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How can we begin to address the increasing incidence of violence in our
nation’s schools? In today’s society, teachers struggle daily with students who
bring to the classroom painful reality problems including parental neglect and abuse,
alcoholism, poverty, and brutality as entertainment. So often adults are at a loss to
understand why students would resort to aggression when there appear to be other, more
fulfilling ways to meet needs. In talking with troubled and troubling students, we often
find ourselves quick to speak and slow to listen, and we miss the chance to discover what
lies behind the surface behavior. A fresh approach known as Life Space Crisis
Intervention (LSCI) helps teachers, counselors, and other school staff to identify the
motivating forces behind the rigid patterns of perceiving, thinking feeling, and behaving
which lead to repetitive acts of self-defeating behavior in students. LSCI has evolved
from "interviewing" into an integrated way thinking about and intervening in
daily crises in the lives of troubled children. The LSCI process takes on different forms,
depending upon setting, staffing patterns, and student needs. The underlying concepts
apply not only to our interactions with children in the heat of crisis, but equally to our
everyday teaching interactions. Knowledge of LSCI enables us to exploit crisis as an
opportunity to bring insight to cycles of responses to stressful events which lead to
greater and greater problems. Nicholas Long developed the concepts originated by Fritz
Redi and David Wineman in the 1950’s and has tailored them for use by teachers,
counselors and other school personnel. There are three underlying concepts which enable a trained adult to use LSCI
effectively. The first is the ability to understand the differences in the psychological
worlds between students and staff during crisis. Students who are emotionally
"stirred up" are operating "from the gut." They, unlike adults, are
often flooded by their emotions and are unable to bring their feelings under control of
rational thinking. Yet, untrained adults don’t recognize these essential differences
in psychological worlds and approach the student as if he were thinking clearly in an
effort to control the crisis. The "straightforward" or "logical"
approach, rather than de-escalating the student tends to have the opposite effect. The
student responds with more intensity which triggers in adults feelings of helplessness,
rage, or counteraggression. If we are not trained, we can find ourselves feeling, and even
behaving in the same manner as the aggressive student. Understanding the Conflict Cycle,
the essential role the adult plays in escalating or de-escalating violent behavior, is the
second underlying concept in LSCI. The third key concept involves understanding that
students in crisis need to talk, and highlights the attending, listening, decoding, and
responding skills which keep the process going. As the adult systematically brings order
to chaos, the student is able to reconstruct events surrounding the crisis "central
issues" which are the most common factors influencing aggressive behavior. It is important to note that the note that the LSCI process can only be effective when
incorporated into a comprehensive (psycho)educational program which allows a forum for
students to practice new behaviors and gain recognition for new insights. Students are
usually unaware of their counter-productive cycles of perceiving, thinking, feeling, and
behaving until they can be led to understand them by trained adults. Once insight occurs,
the student is better able to begin using rational means to cope with stress which lead to
a better way of living. LSCI is an important tool for adults working with children and
youth in today’s schools because it provides a productive alternative to punishment
or exclusion of children and youth who engage in acts of violence. |
