Violence Against Teachers

Advocacy, Parents, Pre K - 12 Teachers April 18, 2016

Understanding the Truth about Violence against Teachers

We have all heard stories about teachers who have been assaulted and continue to work in fear that they may be victimized by one of their students.  In fact 80% of teachers in a nation-wide survey reported being victimized at least once within the current or past school year.

There are different reactions to this occurrence, ranging from

“Why would anyone teach at that school?” and
“Some teachers just don’t know how to manage those kids” to
“These children have been traumatized and just need the proper guidance and services.”

But what if you are a teacher in that school because you care? You know that these students need help and you are trying to do your part.  What if you have managed classrooms full of students for years, but this time is something different?  Then what?

It is true that there is a growing understanding of how trauma and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) not only affect the brain and learning, but can lead to numerous behavior challenges, including aggression and impulse control.  It is also a fact that for many years, male students of color, students with disabilities, and LGBTQ students have been disproportionately disciplined more frequently and more harshly than their peers, prompting the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education to release guidance on promoting supportive and preventative approaches to school discipline.  Trauma-informed and restorative practices  in education and justice are becoming more widely used and have been acknowledged for their role in stemming what is referred to as the school-to-prison pipeline and building a more resilient and compassionate community.  These are all important and necessary education and juvenile justice reforms and programs that should be implemented and replicated across the country.  But what if you are a teacher right now, going to work today, knowing that you might face another physical or verbal threat from one of your students?

The American Psychological Association (APA) has been examining the issue of violence against teachers and has developed numerous resources to highlight and bring awareness to the issue, as well as to promote long-term solutions  to the problem facing teachers today.

Quick Tips for Educators

  • Note any change in students’ emotional and/or behavioral functioning.
  • Always consider social, cultural, and linguistic factors when judging student and adult behavior.
  • Remember you are not alone! Talk with a trusted colleague, mentor, administrator, or union representative and get outside assistance when needed.

Providing Support and Education for Teachers

NEA Healthy Futures has been working to educate our members about the myriad challenges facing students today, dealing with unprecedented levels of poverty and toxic and environmental stress. Member survey data confirm that most educators do not always identify or fully understand the different learning disabilities and behavioral disorders that can lead to disruptive behaviors.  We also know that each of us comes to a situation with our own internal biases that can affect our response to different behaviors.  Teachers and school-employed personnel need to understand how to identify behavior issues, but also how to respond to and de-escalate aggressive behaviors.  Suspension, expulsion, and involvement in the criminal justice system are not effective discipline tools and do not solve the problem.  NEA is working to train our members in greater awareness of mental health issues and have developed a training on Addressing Behavior Challenges (ABC) throughout the school environment.

The shortage of quality teachers in high needs school districts and with high need populations has long been a serious challenge. Keeping quality teachers once you succeed in drawing them to the profession is a whole other challenge.  We need to continue to do all we can to support and empower teachers with the proper skills and resources to address the needs of their students.  This can be in the form of additional training and professional development, but can and should also be in the form of more school-based mental health professionals (school psychologists, school counselors, and school social workers) and other specialized instructional support personnel (SISP) to work with students to address any number of barriers to teaching and learning and to consult with school staff on how to approach and prevent challenging and even violent behavior.

Our teachers and school employed professionals deserve to be treated with respect; they deserve to work in a safe and supportive environment, just as much as our students deserve to be taught in a safe and supportive environment.  Take action and speak up for the students and teachers who need more support, training and resources to address complex student issues and prevent violence in our schools and communities.

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Parents, Pre K - 12 Teachers April 11, 2016

Psychologists Invited to the Table to Guide Use of Federal Funds

From ESEA to ESSA:

For you policy-wonks out there, psychologists included, you certainly are aware that Congress passed, with bi-partisan support, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965.

This law, like previous versions, provides the scaffolding for our federal investment in K-12 education.  The law directs how the federal funds are to be used.  And in general, the law continues its historic focus on targeting federal funds to low-income, high-need schools, by formula, in an effort to provide more equal access to a high-quality education for all students.

Pre K - 12 Teachers, Undergraduate Teachers April 4, 2016

How Regional High School Teacher Networks Will Take your Game to the Next Level

Professional development opportunities for high school psychology teachers have traditionally been hard to come by. In the past, the only significant opportunities to see presentations on best practices in the teaching of high school psychology were limited to the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) annual meeting or the Advanced Placement Annual Conference. Both are outstanding opportunities for professional growth but typically require significant travel and expensive conference fees.

Student loan paperwork

Advocacy, Graduate and Postgraduate Students March 28, 2016

My experience on Capitol Hill: How I Advocated to restore eligibility for federally subsided loans

Recently, I had the opportunity to attend the Education Leadership Conference (ELC), which was presented by the American Psychological Association (APA). As an APA graduate student affiliate (APAGS), I was honored to be one of the representatives for the graduate student body for APA. The conference included a wide variety of presentations that included research, reviews, opinions, and panel discussions. The focus of the conference was on the importance of translating psychological research to educational practice, policy, and the public.

As research presentations and discussion panels drew to a close, the focus of ELC changed to advocacy efforts. This involved specific sessions to assist all ELC participants to learn, understand, and apply specific advocacy skills in anticipation of their congressional meetings on Capitol Hill the following day. As a graduate student, I was initially nervous about this aspect of the conference because I had no prior experience in political advocacy. Furthermore, I was the only representative from my state and realized that I would be meeting with my state’s Congressional delegation by myself. At the final day of the conference, I walked into three meetings with three different representatives from Wisconsin and pleaded my case for our primary advocacy concern, which involved the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, specifically to restore graduate students eligibility for federally subsidized loans. I used my own personal experience with student debt to center the conversation: in 2008, I returned from a combat tour in Iraq. Upon exiting the military, I knew that I needed to make a difference with the veteran population, specifically to advocate for change in mental health service availability, quality of care to both veterans and their families, and to make an impact on today’s society. After completing my undergraduate degree in Child Psychology and my Master’s degree in Counseling Psychology from the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, I realized that the best way to make a difference was to work at a Veterans Affairs setting. One primary concern of mine before entering a doctoral program was how I was going to pay for this amount of schooling. Although I was fortunate to utilize the Montgomery G.I Bill, it did not cover all expenses that are required as a both an undergraduate or graduate student. As a current 2nd year doctoral student in Counseling Psychology at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, I am continuing to take out student loans in order to ensure I am financially stable, regardless of assistantships and scholarships that are available to me. Overall, my student debt has heavily influenced my future endeavors and academic pathways in order to obtain a career working with veterans.

When the day was over, I sat in a coffee shop and reflected upon my experience and considered whether I had made a difference. As I sat still, I looked up and saw six other ELC participants walk in. I quickly realized that a difference was made. Not because of me, but because of a movement of force by ELC participants to stand together and fight for current and future psychologists.

When I returned to my institution, I shared my experiences with fellow students, professors, and colleagues. Several individuals asked me if this experience changed my views on advocacy or if I found a “calling” on Capitol Hill. I calmly replied by stating that advocating is a must for each graduate student, clinician, researcher, or academic. We must fight for what we believe in and prove to the entire world that psychology has a place. Furthermore, we must use our skills to advocate for our capability to be effective, including the lowering of student debt, which has plagued this country, and our field specifically.

Overall, I had a great experience at ELC and I enjoyed the consistent application of current research into the discussions with ELC participants. As a graduate student, it is vital for soon-to-be psychologists to take part in conferences that have a direct impact on the future of the profession and to have a strong voice within advocacy efforts that further advance our field, in both application and appearance to the public.

Undergraduate Students, Undergraduate Teachers March 21, 2016

How to Maximize the Blessings and Minimize the Curses of Being a Psychology Major

Psychology majors are both blessed and cursed.

What is a psychology major’s first blessing?

Your ability to prepare yourself for a remarkably wide variety of careers because the psychology curriculum provides so many opportunities to develop the seven crucial sustainable job-related skills (i.e., communication, collaboration, critical thinking, professional, self-management, technological, and ethical reasoning) that employers value most during the hiring process. These same seven skills also help new hires gain positive on-the-job outcomes (e.g., new responsibilities and promotions) and avoid negative on-the-job outcomes (e.g., reprimands, discipline, and termination). This blessing is the reason why “students who complete a baccalaureate degree in psychology will have completed an almost ideal workforce preparation”.

The second blessing?

The knowledge you acquire as you learn about the causes and consequences of human behaviors and mental processes, which are perhaps the most interesting, complex, and important topics addressed in higher education today. The captivating nature of psychological knowledge attracts huge numbers of students to the major, produces more than 117,000 bachelor’s degrees in psychology each year, and prepares you to enter a remarkably wide range of careers that deal with people and their interactions with each other and their environments.

Unfortunately, there are downsides (i.e., curses) to these blessings.

What is the first curse of a psychology major?

The prospect of making a decision from such a massive set of career choices is a daunting task for many psychology majors. Unlike your education-, accounting-, and nursing-major peers who know exactly what they will become when they graduate (i.e., teachers, accountants, and nurses), only a small percentage of psychology majors continue their education, earn graduate degrees, and become psychologists (Hettich & Landrum, 2014). The rest enter the workforce immediately after graduation in diverse fields such as business, advertising, human resources, social services, health care, law enforcement, technology, education, fitness, recreation, and the military.

The second curse?

Psychology is a very popular major. This may initially appear to be a blessing, but it also means that a bachelor’s degree in psychology places you at risk in the job market simply because so many are competing with one another for jobs. If you lack the ability to prove the possession of a strong set of job-related skills, you risk job dissatisfaction, the disturbing belief that your jobs are not related to your major (Borden & Rajecki, 2000), and the very real possibility of having to accept a job that does not require a bachelor’s degree (Rajecki & Borden, 2009), or—worse yet—that presidential candidate Jeb Bush was correct when he stated that psychology majors end up “working at Chick-fil-A”.

blessings and curses 3

The experience of teaching, advising, and mentoring thousands of psychology majors during my 40-year academic career has led me to conclude that this group is composed of two subgroups:

  • occupationally savvy students and
  • occupationally not-so-savvy students.

These subgroups approach their professional futures in profoundly different ways.

Savvy students:

Savvy students adopt a proactive, two-stage approach to the collegiate experience by deliberately using it as an opportunity to explore, identify, and refine their career goals. You create and follow a well-crafted plan to acquire the skills you will need—and the evidence that you have acquired them—to attain your post-baccalaureate aspirations. In other words, you intentionally use your undergraduate educations to decide who you want to become and then begin a systematic process to construct yourself in the image of that person.

Not-so-savvy students:

On the other hand, if you are a not-so-savvy student, you will live your undergraduate life under the ill-fated illusion that you are entitled to, and will acquire, a good job after you graduate simply because you possess a college diploma certifying that you have accumulated enough credit hours to graduate. You will take courses to “get them out of the way,” avoid challenging classes in which you could strengthen important career-enhancing skills (e.g., writing, public speaking, and math), choose easy rather than skill-building electives, and spurn extracurricular opportunities because you believe them to be a waste of time, rather than opportunities to develop valuable collaboration and leadership skills. These unfortunate strategies, paired with the misconception that the work required as an undergraduate student cannot be applied to the “real world” of work, can produce very negative consequences.

Case in point is the extreme disgruntlement one of my former students described several years ago in The Huffington Post  who, in debt and without a steady job, attempted to sell his diploma on eBay® for $36,000 plus $3.50 shipping and handling. Perhaps as a result of living out a self-fulfilling prophecy, he was quoted as saying, “Universities are handing out too many degrees that have zero real-world application.”

Interested in becoming the savvy psychology major I have described in this blog? Read my full article here to find out how. 

From “How to Maximize the Blessings and Minimize the Curses of Being a Psychology Major,” by D. C. Appleby, 2015, Eye on Psi Chi, 20(1), pp. 16–19. Copyright 2015 by Psi Chi,the International Honor Society in Psychology. Adapted with permission.

Additional References:

Borden, V. M. H., & Rajecki, D. W. (2000). First-year employment outcomes of psychology baccalaureates: Relatedness, preparedness, and prospects. Teaching of Psychology, 27, 164–168. doi:10.1207/S15328023TOP2703_01

Hettich, P. I., & Landrum, R. E. (2014). Your undergraduate degree in psychology: From college to career. Los Angeles, CA: Sage.

Rajecki, D. W., & Borden, V. M. H. (2009). First-year employment outcomes of U.S. psychology graduates revisited: Need for a degree, salary, and relatedness to the major. Psychology of Learning and Teaching, 8, 23–29. doi:10.2304/plat.2009.8.2.23

I-O Psychology

High School Students, Undergraduate Students, Undergraduate Teachers March 14, 2016

Interested in I-O Psychology? Here’s What You Need to Know

How do teams of astronauts creatively solve problems? What makes a CEO, police officer, or teacher motivated? How do we recruit, hire, and retain the best performers for our workforce? How do we eliminate discrimination against women and minorities in companies? What can we do to keep our military service members safe and healthy?

These are all questions of interest to Industrial-Organizational (I-O) psychologists, who use science to improve not only the effectiveness of organizations, but also life for employees.

High School Students, Pre K - 12 Teachers, Undergraduate Students, Undergraduate Teachers March 7, 2016

5 Phenomenal Women of Color Who Changed Psychology Forever and Will Inspire You to Do the Same

Not too long ago, psychology was a discipline dominated by white males. Change came slowly in the wake of the Civil Rights and Women’s Movements of the 1960s and ‘70s. But even before then, a few intrepid women of color entered the field of psychology and strove to change it (and the world) for the better. And women of color continue to break barriers and contribute to psychology as scientists, practitioners and policymakers to this day.

Parents February 29, 2016

The 4 Principles of Attachment Parenting and Why They Work

Attachment parenting took a beating after the May 2012 issue of Time Magazine with its controversial cover picture of Jamie Lynne Grummet nursing her 3-year-old son. If the cover wasn’t inflammatory enough, the title, “Are You Mom Enough?” added further fuel to anti-attachment (aka anti-helicopter) parenting outrage. The implications of this cover story were that there’s something wrong with parents (especially mothers) who coddle their children or at least become too involved in their upbringing.

Advocacy February 22, 2016

You want me to do what? Thoughts from a reformed reluctant advocate

I’ve been honored to participate in the Education Directorate’s Education Leadership Conferences (ELC).   I vividly recall reading the ELC materials sent prior to the first conference I attended.  When I read the part about “making Hill visits” it stopped me short; I thought, “Huh, say what?”   Surely I was misreading and they couldn’t actually be serious about “making Hill visits”, they were, and I did.    What an amazing experience!

Over the years, we have gone to the Hill, under all sorts of political conditions, and spoken about a range of issues including the Garrett Lee Smith Memorial Act, Graduate Psychology Education Grants and this year, graduate loan debt.   And happily, after benefitting from excellent advocacy training, my reluctance indeed changed to enthusiasm, albeit cautious enthusiasm at first.

It’s just plain exciting to be on the Hill with colleagues making visits to congressional offices with requests that will make meaningful differences in society.  I confess, there is also a delight in seeing the offices of people you only read about in the news and the hallways full of doors framed with state flags.  And, what fun it is to discover the vast underground network of corridors, offices, dry cleaners, shops, and cafeterias that connect all of the senate and house buildings, just like a small underground city!

But it is much more than fun and novelty.

Advocacy for psychological issues is about believing in the importance of our issues, and seeing a need to educate congress members and the public about these issues.

The advocacy process is also about seeing countless other groups, all doing the same thing; all meeting and advocating for issues important to them, from parent groups advocating for increased childhood disease research to members of the video distribution industry discussing commerce regulations.  Literally all manner of people are there, everyone is welcome, and all are doing advocacy work.  To me, this is democracy in action and it is an honor to be a part of that process.

This year our advocacy issue was different than usual, it was broad and went beyond psychology.   We were advocating for restoration of the Federal Direct Subsidized Loan Program in the Higher Education Act reauthorization.  Although this was a bigger, perhaps more difficult “ask” than usual, the congressional staff we met were highly engaged.  Many congressional staffers seem very young and are probably paying off their own loan debt so we may have hit close to home.  I was delighted to meet with my house representative, Congresswoman Chu (CA-27) and her legislative aide, Ellen Hamilton.

Rep Judy Chu and the author, Jodie Ullman

Rep Judy Chu and the author, Jodie Ullman

We did begin by chatting a little about my town’s quirky 4th of July parade that the congresswoman always participates in, riding on the back of car.  As we moved to a discussion of the issues of graduate loan debt, to my delight and complete surprise, right there in the meeting, she decided to introduce a bill to reinstate the federal direct loan subsidized program!   This was simply astonishing to me and far beyond our request!   And, indeed, after much hard work from the Congresswoman, her staff, and the Education Directorate Office of Government Relations, in early December she introduced H.R. 4223, the “Protecting Our Students by Terminating Graduate Rates that Add to Debt” (POST GRAD) Act.  Wow!

This bill is critical to our graduate students who are increasingly graduating with crushing debt.   Beyond the stress associated with a growing debt burden, the commitment to pay the loans back often forces new graduates to make career choices based narrowly on income rather than a commitment to larger goals.   The public often thinks of undergraduate degrees as key to an educated workforce but overlook the role of advanced degrees in the workforce.  Without debt relief for graduate students we risk harming the educational development of the professionals we need to fill critical jobs that require advanced degrees, we know this in psychology, others may not.

So, we have work to do.  Each of us can make an impact, we really can!  Please click on the action alert link below and contact your congress members and ask for their support of H.R. 4223.   When we all work together our impact is enormous, I believe that is the key to making positive change.    Making Hill visits has been a career highlight for me, but we can advocate in all manner of ways, pick one that seems doable.  The key is realizing our voices are heard and matter!  Now, more than ever, we need to be advocates, we have the skills, ability, and dispositions to step up and advocate for critical education issues.   If we don’t speak out, we really can’t count on anyone else speaking up.  Please take a moment now to contact your congress member.  Together we succeed!

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