001them. So again, thank you very much for that. Uh some housekeeping items for today. Uh if you could silence your phones, please throughout the day and if you as anything if you need to take care of your needs, please do so. Um and we are guests in this building, so please pick up after yourself. Uh, make sure things get in the trash where they belong and things in the classroom are put back where you found them. Um, at lunch today, look for we'll have four people with clipboards before the uh you go through the line to build your box if you're staying here. Uh, so look for them and they're going to tally you up because we have to figure out how many people are eating and what are uh what we'll end up paying
002for today. And for sketches, I sent it in the email to everybody. If you registered after Friday, you didn't receive it, but you have to have your pick number and it has to be accurate and your name must appear like it does in MOAX. So, in order to get the sketches, if one of those are off, we can't guarantee that you will get sketches for your sessions. And the way that will work, I don't know if you can see them. I have six signs uh pieces of paper up around the room with QR codes right now. That's how you'll get your sketches today for each session. At the end, they'll present a QR code and you'll use that with your phone hopefully and if it doesn't work, they'll have a sign out sheet that will
003have the necessary information and and at the end of this presentation, Dr. Harris will have a QR code up here for you as well. So, I think that about covers it and we're ready to get this day rolling. So, I'd like to introduce our keynote speaker. Uh, Dr. Jim Harris is a director of Marshall University's, excuse me, interdisciplinary behavioral health center and an assistant professor to the department of social work. He is also the founder of opportunities consulting services. Dr. Harris brings a diverse background in health and human services, having served as an early interventionist, parent educator, educational consultant, university instructor, and behavioral health therapist. A TEDex speaker whose talk was selected as an editor's choice video, Dr. Dr. Harris has delivered presentations at conferences ranging from local gatherings to international venues on topics such
004as behavioral interventions paring positive behavior support traumainformed practices and organizational change. Dr. Harris has partnered with both public and private organizations including the Fred Rogers Company, the US Department of Education and the US Department of Justice. So we're very excited to have him here. is going to present and have two sessions this afternoon noon. So ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Jim Harris. >> Thank you, Dan. >> Here goes nothing, right? Thank you, buddy. Morning. There we go. That'll work. Um, pleasure to be with everybody this morning, right? We're bright and early on a Monday morning at 8:05. So, we're about to see what I can do to wake folks up, right? Um, so my name is Jim. We're going to spend about an hour together and then I've got a couple breakouts after this. Um, look
005forward to spending the day with you and um it's not lost on me the opportunity to open up the day. A special thank you to Dan. Dan's and I have been talking. This has been in the works for quite some time. Um, so and he's might I get to do the easy part. I show up. Dan and the team with the ISD are the ones that are putting this together and I I uh I want to make sure that I uphold my side of things. So this is what we're going to talk about. What's wrong with kids these days? Interesting question, right? Um, I think what's interesting how I want to start this because I've only got about an hour and I want to get right to the point. So, one of the things I
006run into, I do work all over the country in different capacities a lot of times around mental health needs of of students um building helping schools build behavior support systems, disciplinary practices, those kinds of things around the behavioral mental health needs of kids. And one of the places I start typically I always tell people there's an alignment of these three things which is state, story, and strategy. State is the mental and physical condition you're in when you encounter a challenge. Okay. So what that what I mean by that is is our regulatory capacity as educators, our regulatory capacity as helping professionals sets the ceiling for the regulatory capacity in the relationship with a kid. So what I mean by that is our calm or our chaos is contagious. So what you we have to work
007on our calm being contagious. So taking care of our minds, our bodies, the way we operate, our emotional control sets the stage for the regulatory relationship we have with kids. Story is our thoughts and beliefs about the challenge or situation that we're facing. One of the things I find is a lot of my work is is focused around story, which is what people think about the situation that they're in. how kids view young people today. And a big shift that we find for the mindset shift that I really want people to focus on is the difference in these two questions. What's wrong with kids these days versus what do kids need these days? So, let me think about what's wrong with kids these days. So, let me take that and we'll make that question somewhat
008more experiential. If you spend all day today learning and you go home, you've had a long day and you walk in the house and your significant other uh sees you and says, "Hey, I was thinking about you today." You might think, "Oh, that's nice. You've been thinking about me." And they say, "I even made a list." Make a list. Let's share with me about this list. And they say, "I was thinking about all the ways you could improve as a person." Now, think about how you're going to respond to that. Are you going to be like, "Well, let me get a cup of coffee and something to write with because I want to make sure I get write down all the ways you think I'm failing as a human or are you going to get
009a little defensive yourself and be like, you know what? I made a little list I've had for a while and I actually got a PowerPoint I'd like to go through with you about all the ways I think you need to improve." What what you're responding to when someone says what's wrong with you or here's the list of the things that's wrong with you is important. It's a concept of contempt. Now, contempt is different. John Gottman who in my opinion is one of the best researchers in the world in relationships. He's he has studied marital relationships and and family rel relationships for years. And the one thing that he's found, one of the key findings he's found is that the presence the frequency and intensity of contempt in a marital relationship is the number one predictor
010of divorce. Now contempt is different than criticism. Criticism is a paralleled uh situation, but contempt is when we speak down to someone else. And what you responding to when you when someone says, "I made this list of the things what's wrong with you." You're responding to what feels like contempt, which is them talking down to you. And oftentimes when I find with people when they say, you know what's wrong with kids these days, and they pull their pants up like they're going to wrestle a kid at any moment, right? is that they're looking at kids in a contemptuous way. Now the other question is what do kids need these days? Now this this the tone of this is slightly is is significantly different and I always talk about this is the difference between nose tonose
