A Psychoeducation for Teachers Skill-Building Guide

2.  In a broader sense, psychoeducation refers to the
education given to people living with emotional
problems. Through socio-emotional skill training,
the individual’s own strengths and coping skills are
reinforced, so that the person becomes the main
contributor in his or her own emotional
improvement. The theory behind this is that, with
stronger knowledge and skills, the better able the
person becomes to cope with emotional problems.
In the 1970’s, when psychological theories were
first applied to education in a more systematic way,
psychoeducation arrived to the classroom.

3.  Currently used in special education settings to deal with
emotionally troubled and behaviorally disordered students,
psychoeducation is an approach to changing the behavior
patterns and interpretation of events of children who are not
adjusting well to the school environment. In schools,
psychoeducation is a skill- building training that helps disruptive
and acting-out students understand how their troubling feelings
and emotions relate to their school difficulties and behavior
problems. In considering the socio-emotional issues of the
troubled student in the process of behavioral change,
psychoeducation teaches the student positive attitudes and
socially appropriate alternative behaviors, involving the student
in the development of better coping skills.

4. In child guidance,
we believe that…

5. Attitudes, feelings,
and emotions play a
vital role in learning.

6. Behavioral change
is primarily a
teaching and
learning process.

7. When we
understand a
problem, we are
more likely to know
how to solve it.

8. When teachers
understand their students’
disruptive behaviors, they
can devise strategies to
improve those behaviors.

9. When students
understand the
motives behind their
behavior problems,
they can make better
choices.

10. Disruptive and acting-out
behaviors are a reflection of
children’s inability to deal
with stress and troublesome
events in an effective and
socially appropriate way.

11. Teachers’ interactions with students are
a potent behavior management tool.
Teachers can influence the direction of
any interaction with habitually disruptive
children to move them away from
conflict and toward a learning classroom
climate.

12. Any intervention for
behavioral change must
respond to the complex
and multifaceted
dimensions of troubled
children.

13. Children have all the resources they
need to solve their own emotional
and behavioral problems. The
teacher’s job is to pay attention to
those resources, making the child
aware of those resources while
allying with the child in improving
behavior.

14.  Teachers have a choice in how they respond to
children’s behavior problems. Teachers that
manage behavior, or behavior managers, rely
primarily on preventive measures to weaken
disruptive behaviors. When misbehavior takes
place, the teacher sees it as an opportunity to
help the student learn a way of behaving that is
more positive. Behavior controllers, on the other
hand, tend to ignore good behavior and only
pay attention to the habitually disruptive student
when the child misbehaves.

15.  In child guidance, the teacher does not blame
the student for his disruptive behavior. A
therapeutic teacher focuses on helping the child
find ways of meeting socio-emotional needs in
positive ways, overcoming obstacles to socially
appropriate behavior; in simpler words, through
enhanced training, psychoeducation empowers
the teacher, so that the teacher empowers the
child.

16. In their historical analysis
of psycho-educational
theories and schools of
thought, Wood, