Relationships Are the Intervention: An Interview With Michael Marlowe

Dr. Marlowe’s research for three decades has focused on the construction of the relationship-driven classroom model for educating students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD), which is distilled from the teacher lore of Torey Hayden, and using Hayden’s classroom stories in teacher education to modify teachers’ attitudes and practices toward children with EBD. He is currently working with Hayden in delivering online content to train community outreach coordinators and teachers in Nepal in inclusive education and relationship-driven classroom practice.

Intervention:

Tell us how you entered into the field of intervention research for students with EBD?

Marlowe:

In 1968, as a 20-year-old English major at the University of Kentucky, I happened upon a summer job as a counselor in a residential camp for young boys with emotional disturbance. The camp was run by the department of psychology at the University of Alabama. My personality proved to be a good fit. One, I really like children, and I found a natural enjoyment in interacting with the campers. Two, it was helpful to have child-like personality characteristics (e.g., quick to laugh, can see the funny side of things, can genuinely laugh… and at oneself, and can happily suspend reality when playing with kids). I’m not talking Peter Pan Syndrome, because an adult who hasn’t grown up is a dysfunctional adult; but fun and laughter is one of the five basic human needs according to William Glasser, a needs theorist, and lightheartedness plays a unique role in childcare. Three, a good memory of my own childhood in east Tennessee helped me empathize and see things from the boys’ perspective and guide me in responding to them. And four, I am a maverick, so I was naturally drawn to the field of childhood variance.

The youngsters were difficult and resistant at times, but they were also compassionate, perceptive, and courageous. I had no special techniques, no special training, no deep insights, but I found it easy to care for and form relationships with the children, and my up-close and personal approach tended to be effective. By the end of camp, I knew the importance of relationships when helping another. My career in special education can be traced back to that experience.

Intervention:

How would you describe your career?

Marlowe:

After college graduation, I wore several hats directly working with young people with EBD and adults with mental illness. I first worked for 2 years as a community placement worker at a 1,000-bed Kentucky state psychiatric hospital, the second oldest state psychiatric hospital in America. It was a cold, hard, and dehumanizing environment. The deinstitutionalization movement for the mentally ill was gaining momentum, and I worked with assigned long-term patients in preparing them for community placement. I taught daily and community living skills, conducted group therapy addressing transition issues, and supervised community outings. Looking back, it seems the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill movement was much like the current inclusion movement, [that is] cost-cutting in disguise. There never have been adequate community resources and services for adults with mental illness, and with the closing of state psychiatric hospitals, many, if not most are now incarcerated or homeless.

In 1972, I joined Teacher Corps, a program established by the U.S. Congress to improve elementary and secondary teaching in low income areas by forming partnerships between universities and local school districts. I taught students with EBD and learning disabilities (LD), and I served as basketball coach for 2 years in an Indianapolis elementary school. The school was situated in an industrial-chemical neighborhood bifurcated by a heavily trafficked freeway. Emissions from the smokestacks and vents and the leaded gasoline exhaust turned the sky a brownish-gray. Respiratory ailments and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)–like behaviors were common among the school children.

In the afternoons and evenings, I earned a master’s in elementary education with teacher certification in EBD from Indiana University. I was trained in the LD remediation model for teaching students with EBD. My inner-city teaching experience reaffirmed the importance of relationships. All the individualized education and prescriptive teaching plans in the world cannot accomplish what genuine rapport can. You have to reach kids before you can teach them.

I then taught students with EBD in a rural Kentucky elementary school for a year followed by a year teaching students with EBD and serving as golf coach in a rural Kentucky high school. The U.S. Congress had just passed Public Law 94-142, The Education for All Handicapped Children Act (1975), initiating a flood of new classes in the public schools, and I was the first teacher for students with EBD in both school districts. It was an exciting time of innovation and change. In between the school years, I worked as a counselor in a Project Re-ED summer camp for adolescents with EBD located in the Daniel Boone National Forest.

Because I wanted to learn more about how to teach students with EBD and to share that knowledge with future teachers, I sought a doctorate in the area of teaching children with EBD at the University of Florida. There was a shortage of professors offering positive strategies for working with students with EBD; but I did learn how to conduct research and to publish. Research scholarship was the coin of the realm.

Intervention:

Tell us about your career in academia.

Marlowe:

I spent the next 38 years as a professor of special education at three universities: Tennessee Technological University, The University of Wyoming, and Appalachian State University. There were two distinct phases to my university career. The first phase emphasized research and publication.

My interest piqued by having observed firsthand the effects of a toxic environment on school children’s health and behavior. I became the principal investigator of a research program linking the deleterious effects of exposure to toxic metals (e.g., lead, mercury, cadmium, aluminum, arsenic) with childhood neuropsychological performance. Our studies failed to determine safe dose or no-effect levels of toxic metals in general populations of children and showed significantly higher toxic metal levels in populations of children with intellectual disabilities (ID), LD, and EBD. During this time, I served as an advisor to the President’s Committee on Mental Retardation regarding childhood toxic metal exposure and ID and developed a lead poisoning prevention environmental education program for children in Head Start and their families. Twenty-five years later, federal agencies remain extremely slow to act on reducing metal exposure in infants and children, so the silent poisoning of our young people continues.

The second phase of my tenure was characterized by the development of a unique psycho-educational approach to teacher education regarding EBD. Its focus was the philosophy, classroom practice, and teacher stories of Torey Hayden, a teacher of students with EBD and author of a series of internationally best-selling books chronicling her day-to-day work in special education. Her first-person accounts emphasize the active use of relationship skills, intuition, and the social milieu in changing students’ behavior.

Using Torey’s teacher stories as course texts in EBD teacher education, I distilled from them a consistent methodology for educating students with EBD which could be termed the relationship-driven classroom. Torey and I subsequently met, and drawing upon our real-life classroom stories, including some of those described in her books, we wrote Teaching Children Who Are Hard to Reach: Relationship-Driven Classroom Practice (Marlowe & Hayden, 2013). Our book identifies the key skills teachers need to build successful classroom relationships.

I taught Torey’s teacher stories and her relationship-driven classroom practice to some 3,000 teachers at Appalachian State over a 25-year period. Concurrently, I developed a research program examining the influence of this psycho-educational model on teacher education outcomes. Research findings consistently showed that Torey and her relational approach were a powerful influence on preservice and inservice teachers’ short-term and long-term attitudes and practice.

Intervention:

In terms of the field, what are the events, policies, innovations, and people that have had the most significant impact on your career?

Marlowe:

The person who has had the most impact on my career is Torey. My introduction to the genius of Torey happened in 1992 when I adopted three of her books: One Child (Hayden, 1980), Somebody Else’s Kids (Hayden, 1981), and Murphy’s Boy (Hayden, 1983). What drew me to her work was the difference in her approach, as backdrop to her stories, to students with EBD in contrast to the primary approaches today. Current classrooms for EBD rely on the heavy use of behavior modification programs, which seem primarily aimed at achieving obedience. Here was a viable alternative, an approach that centered on relationships as a means to change behavior.

I was also drawn to Torey’s work by how her writing accurately portrays what it feels like to work with children, evoking memories back to when I taught in classrooms for students with EBD. It was validating to read Torey. Here was a kindred spirit in a sometimes lonely field, as she articulated the feelings and thoughts I had experienced—compassion and frustration, joy and sadness, enthusiasm and disappointment.

Using Torey’s teacher stories as course texts transformed my university teaching experience. What emerged was a mixture of story, classroom practice, and theory which provided complex, useful content for substantive discussions of teaching students with EBD. As Jerome Bruner has noted, people are hardwired to respond to stories, and Torey’s stories provided a much needed exploration of the happenings in real-life EBD classrooms over a period of years. Teachers sensed the excitement of someone who was there before they were and writes it like it really is. They identified with Torey as a role model and imagined new possibilities for their own teaching.

A second genius of influence was Fritz Redl. I happened upon the Aggressive Child (Redl & Wineman, 1957), his landmark work on troubled children and youth, in a used bookstore during my doctoral studies. I had never found anything in the field of EBD as personal or useful or caring as his work. It portrayed with vivid clinical examples the fundamentals of relating to children and provided a template for day-to-day caring interactions with students with EBD. His psycho-educational treatment concepts became anchored in my university teaching, and they remain essential, a half century after the publication of his last collection of papers When We Deal with Children (Redl, 1966).

Intervention:

What would you say has had the most positive impact on the field of interventions for students with significant behavioral needs?

Marlowe:

The intellectual genealogy of Redl has had the most positive impact on the field of interventions for students with EBD. William Morse and Nicholas Long, students of Redl, coauthored seven editions of the psycho-educational text, Conflict in the Classroom (Long et al., 2014), running from 1965 to the current volume published in 2014. The book embraces the worth of each young person and teaching methods that feature relationship building. Long also founded the Life Space Crisis Intervention Institute to provide training in Redl’s reclaiming strategies for students with EBD.

Larry Brendtro, who learned from Redl, Morse, and David Wineman, is also part of this genealogy. Brendtro, Martin Brokenleg, and Steve Van Bockern founded Reclaiming Youth International to advance research and practice with the most troubled youth. They wrote Reclaiming Youth at Risk (Brendtro et al., 1990), outlining the psycho-educational circle of courage model, which has become the core philosophy of a worldwide network of schools and programs. And, Brendtro with Long served for two decades as co-editors of the journal Reclaiming Children and Youth, stewarding the ideas of Redl in over 1,000 cutting-edge articles.

Intervention:

What do you think has had the most negative impact on the field?

Marlowe:

Since the late 1970s, researchers and policy makers in the EBD field have given high priority to applied behavioral theory and its ideology of control. This massive emphasis on developing and investigating curricula and techniques that predict, control, and modify problem behaviors has proven ineffective in teaching students with EBD to think critically, develop socially and emotionally, and achieve academic success.

The reason the use of behaviorist practices as our primary methods are so often ineffective is because the focus is on obedience and control rather than change. Obedience, while preferable to misbehavior, is of limited value in the long term because it is externally governed. If the external authority is not present, often times the desired behavior is no longer present either. The only way to ensure a desired behavior remains in place once outside the controlled classroom environment is if change has genuinely occurred within the individual.

For change to take place, the teacher must first form a relationship with the student, a relationship that the student cares about and values. This is the only context in which change can take place. Students change because it matters to an admired teacher that they change. The relationship gives the student the energy to change that which they didn’t manage before because it now matters to the teacher. The desire to be liked is writ large in human affairs. It is designed into our DNA.

The behavioral model, where the focus is solely on the maladjusted behavior and controlling it, is not dependent on the personality characteristics of the teacher. Behavior modification symbols cannot replace a relationship. If you replace a relationship with concrete consequences on too often a basis you encourage apathy. The student is not relating to another person so there is nothing to connect with. You see whole crowds of kids coming out of EBD programs who do not give a “s#*t.” Why should they? Who can relate to an M&M [candy]? Or a check mark? Or a star? There is nothing there to relate to, so it teaches disaffection. It also teaches a lack of empathy or an inability to see something from another point of view. There is no other point of view in an M&M, and an M&M has no feelings, so you are not teaching the student how to see things from another perspective or how to interpret feelings. And finally, it teaches subjectivity and self-centeredness. Subjectivity is basically selfishness. It is seeing things from my point of view. When a student works for rewards, you teach subjectivity. Selfishness comes quite naturally to us, so it isn’t something we want to reward on a whole scale basis.

My feelings about applied behavioral analysis can be summed up using the analogy of a hammer. If your classroom is a house, you would not want to build a house without a hammer. But at the end of the day you do not want to say, “This is the house the hammer built.” The hammer was simply a tool that was used. It is one of many tools needed to build a complete house. It shouldn’t be the centerpiece of what you are doing.

Intervention:

What do you see for the future of the field of interventions for students with and at risk for EBD?

Marlowe:

It is time to look for intervention methods drawn from practice-based evidence. The most in-depth discussion of what works in practice is found in the Heart and Soul of Change (Duncan et al., 2010), published by the American Psychological Association. It challenges the evidence-based practice model that specific treatments produce cures. Instead, human relationships are at the core of educational, counseling, and psychotherapeutic success. This therapeutic alliance based on trust and hope has been documented in over 1,000 studies.

Conversely and disturbingly, if we consult evidence-based practices on teaching children with EBD we can infer that a pedagogical alliance is of scant importance. Daniel Poling and others found only 13 intervention studies over a 30-year period for students with or at risk for EBD targeting teacher–student relationship quality. The relationship between educational research and teacher preparation in the field of EBD is so direct as to hardly permit the separation of one from the other. Teacher preparation programs in EBD emphasize coursework in applied behavioral analysis while relationship building plays a secondary role. It is no wonder that teachers in classrooms for EBD have poor teacher–student relationships and have the highest rate of burnout of any teachers in the field of special education.

Aristotle said that education of the mind without education of the heart is no education at all. Where do we teach matters of the heart in EBD teacher education? Where do we use a relationship-oriented vocabulary using words like sense, love, empathy, nonjudgmental, and tolerance? Do we know how to teach the behaviors associated with acceptance, commitment, seeing from the other point of view, affection, and enthusiasm? Shouldn’t it be possible to describe and demonstrate how to set up a relationship-based classroom that affords opportunities for the expression of feelings, opportunities for students to communicate with you, opportunities for joy and enthusiasm, and opportunities for stress-reduction and relaxation?

The field of EBD faces critical short- and long-term issues, and there needs to be a strong focus on building relationships at the teacher–student level. Using relationships as a means of change requires us to offer students in our teacher-training classes opportunities to develop the interpersonal skills, philosophical beliefs, and classroom practices needed to create strong and healthy bonds with their students. No one goes into teaching because they want to control lives; instead, they choose teaching so they can change lives. We need to give our teachers the capacity to influence change.

Intervention:

Do you have any final comments?

Marlowe:

A last thought, the most underrated and effective tool for change is humor. It has been long overlooked by researchers in the field of EBD. There is a joylessness in our research literature with its emphasis on control and conformity, and it is suffocating us. Humor can uplift a depressed mind, reduce tension, engage hard to reach students, show our human side, and enhance relationship building.

Teachers must always keep their sense of humor. Most students can tell very quickly if you are laughing at them, but most students can also tell if you are laughing with them. If you laugh at life you stand a much better chance of getting through it. The existentialists have a point, most of life is absurd, and most of it doesn’t make sense. So, really the only appropriate response is to laugh at it. Teachers shouldn’t let their sense of humor be obscured by working with these kids; it is your best friend in the classroom. Invite it in often.