011or hip to hip. Now nose to nose is about me versus you. So what's wrong with kids these days is about me versus you. It's adversarial. It's it's me against you. Fix broken things. that kind of thing. But hip tohip is about shared perspective. Now, don't misunderstand what I'm saying here. I'm not saying you should be friends with kids. That's I tell kids, I work with a lot of kids and groups of kids and I'll say my I am not here to be your friend. I'm here to be a leader, to be a mentor, to be a source of strength for you. You can you need to go make friends. I'm not your friend. But if I'm working hiptohip, what that means is I have shared perspective. I have an 18-year-old and a 15-y old
012and I think about as a father commonly I'm trying to when I think of that hip-to-hip posture. It's about my job to understand where my kid is in the world, where he's been, who I am, where I've been, and where I'm trying to help him get ready for a world that neither of us have been in. We have to be careful as adults sometimes. We act like we know what the future's going to look like, but there's so much ahead that we can't predict. Now, there's things that we can anticipate, but there's so much that we can't predict. And I think that's an important side of when we're getting kids ready for a world that we neither one of us has survived in. Now, here's where it starts, though. We have to think where we
013came from and how that impacts our vision or our thoughts or our perception of what world kids are going to grow up in. Everything on this slide a previous generation thought was going to ruin the current generation. Is that fair? Who's the cat in the upper right hand corner? Who's that? Elvis. Right. Can someone tell me a unique fact? We'll play a little trivia. A unique fact is 1950s Ed Sullivan and a few other shows. Something unique about when Elvis was on TV. The hint would be cameras. So, anytime something unique about him on TV? Yeah. only showed him why. There we go. Yeah, they only showed him from the waist up. The Ed Sullivan show people sat down and decided we've seen this guy on TV before. These hips are going to be a
014problem, right? We show his hips, we're it's it's the social fabric is going to completely deconstruct, right? So, he showed him from the waist up. Hey, think about that. Think about today. Think about TV today. A few years back, my my youngest is 15, but he was probably like, I'd say 13 at the time. We're flipping through the channels and Dancing with the Stars is on. You guys heard Dancing with the Stars, right? Yeah. We're watching. I flipping through the channels. I look, there's a former NFL wide receiver standing in the middle of the dance floor. And out runs an almost dressed lady. Almost. Right. She runs out and she climbs up one side of this man, down the other side of this man. doesn't even touch the ground in between. And I look over,
015my son is leaning in, right? 1950some. Her lack of clothes alone is pornography. I don't think that's a dramatic statement. I think that's accurate. And this is now like after after dinner TV. Who's who's the cats in the mail? Who's who are those folks? Yes. Test your 1970s 80s knowledge. Anybody remember there used to be they used to say that KISS was an acronym. It's not not keep it simple stupid. That's not that one. But the there was another acronym. What do you think? Do anybody remember what they used to say the other acronym of what KISS stood for? What is it? There we go. Nights in Satan's service. I got an extra special acronym. What I was taught when I was six, seven years old was kids in Satan's service. You know where I
016learned that? Vacation Bible School. Anybody ever been to vacation Bible school, right? Lots of glue and glitter and yarn. It's the only place where you can get like an off-brand vanilla Oreo and like fruit punch at room temperature. And no one seems to be upset about it. No one on a hot summer day has ever said, "You know what I can go for right now? I could go for an Oreo, but vanilla with a subpar amount of cream and if I could get some fruit punch at about 72 degrees, that hit the spot right there. But for some reason, vacation Bible school like, "This is the treat. This is what we're getting." Yeah. We were we were all in our little circle, right? We're getting ready to transition and the vacation bible school lady felt
017like it was a good time to give some extra instruction. And she goes, "Do you kids know who KISS is?" Like, "Yes, Bible school lady. We know who KISS is." She goes, "But do you kids know what KISS stands for?" We're like, "No, Bible school lady. We don't know what KISS stands for." She says, "It stands for kids in Satan Service." And we were terrified, right? That was I was so terrified that summer we went on vacation and back in the old days like the old days in like you'd see like they have what they called the arcade which was really just a room beside the check-in was like they had like one window, a pinball machine and one video game. But if you're a little kid, you're like, "This is the coolest thing that's
018happening in this building, so we're going to love this." So my brother and I were in the arcade, but they had a KISS pinball machine. And my brother also knew uh because he went to the same vacation Bible school, what KISS stood for. And so I saw the KISS pinball machine, and he saw the fear in my eyes. And he told me that Satan was going to grab me and pull me into the the pinball machine like any older loving brother would tell you. And I remember he was pushing me into it. And I was crying, freaking out cuz listen, the lady of vac, she works for God. She knows these things, right? She's on the payroll. Now, what's interesting about this is I think about kids today. I think about my boys. I think
019about the kids I work with all over the country. And one of the things that I consider, let me ask you this. Who's raising a teenager right now? Anybody raising a teenager? Nice. Okay. Now, think about this question very clearly. If you could, and I could offer you the opportunity to trade places with your teenager and run back your teen years. Raise your hand if you'd be interested in running it back. Anybody interested? That's interesting. No hands went up. Me neither. My hand would not go up for that either. I am not interested in trading places with adolescence these days. Now, what's interesting about the fact that you did not raise your hand tells me something unique about kids in society today. And what I would deduct from that is at least in the social
020realm, you believe kids have it harder now than we had it growing up. Is that fair? I think of a a young person's ability to make lifechanging mistakes and to record life-changing mistakes that I didn't have access to growing up. I feel confident, maybe I'm the only person that this may not apply to you, but I know that there were evenings in my late teens and early 20s where I was neurologically compromised. If you don't know what that means, don't worry about it. You probably didn't do much, right? that I was neurologically compromised with my buddies and we were making a series of poor decisions that at some point we would have thought we should record this because there's people that aren't here and we should send it to the people that weren't here so
021they could see this fantastic time we are having. Now, what's funny about this is I asked a couple of my buddies that I went to school with. It's been a little while back. were have we were having dinner around Christmas time a few years back and I said you guys think there's a chance that back in the days when we were in college that we were having an exceptionally fun time that we might have recorded our stupidity and both of them said 100%. And one of these guys is a family practice doctor. The other one is a rocket scientist for NASA. And I'm whatever I am. And we are pretty good guys. And one of the things I think about is we were pretty good guys. But in our younger minds, we realize that we
022might have made those because when you're 40, 50, 60, whatever, it's easy to look at kids and go, "Why would you make such a dumb decision? Why wouldn't you think through the long-term consequences?" Apply your 20-year-old mind to that. And the thing that I think about is what kids need from us is not contempt. What they need from us is guidance. They need direction. They need conversations. They need our help in figuring these things out. These are my boys. This is when they were young and cute. So, I use old pictures of them. Um, this is what they look like. Now, one of the things I think about is this balancing act between acceptance and growth. I'm working with kids and looking at situations and helping people is this difference between acceptance and growth. Acceptance
023is about understanding unique experiences that a child has. Understanding things like neurological differences, trauma, um family circumstances, even just the difficulties of being a young person today. And then growth is about pushing kids to be a better version of themselves. So, we're always working on this continuum between these two things. And if we do too much of one, there's consequences. So if all you do is accept, accept, accept, you can't help it. Your ASUS score is high. You know, you this, this, this, this, and this. What we'll do is we'll weaken kids. But if all we do is push, push, push, we break them. So we're always trying to figure out with kids, and you guys know this because you work with kids all the time, and there's sometimes you're like, man, this kid, I
024got to give him a little more slack, or this kid, he needs pushed more because, so you're always trying to figure out that dynamic acceptance and growth because we're trying to create functional adults. Jake's my 18-year-old. He goes to Ohio University and I remember a while back Jake's mowed grass for extra money. That's how he's made money through the years. And on Sundays, typically we would decide what the schedule's going to be like because he has to he would have to use my van to get the mower to where he was going to mow. So, he had to coordinate with me to make sure he could use the van. It was like a Sunday. And I said, "Hey, Jake, Tuesday's the day you're going to have to mow because that's the only day you can
025have the van." He goes, "Well, Karns and I were going to play ball on Tuesday." I'm like, "Sorry, Tuesday's the day." He's like, "Why can't you just take mom's car?" And I was like, "Tuesday's the day." He said, "You're mean. Anybody ever have a kid tell you you're mean, right? You're not you're not mess you're not working full speed unless you've heard that a couple times, right?" And I started laughing. I said, "Son, you're mistaken." And I said, "Our goal in this house is not to raise happy children." My son yells into my wife. My wife is our principal of our local elementary school who was in the other room. My son yells in to my wife, "Dad doesn't want us to have a happy childhood." And my wife yells in, "Me neither, right?" I
026said, "Son, here's the thing. We want you to have some happy times in your childhood. But here's we are trying to raise functional adults in this house. And we understand that sometimes we're going to have to have a disgruntled landscaper in the effort toward being a functional adult. It's funny. I'll show you this real quick. I just added this for fun. This is You ever see the parent pages for universities? So my wife likes to send me these because they crack me up. This is about This is a parent posted this on the Ohio University parent page. A legitimate question. At least I had enough sense to put anonymous member. This is talking about an 18-year-old kid. Are we thinking yes or no on rain boots? I'm trying to envision this six foot whatever 18-year-old
027kid walking around with yellow rain boots on got my feet all dry. Look at me. Thank you, mama. Right. You know what worries me about this more than anything else is this is just a smoke to a scarier fire of if a parent is asking this question, this kid is probably borderline helpless going to college. Is that fair? So, I tell kids, "What do I want you to be? I want you to be a taxpayer." Now, it sounds like I'm just being facicious. I mean it. I want kids to be a taxpayer. And I'll tell you, let me talk about taxpayer. What is what is the criteria for a taxpayer? The first thing we're looking at is the kids are alive. Now, that seems like a trivial idea, but if you look, depending on whose
028research you're reading, the second or third leading cause of death of 18 to 23 year olds is suicide. That should terrify That should be absolutely terrifying. That the second or third leading cause of death in late late adolescence and early adulthood is the completion of suicide which is the ultimate defiance of our sur our drive to survive which is our brain's primary objective is to keep you alive. It is a defiance of that primary objective. So number one is I want to take mental health very very seriously and I want to make sure that kids feel like they have the supports they need and help them build a psychology that tells them that they can move forward. The second one is they're free which means they're not incarcerated. Third one means they're able. Now there
029are people in society that by no fault of their own are disabled. And part of the reason why this is so important is everybody that can should participate in the economy. two reasons. One because there are a certain segment of population that cannot participate in in the economy. So we everybody that can needs to contribute in order to support. If you ever had a family that was dis a family member that was disabled or a family member that was in a situation like you understand the importance of certain governmental supports for folks that cannot participate in the economy. If you've ever had um an an aging parent, a child with a disability. So this is why it's so critically important that people that can participate in society do participate in society from an employment standpoint.
030The second part too is when you don't participate the mental health consequences are significant. When you can and you don't that is not free. There are mental health consequences when you do not participate in society when you're capable of participating. People might act like all free. It comes with consequences. So, I want everybody that can to participate. And last is employed, which plays into that same idea. I used to work in juvenile detention facilities, and that's why I tell kids, I want you to be taxpayers. It's not because I need you to pay my social security. It's because I want you to have the opportunity. It's the starter kit that gives you a shot at live leaving living a meaningful life. It's it's gives you a shot. So, let's talk about strategy. So, what we're
031going to do about this, I wanted to add this in here. I want you to really think about these two questions. I've been proposing this to educators over and over again. Kids are constantly asking you these two questions as they walk through your hallways, as they walk in your classrooms, whether where no matter what your role is, they ask us these two questions. Now, they may not be asking it to you verbally, but they're constantly asking you in their behavior. Do I belong here? And can I be successful? And your school, your system, your relationship should continually help them answer these questions. And you I'll tell you when you find kids that are struggling the most, they're going to they're they can't answer the in the affirmative to one or both of these questions. So
032when I'm building a behavior plan for a kid with significant mental health issues, if I want to really drill down into it, I'm going to say, "How can I help this kid feel like he belongs and he can be successful?" Because nothing comes from nothing. So I have to figure out how to help him answer these questions. Looking at this idea of health though is I want these kids to develop a balanced psychology. And when I think about emotional health, I think about physical health. And the elements of those are range and recovery. Range is you go to the doctor, you get your blood work, they send you the report, they tell they show you whether you're in that range, the green range, the yellow range. They have the little markers to show you are
033you within the what we would consider the healthy range. Recovery is your body's ability to respond to adversity, which is equally as important, if not more so, which is that ability for your body to respond to an illness, a sickness, a broken bone, whatever it might be. Those are key indicators of physical health. Now, emotional health is the same thing. Range is the difference between sad and depressed, nervous and an anxiety disorder, busy versus ADHD, those kinds of things. We measure range. recovery, which I would I would encourage you to think about this as probably one of the primary um evaluations that you should or evaluators you should use on a kid. What I mean by that is how do they respond to adversity? I think too often in education we celebrate talent over the
034idea of development of skill and grit and determination because talent oftentimes like IQ for example taking credit for a high IQ is like taking credit for being tall it's mostly genetic so praising constantly Carol Dwek's work around mindset constantly praising talent actually hinders effort but if we acknowledge effort we actually increase that focus towards determination. So if I've got a kid that is a is a 17-y old kid and if he gets a B, he has a nervous breakdown or whatever. Well, I'll give you a perfect example. I've worked with numerous college kids who have been so perfect all through their life. They scored all this on their ACTs. Nothing. And their parents be like, they've always nothing's ever been hard. It's always been easy for him. and I'll say, "I'm worried about your kid
035because I don't know if this kid can get up because he's never fallen down." I'll take a, you know, I'll take probably better I'll take a skinned up 3.4 kid than a perfect 4.3 that I don't know what they I don't know what they can do. And even on the way down, if I've got if you teach kindergarten and you've got a 5-year-old who builds a block tower and that block tower falls over and he loses his mind and starts fbombing people and chucking chairs, we got a problem. In case you didn't know, right? We got a problem. Why? Recovery. He doesn't have recovery. So, how do we build recovery? Does anybody remember this? It's probably one of the most useless things the government ever created right here. It's not applicable. Doesn't work. Right? So,
036they came up with this. Like it better. So, I've came up with this. I don't think I'm Freud or anything, but I thought this is a good thing. This is what we're going to talk about is a balanced psychology. Think about if we are what we eat plus or minus. I think about this model here. My boys and I, you guys have golden corral around here. Oh, I love me some Golden Corral. You can judge me. Go ahead. It's okay. You know what's great about Golden Corral? Nobody's trying at Golden Corral. Nobody shows up to Golden Corral like I'm going to be a better person. People show up in Golden Corral, they're like, "I'm gonna limp out of this place." Right. My boys and I would go to Golden Crow. We had guys nights. We'd
037go to Golden Crown and like go see a a superhero movie. You know, it's it's it's it's special because it's the only place that has like a bacon tray and a chocolate fountain, right? But so if I said to my boys, which I would never say, "Hey, go make a healthy plate and use this thing." They'd be like, "That's not helpful." But if I showed them this, they could plus or minus. we could argue whether the ratios are right or whatever. So, I created this because I was working with a lot of uh foster parents. I still work with a lot of foster parents and and one of the things that uh is very very difficult if anybody's been a foster parent or adopted a child is especially when you get a kid later in
038their life. You you they kind of show up with already a certain amount of experiences. And one of the things that I I tell foster parents when I work with them is let's think about what they need from a nourishment standpoint. So, if I've got So, what I did was kind of build this whole model, which is if I've got a kid, just real quick, I'll show you this. If I've got a kid that's getting dropped off at 14 years old to a foster parent, and that kid, excuse me, he's got ton of loss, lost family members, lost relationships, what I tell that foster parent is what that kid needs more of is stability because that's the counterpoint to loss. So, I'm going to unpack each one of these and we'll go through them. Love
039and belonging. Notice love and belonging is off to itself. Why? I never leverage love and belonging for anything else. I used to do this early in my career. I made this mistake when I was working with kids in the in the uh residential facilities that I worked in. One of the things I'd build a good relationship with a kid and then I would I would say things like if a kid's having a bad day, hey man, I thought we were buddies like what's going on with you today? Now, what the problem with that is, especially if I'm working with a kid with attachment disruption, is what am I saying to that kid about our relationship? If I say, "What's wrong with you? I thought we were buddies." What am I what am I doing there?
040I'm leveraging my relationship, right? My relationship now becomes our relationship is contingent upon your compliance. And if I've already got a kid that doesn't trust adults with good evidence because of their life experiences and now they see me trying to leverage my relationship as a form of compliance, they're done with. So I had to learn that's I'm real honest about I made I made a lot of mistakes in my career. I've learned some of my best things on face planning. But what I started learning was I can have an unconditional positive regard. I can have that and still be upset with a kid's behavior. But I can't let that be so permanent. So love and belonging. So look at this right here. Why is that little girl want to walk? What would make that little
041girl want to walk? To get to his mama, right? Like she's capable of walking because her bone structure. Her head's not most of her body anymore. She's capable of walking because of that. But she wants to walk because of who she's moving to. Now think about this. If you remember your own kids, if you have your own kids or somebody been around toddlers, remember like especially if you had your own kids and you thought you want them to walk, you're really in a hurry for that. And oftentimes it was because you had a friend or family member that had a kid about the same age as your kid and you guys were having that passive aggressive arms race about whose kids was growing faster. And they'd be like, "Is your son walking?" Like, "Yeah, my
042son's walking." And just to be polite, you'd be like, "Is your son walking?" They're like, "Yeah, my son walks and speaks Mandarin." We're going to go take a walk around in Ann Arbor just to let them get a look at things, right? You remember when your kids learn to walk, they'd be like on the couch, right? And they'd be standing holding the couch and you get just far away from you put your hands out like this, right? This is probably and it's going to sound dramatic, but I mean it. This is probably one of the most important developmental concepts to understand in all of education, which is that kid is holding on to that couch and that couch will continue to do its job. What you are asking that kid to do is to let
043go of certainty and take a risk. And the only way that kids taking that risk is if you're worth it. So if I want to summarize relationships in a school, I want as many people in that building as possible that kids will take risks for. I want as many people as possible that create an environment where kids feel safe to take risks because what is education but risk taking? What is a lecture? What is a quiz? What is um a project? What is that but a risk that kids take? And I see a lot of the kids that I'm working with that their effort is low or their engagement is low because they don't want to take the risk because they don't trust the environment that they're in. And also in fairness to to in
044fairness to teachers is sometimes it's not anything to do with you, but it's the things that happen before them that makes them not want to take risk because they don't feel safe to take risk. So then we have to work through those things and build that element of of a sense of safety and risk takingaking. And also too, and I say this, this sounds kind of harsh, but also too, when I'm working with a group of kids, if I got a kid who takes a risk and another kid that criticizes or makes fun of that kid, I squash that, quick, fast, in a hurry. I have to show kids that I will correct and I will redirect when if someone takes a risk that we will not create shame when we take risks. And that's
045why I'm saying I'm not my job is not to be their friend. My job is to be a leader, a mentor, to create an environment where kids know I got it. I got it. Because if I let that happen, now I got a bunch of risk managers in the room and now I don't get the amount of growth that I need. I tell people, get good at the things dinner versus Disney. If I had a kid that I was going to play some foster care and I only knew one bit of information on each family. One family, what I know about them is that they are have dinner as a family every night. The other family I know they take one one week out of the year they go to Disney and they spend $15,000
046on a Disney vacation. If that's as a thought experiment, if that's all we knew about those families, which family would you tell me to put that kid with? Why? Consistency. Because it's one of the big things about when I work with schools and their behavior systems and everybody wants to do rewards and all that kind of stuff. Don't don't don't don't worry about creating some party at the end of nine weeks with a jump house and hot and ready pizzas and unicorn rides and all that kind of stuff. Get good at the stuff you do every day. Get good at arrival. Get good at lunchtime. Get good at hallway transition. Get because that's where the money's at. Good families are built on good good routines and good uh patterns. Good schools are built on on
047the things they do every day consistently. John Gottman again has these ratios that he he talks about that ideal relationship operate in a 5 to1 positive negative ratio and what he calls disaster relationships in a 08 to1 ratio. I was at a middle school a few years back asked me to come take a look at things. They said we just want to work on culture here. We want to get better build better relationships with our kids. I said let me just watch some unstructured time. So I watched the rival. I have a little T-chart. On one side I put DC on the other side I put a plus sign. As kids arrived, every time a kid was directed or corrected, I put a mark on the DC side. Every time a kid was positively acknowledged,
048I put a mark on the positive side. Now, positive acknowledgement to me, this is my definition of positive acknowledgement. Anything that's not a direction or correction that acknowledges a kid is alive. That's it. That's my positive acknowledgement threshold. It could be good morning, fist bump, go herd, anything. Thumbs up. First down went to this middle school. The ratio was as a kid walked in, they were 12 times more likely to be directed, corrected versus positively acknowledged. Was it because they're bad people? Nope. They're actually really good people. Good folks. You know what the problem was? The mindset of what was happening. They were on duty. You know who's on duty? Prison guards and police officers. And what looks like to be on duty. When I'm doing this, what am I looking for? Trouble. My dad
049taught me a long time ago, when you look for trouble, guess what? You will find trouble. So what we did was we worked with them on the best. I had a kid a long time ago. He was in one of the facilities I worked in and he said, he was talking about school. He goes, "Mr. Jim, you can tell the teachers that like you because they talk to you when they don't have to." I'm telling you what, I have never found a better judge of relationships in a building than to walk in and see, do teachers talk to students when they don't have to? You know how much grant money it cost to increase that? Zero. You any project aware, anything else? I love grants and they're all fun, don't get me wrong. But you
050want to improve the relationships with students, increase the positive communication, talk to students when we don't have to. I'm advancing, but that's not There we go. So we look at stability is going to be this next one. Great big here. Huge stability. What's one of the elements we do with that? I'll mention environmental design is one of the big ones. WWDD is what would Disney do. Disney's the best environmental design company in the world in my opinion. Why? Because they want to think about this. They want to save your neural energy. Okay? They want to save your energy. They want when you're waiting in line, if you think about it, when they're waiting in line, they've learned like if you go to like a low-end uh theme park, they put you in the cattle shoots,
051right? The cattle shoots and you walk this way for 45 minutes and then you turn and you pass where you were 45 minutes ago and it like takes some of your soul, right? It's exhausting. What Disney's try to do is they try to create the waiting experience and they create different things like they keep you in an open space if you notice this. They slant the floors. They take you into places. They give you TVs to watch. They give you things. Why? Because they want to save your mental energy because they want you to come off that ride with tons of energy and go buy a $35 corn dog and feel like fulfilled. I one of the things I talk to schools a lot about is are you designing and is your is your building
052designed in a way where you're thinking about preserving the mental energy of your students? Are you looking at your lunch routines and how kids move in, how they move out? Are you looking at your classroom, how they move in, how they move out, the rituals, routines, systems? Are you are you observing how your hallways run? Are your hallways tiring? One of the ways we know hallways make make a hallway tiring is the way the crowd works and how loud it is. I'm not saying hallways can't be fun, but what I'm saying that that can drain. It doesn't necessarily mean that in that moment I'm going to have a kid act out. It just means that our kids exhausted after that being in that environment because it's so neurologically demanding. Also, classrooms, one of the things
053I tell people about is like organizing stuff. Have you ever been in a classroom that looks like an episode of hoarders? If they're sitting close to you, don't point. It's not polite. One of those classrooms that hasn't been updated in year, the last present they have is Nixon on the wall or they've got their leaf unit from 1992 and all the leaves have completely disintegrated. Here's one of the things I think about. I was working in alternative school years ago and I walked in and they had a bunch of broken computers on a on a on a table over here and I said, "What's up with those computers?" And they said, "Oh, they're just broken ones and that's where the tech people keep it down here." And I said, "So this is the room where
054we keep broken things." We've already got kids in alternative school who already don't feel like they're the highest desirable students in the district. And I said, "Would you teach AP English in this room? and they're like I'm like that stuff matters where kids are and the environment they're in matters. Also things and I'm going to pick on who teaches in elementary. Anybody teach elementary? All right, I'm I promise this. No offense here, but listen to for just a second. Sometimes elementary walls can get busy. You ever see 15,000 things on the walls? I always tell people your wall is an extension of instruction, but sometimes we get so much stuff on the walls, it's just a bunch of stuff. And I'll see like sometimes uh walking through the hallway, you see like a a poster
055that clearly was bought at the book fair that has like a pig and a kitten laying together and it says like better together. Never in my life I ever walk through the hallway, the kid about to lose his mind. Ever look at a picture like that and go, "Dr. Jim, I was about to lose my mind. I saw that pig and that kitten get along. I makes me want to be a better person. How much? Now I have seen schools where we work with things like zones of regulation, for example, and we have things on the walls where I have a kid starting to escalate and I'll say, "Go show me your color." Because I know he can't. I know he verbally he can't because we get upset with the verbal reasoning uh declines. Verbally
056he may not be able to tell me, but I have an environment that is an extension of instruction and support for that kid. Another thing we talk about is do we have expectations? Now, full disclosure, a lot of my research that I've done is around MTSS systems and positive behavior supporting systems. So, I do believe in the idea that we should have three to five positively stated expectations for all people in all environments. The reason why I believe that is the evidence backs it up. And I know it's something that since 2001 when the technical assistance center came along, 2010 came along, especially and I know in Michigan and some of the work I've done in Michigan, a lot of that training from 2008 to 2012, um, was a lot on like teaching schools how
057to like give out tickets and have school stores and have jump house parties and stuff like that. But I would argue that the posit behavior support structure is much more than that. I've got a session, the last session I'm doing on MTSS, which is about good teaming, great expectations, uh, teaching systems, teaching kids what it means to be successful. I think this is one of the areas where we got to get strong, helping kids understand what it means to be successful in those environments is an it helps. I've worked a lot of kids with autism, anxiety, ADHD, uh, a th those different things. This is a word that gets us in trouble, especially in middle school and high school. They should know how to behave. They should know how to act in the hallway. I
058tell people all the time after every break, assume every student had a non-threatening head injury. And when they come in and say, "I realize you've forgotten everything I taught you up to this point. We're going to retach you what it means to be successful." I think about this. I had somebody um talk to me about this the other day, and I thought, you know, well, why should we have to do this with high school kids? I think about if you're a sports person, you may have heard of a guy named John Wooden. John Wooden is probably one of the greatest coaches of all times. Absolutely fantastic human. The first thing that John Wooden would do with these, he won, I think, 11 national championships in college basketball. But the first thing they would do is
059he would teach them how to put their socks on. So you take these gigantic grown men and make them sit down on the bench in the locker room and teach them how to make the seam on their sock completely perfect, how to lace their shoes up and how to tie their shoes. And his thought process was what he would tell them is if you don't put if you don't put your socks on right, you don't put your shoes on right, you're going to get blisters. And if you have blisters, you can't play basketball. So I don't care how good you are, how tall you are, if you got blisters on your feet, you're not going to be able to play at the level you can play. So the thing that I would think about is
060we too often are like I shouldn't have to teach any time teaching kids how to walk through a hallway when actually that's the fundamentals of school teaching kids how to do those things and balancing between this concept of skill and will. I would argue one of the things I talk a lot about when we talk about behavior support systems is we can't go to incentives before we go to skill development. Here's why. If you ask me to take like you say hey we got an AP physics test we're going to give you gym. you get a A on this AP physics test, we're going to give you $1,000. I will want the thousand dollars, which is my motivation, which is my will, but my skill is low. I don't I haven't been done physics for
061a long time, so I'm not going to get an A. But if you misunderstand and think, oh, he's not motivated enough, Jim, we're going to give you 10 grand if you can get an A on this physics exam. What you've done is if you focus on will over skill, the larger the gap between my skill set and my motivation is where shame, anger, and resentment live. So we got to be super careful about defaulting to motivational strategies without assessing skill set. And helping kids learn how to practice, working on skill development, getting good at the day-to-day things. I always say, how do how do we teach success versus how do we punish failure? What are our teaching systems that help kids be successful athletically? Well, this makes complete sense to us. Your football teams probably
062practice, you know, anywhere from six to 10 hours a week. Everybody that makes sense to everybody. Oh, of course it makes sense. We we want to have a good for for a game that lasts two, you know, three hours maybe. But when I ask people like, "Hey, when's the last time we practice our classroom routines? When's the last time we've watched film on our self-eing?" It's kind of like, oh wow, never thought of it that way. I had a a really great teacher I worked with several years back. She was a very very accomplished girls basketball coach. And after one of my trainers, she came up to me and she goes, "I'm really frustrated myself." And I said, "Why is that?" And she goes, "She's won she won like a ton of championships and stuff."
063She goes, "I have put in thousands of hours watching film with my teams, but I have not once ever recorded myself teaching and tried to improve my teaching practice." and she goes and that's pretty humbling to me. So that's where we close those gaps. The next one we look at challenge and responsibility. Now notice this. Challenge, responsibility, success, and consequence and failure are equal thirds. Why? Because I think kids need a little bit of each one. I think we need a little bit of each one. I think kids need challenge and responsibility. Kids need success. Kids need consequences of failure. Because I think that helps build your sense of ability to navigate the world with the world. I have worked with kids that have had too much success and I've worked with kids that have
064too much challenge and responsibility and not enough success. So, let's talk about challenge and responsibility. Now, here's what we're up against is this. Some of you might know late 60s, early 70s, but especially in the 1980s in schools, Character Ed got big. Okay, Character got really big. It was all about self-esteem. It was called the self-esteem movement. And this was this belief that if we just tell kids they're special rainbows, they'll make fantastic choices and be successful in the world. Turns out that's not true. But we tell teachers, we just got to tell kids they're great. We just got to acknowledge kids and tell them they're awesome. So we got a teacher standing back here and looking at a kid. Kids walking down the hallway and it's like, I got to say something nice to
065this kid and kick him down. Look at you buddy. Good little breather. Tell you what, buddy. All day in and out. in and out. We'll get you a Gatorade and a trophy, right? The kids like, I never thought of it, but yeah, I'm I'm I do this all day and I have not received positive acknowledgement for it. The problem with that is is they they they they develop a a sense of something for nothing, which is the ultimate victim of entitlement is the entitled person. That's that's what people don't think about. The ultimate victim of entitlement is the entitled person. Why? Because entitlement means I expect someone else to give me something which means I've given my power away. So when I facilitate the entitlement in someone, I take their power. And when they the
066person doesn't give them what they think they deserve, the only emotion they're left with is resentment. So what I want to do is teach kids something for something. Something for something. With some kids that are so have such significant behavioral challenges, I have to start really, really, really small. I have to start with first then I have to start with you do this, this will happen. So they start to develop a sense of faith in their own behavior. And that's the strategy oftentimes I'm trying to facilitate is that if we think about the good old days kind of thing, I always think about like where it comes from and how hard it is for kids to develop that sense. My grandmother grew up on a farm in Wayne County, West Virginia, and she would talk
067about how we appreciated our breakfast. And what she meant by that was the things on the table, they helped get there. My great-grandfather probably didn't say at the head of the table and say, "Now, Frank, Frank got the eggs." Everybody give Frank a hand. Nice job, Frank. Right. My grandma's name was Ada Beatatric, but they called her B. They said, "Now, B, be B got the butter. Be our special friend today. You can take a trip to the treasure box." Do you think that's what my great-grandfather said? No. The value is what what you added to the family. And a lot of times when we're working with uh especially when I talk about tier 2 interventions with students is we got to find ways for kids to add value because that's where self-concept with content
068comes from. Self-esteem is air in the balloon. Self-concept with content is a foundation of of psychology. It's an idea of I can. When I talk about this, reason why I say I can't. When I work with kids, sometimes I'll say, "What can you do?" And they always look at me kind of puzzled like, "What can you do?" And they like, "What do you mean?" I'm like, "Can you mow grass? Can you clean a kitchen? Can you do algebra? What can you do?" I don't mean in a condescending way. I'm like, "If we're going to figure out what to to help you build into a better version of yourself, I have to get a sense of what you can do." And if a kid can't answer the I can question, I look at the adults in
069that kid's life and say, "It's your job to help him finish that that question." It's your job to help him learn to to build a psychology of I can what it's our job to build that psychology. Loss now notice loss is only a small chunk. Why? You don't need a lot of loss in life to get the point. You know, loss is one of those things where you don't need a lot. But now, how many kids do you work with that have had way too much loss in their life? So, what do you do with that? It's not feeling sorry for them. It's stability. Because what loss does is it takes your certainty. When I lose a parent, when I lose a relationship, I lose my certainty. So, my job if I'm if I'm working
070with that kid is to be as predictable, consistent, and caring as I possibly can be. No magic. You don't have to be a therapist. You don't have to do some kind of Freudian trick. You show up. You be consistent, caring, and predictable. And with time, you develop a sense of faith in the world. There's a highly tech slides are very technical, as you've already could tell. Does anybody know what that is? What is that? It's a guinea pig. I'm upset somebody. Guinea pigs are not real pets. Anything that runs from you and you try to pick it up is not your pet. That is an animal you have trapped in your house. Right? You know what's crazy about it? When I was a little kid, the first thing I ever lost was my guinea pig.
071My guinea pig did it didn't like me. It ran from me when I picked up. Made a squealing noise and everything. But like seven years old, my guinea pig died. I cried. I was upset. My parent, my my dad was good about it. Put him in a Nike shoe box. We buried him in the backyard. All that kind of stuff. But I understood I always tell people let kids experience loss because that's how they have that experience. But don't if a kid gets too much loss that can be counterintuitive. Failure and consequence. If you notice this one's equal right here. Why is that relevant? I think here's one of the biggest points I'd say about failure and consequence is it's functional. But here's I'll give you a quick advice on failure and consequence. Don't ruin
072it for the kid by making it about you. been a little while back. But my youngest son's name's Cody, but I call him Monkey. Monkey was coming down the hill on his scooter and I'm pulling in the driveway and he's kind of cutting the curve and I said, "Monkey Bear, be careful. You're going to hit that mailbox." And our mailbox is brick. And he was like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." And I get in the house. I'm unloading the dishwasher and comes Cody. He's all skinned up. I said, "What's wrong, son?" He goes, "I hit the mailbox. What I want to say more than anything in the world?" Told you, son. You don't know about the brilliance I'm bringing in this world, right? But this one, I got it right because the mailbox already taught this lesson.
073I do not need to get in the way. I said, "That looks like it hurts, buddy." That's why I call the Madden approach. John Madden was a color analyst for football. And all the thing he was to add flavor to the situation. So be careful when a kid has a consequence. Don't make it about how right you were. allow them to marinate in the consequences that they've received and then talk to them about what we're going to do differently next time. Last and certainly not least is success. This is probably in my opinion when I go back to this idea of self-concept of content is a kid developing a sense of faith in their own behavior because if if it's important enough to teach and punish, it's important enough to acknowledge. You know, I work
074with schools a lot of times. People can really struggle with this idea of of reinforcement systems. Now, I don't you I purposely do not use the word reward systems. I use con I use feedback and acknowledgement because acknowledgement is feedback. Consequences are feedback. And if you believe in consequences, you you don't get to you you have to believe in reinforcement, too, because it's all part of the same theory. But one of the things I want when I tell you about how we really build this properly where most of your acknowledgement systems are and feedback systems are going to work the best and this is high school or elementary is right here weekly and daily. This is somewhat controversial but true. Grading period and yearly reinforcers show minimal to no impact on behavior. Why? Because the
075kids I can give you this example. Some of you have had this. If you go to the and I've done this research and I pulled these numbers, you look at who earns the party at the end of the nine weeks and it's basically the same kids every time. If the goal was to create growth, then we that number should grow all year. It'd be like using a reading curriculum and all the kids just held steady in the exact same group they were, we would get rid of that reading curriculum. Why? Because we're not getting growth. But we look at these behavior systems and often times people go, "But it's not fair to the kids who behave." Well, the thing is is if if I have a kid here who gets a who gets a consequence
076that then I I give him a consequence here and then I give him another consequence there, that's illegal in the court of law, which is double jeopardy. But somehow we feel like that makes sense. But when we start looking at here's where the money's at is and that in that acknowledgement, I can talk later about that stuff more as I go because this is the most detrimental psychology that a kid can have. which is what's called learned helplessness. Martin Seligman came up with this term a long time ago. But the biggest thing you start to run into that I think is is um what we have to consider with kids is the difference in learn helplessness is basically the narrative of that is my behavior doesn't matter. And if you think of kids you've worked
077with that are really having a tough time, a lot of apathy, whatever it might be, it's they just don't have any sense that their behavior matters or they don't have any ownership that what they do um creates an outcome. So what do we want to facilitate? We want to facilitate a sense of rational optimism. Now some people would say optimism, right? That's half empty or half full, right? That's we want kids to look at that cup and say that cup is half full. I would disagree with that. I I think that's passive. Passivity doesn't change things. What I want out of a kid is I want a kid to look at a half full cup of water and say, "Where can I get more water?" Effort equals outcome. Because the switch in the narrative goes
078to my behavior matters. When I can get a kid to turn that over, now we're cooking. And I don't care what it is. as I can get him to turn that I say him because 95% of the kids I work with are guys that when I can get that kid to turn that over in their head for anything sports um grades performing arts CT what uh yeah CT whatever uh vocational re anything I can turn them over to that now I'm cooking because the kid's starting to develop some sense of faith in his own behavior and I think the great philosopher from the 1990s Lord Christmas If you don't know who Lloyd Christmas is, you need to watch the movie Dumb and Dumber. And I will give you professional development credit for that. Lloyd and
079Harry follow Mary Swanson through the whole movie. Lloyd stands in front of Mary at the end and he profess his love to her and says, "What's the chances we're going to end up together?" She says, "Not good." And he says, "Like one in a hundred." She says, "More like one in a million." He looks at her and says, "So, you're telling me there's a chance?" Right? I know it sounds cheesy, but I do like the I tell people sometimes, "We are dealing with some really tough situations with kids these days. We got some kids that are they're dealing with things that are way outside their range. We're we're fighting the Tik Tok battle. We're dealing with trauma. We're dealing with parents with addiction. Um, we're dealing with the overexposure of certain content at younger and
080younger ages. We have more kids. The curriculum is advancing as far as what we're asking kids to do, but they're developmentally not any different than they were 10, 20, 30 years ago, but we're pushing the curriculum up. I mean, we got a lot going on. And I just think sometimes I need a little more Lloyd Christmas in my life. I need more people that are telling me, you're telling me there's a chance. So, I'm I'm I'm less interested in admiring our problems and more interesting in solving our problems. And I think that's something that we want to think about as we go. So now what do we do? We keep this question in mind. What do kids need these days? Feel yourself getting frustrated. I get frustrated with kids. I get frustrated with my kids.
081I get frustrated with other people's kids. And I find that that frustration is and I'll start saying to myself, what is wrong with this kid? But if I can switch over to and I can get with a group of people and ask this question, um, it helps me out and it just helps me to understand that I may not be able to change something 20 years down the road, but I can change what happens when that kid walks through the door. I can have control of myself. I can think about what I can do to build a balanced psychology for this kid. And I'll I'll this is I'll end this way. um the idea of like a lot of times like keynote speaker or something at the end of it they go thank you for
082what you do for children and give yourself a hug or whatever which you can if that's your jam hug it out but um I think we got to be very thoughtful of the idea of if you've ever had this happen been in a store you ever been a store and have a kid that you taught yell at you across the the store and like they run up to you and you're not sure who they car and they're like, "Do you remember me?" And you're like, "You're going to have to do better than that, buddy. Like, tell me." And they're like, "I'm such and such." You're like, "I thought you'd be in prison. Get over here, son. Like, give me a hug. Look at you all not incarcerated." Right? And then they say something like, "Man,
083what you did or you know, you did this or you did that and and they talk about how that affected them." Like I I really want you to take a second realize that most of the population will never have that experience. Do not take that for granted. Most of society in their work, I very I've never seen an accountant stand in Walmart and someone run across the cereal aisle and go, "What you did with my 1099 changed my life and hug it out with an accountant." But I've seen it happen multiple times with my mom was a teacher for 32 years. We couldn't go anywhere in our town. My wife's a principal. It's like she's a a Tik Tok star in the store. Like, appreciate the fact appreciate the fact that you get the privilege
084to be that person in your community. It's you're not a martyr for children. Appreciate the fact that you get the privilege to be that person in your community. That it is legitimately a privilege. Um, and I think today's one of those days where we try to get a little bit better for kids. Go to the sessions that close your gaps. Go to the sessions that are going to help you improve your practice a little bit more to answer these questions a little bit more for kids. So, here's how you do the QR. There's sign in things everywhere. You can do this to sign in. You're gonna talk after what? Yeah, I got you. So, here's the sign in thing. Um, I'll leave this up and then after I after everybody's done this, I'll switch over
085to the next slide. The next slide will be my contact information if anybody needs me in any form or fashion and I can I can send you my contact information as well. And um I did uh Dan mentioned this in the beginning that that QR code will also take you to the website that has I've had a couple people ask that the TED talks on there too and people can share that as well. All right. Appreciate your time guys. Thank you. All right, just a couple announcements. Uh, next session begins at 9:15 and there are no bells today, so you're just going to have to keep track on your watch. Um, some people have asked about Dr. Harris's presentation. Uh, if you reach out to him, he's happy to share it with you. Uh, also
086if you this I just found this out so this is a little new but if you are buying your own lunch today if your district is not buying it for you if you want as you exit that way uh one of the food service workers is selling tickets for lunch if you don't want to wait and buy a ticket at lunch. So lunch will be $10 if you're having it here. Uh also if your QR code doesn't work or you're unable to do it remember they're around the room as well. Uh there is at the presenter check-in table to the left as you go out there is a sign out sheet. So I think that's it. I'm excited for today. So go on out and have a great day. Make yourself a little bit better.