint. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. To me, that is one of our greatest threats.

In addition, not having well-prepared teachers means that we don’t have very many well-designed programs. When you don’t have a well-designed program for children to participate in, again, you exacerbate their symptoms. Now that we’re introducing more of these children into the public schools, they’ve become pariahs. Administrators don’t want these children in their schools and they do what they can to get them out. It becomes axiomatic for children with EBD that now we’re building scream rooms in the classrooms.

I’ll share a funny story with you which I think illustrates that point. We train teachers at Centennial School, who then go out and teach in the public schools. We place 100% of them every year. Administrators want these teachers. I had a teacher who wasn’t quite finished with her training, but she was offered a long-term substitute position in a very wealthy school district called Council Rock in Pennsylvania. It’s very hard to get a job in that district. She asked me, “I know it’s very short-term and I’m going to have to leave my program here. What should I do? I really want to work in that district when I graduate.” I said, “Take the position. Once they see your stuff, they’ll get you a position in the next year.” So, she goes down there and is there for 2 weeks when I get a call from the principal, who asks, “What are you teaching these people up there?” I thought, “Oh my gosh, what happened?” She says, “I’ve been in this building for 13 years. All these years, I thought it was the children. Now I know, it was the teacher. This looks like a regular class of children. They’re compliant, they’re quiet. How did she do that?” To me that is the lesson behind well-prepared teachers.

At Centennial School, we have a two-year training program where teachers come in and work the full day, 7:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. every day, and then take their classes at night. It’s a 2-year residency, basically 2 years of student teaching. They’re in a room with a highly trained master teacher, we call them lead teachers. In addition to the lead teacher, there’s a coordinator of a number of classrooms. The coordinator and lead teachers all came through the program.

When our teachers come out, they are so well-prepared that they’re scooped up immediately. I heard that in Fairfax, Virginia, one of the biggest districts in the country, there are 100 applications for every opening. We’ve only had four apply to that district, and all four got into Fairfax. They call me in June every year and say, “Do you have anyone who wants to come down here this year?” We sent one teacher to Hawaii. At the end of his first year, he was chosen as the First Year Teacher of the Year. Hawaii now calls me and says, “Do you have any people that want to come and work here?” I place teachers over the phone in Denver where I have some colleagues. Once they hear how our teachers are trained, there’s no question. They want them in their program.

Please tell us more about your teacher training process.

First, every person in the building has a mentor. The most important ingredient that Centennial offers is a highly effective program. We know it’s effective because we take data on the students, and most students who come through that program graduate. We take data on individual students and we take group data. If something isn’t working, we omit or modify it. The students do well under those conditions.

The program consists of three levels: schoolwide, classwide, and individual programs. If a child isn’t thriving in the schoolwide or the classwide program, then we put together an individualized program for the child. The program is based on the notion of positive behavior support. The children who come into our building, all of them, would be considered in the red zone. They’re at the tippy top of the red zone in the 1%. In Pennsylvania the only way you can get that label is to score at the first percentile on behavior rating scales. So, we bring in some very serious and challenging students.

Just like the model of schoolwide positive behavior support, only 12 to 15 out of a total of 80 students are on individualized behavior programs. Most of our students thrive in the schoolwide and the classwide programs that we have in place. If you came into the school every day, you would think you were in a general education public school building. The children would say “good morning” and “please and thank you,” pencils would be up at 9:00 a.m. in the morning, and pencils would be up at 2:30 p.m., just as the bell rings. We have very little vandalism. The question I’m most often asked by people who tour the school is, “Are these children disturbed? Do they have disabilities?”

It’s a very intensive program, and our teachers need to meet criteria in a number of different areas. For example, they’ll write individualized educational programs (IEP) until they’re 100% proficient. It may take 25 versions, but they’ll get it correct. They do lesson plans and get daily feedback, and they do those until they are proficient. They are observed throughout their day by the lead teacher in the classroom and by the coordinator and given corrective feedback. We’ve created a learning community where we say to our teachers, “Criticism is a gift. Feedback is a gift. We’re giving you the gift of competence. If you’ve made an error, you correct it and you’ll probably never make that error again. I just made you a better professional.” That’s okay in our setting.

Schoolwide positive behavior support includes the notion that you set expectations for students. Well, we set expectations for staff as well. One of our norms, for example, is we will only use positive language when dealing with a lesson. We have teachers taking data on teachers to see was that a positive statement, a neutral statement, or a negative statement?

Let me give you an example of data that we’ve collected already this year in an elementary classroom with six children and two adults during reading instruction: 137 positive statements, 37 neutral statements (statements like open your book, turn the page), and zero negative statements. Who wouldn’t want to participate in that reading class? We teach progress monitoring of academics and of behavior. Everything that we teach comes from the research literature. We put it all together into a program and then train to that program. When those teachers graduate and go to the public schools, they take the majority of that program and modify it for the inclusive setting that they might be in. I think that’s the secret behind our success. We train to a program using learning components that work.

You have mentioned positive and negative impacts on the field. What do you see in the future for education of children with EBD?

I am quite worried about it. I believe our society has become more punitive and heavy-handed. The notion of zero tolerance has permeated our schools and we’ve already demonstrated that there is a school-to-prison pipeline in effect for many children in this country. It’s sometimes almost impossible to encourage administrators to see it otherwise. In addition to many poorly trained teachers of EBD students, we have many poorly trained building administrators with no understanding whatsoever of special education and the needs of these children.

I teach courses at Lehigh University for aspiring administrators. I am stunned by what they don’t know, including some who are already practicing administrators. I am stunned by what they do not know about IDEA. We are now more than 40 years beyond the passage of this legislation—40 years! If it hasn’t happened in 40 years, I’m not sure it’s going to happen and that worries me a lot. So you have poorly trained administrators and poorly trained teachers who are exacerbating the symptoms of these children. We are using public funds to do that and making the children look worse. Then we haul them off to alternative day schools, that, in some cases, are simply holding pens where nothing good is going on. That worries me a lot. I don’t know how we’re going to break that trend but it has to be broken or things will just stay the same and that is unacceptable. We can’t say that we’re helping, when we’re actually harming these children and no one is standing up and saying that we’re harming them. We’re doing exactly what these children don’t need. That bothers me.

I think we need better trained teachers. We need better designed programs. I think we need some exemplars like Centennial—but many, many more of them—so administrators can point to them and say, “Wow, these look like regular children here, for the most part.” Then the stigma goes away and they will be accepted into the mainstream more often and we can start reversing this trend and getting these children some help.

When we have an honor roll breakfast, 100% of parents come. Their children have probably never before been on the honor roll in their lives. They have to work hard for it, because we don’t lower our expectations. Parents say to me, “You’ve saved my child’s life. You’ve transformed our family. You don’t realize the impact your school has had on us. There’s no more arguing, there’s no more fights about school. Our child bounces up and gets on the bus.” I’m talking about some children who haven’t been in school for 2 years or their mothers had to pick them up for 2 years. Some have lost their jobs, because they never knew when they would be called to school. There was yelling and screaming at home, “Why can’t you do this, where’s your homework, why can’t you behave better at school?” that pervaded the entire atmosphere. Success at school and children feeling good about themselves transform entire families.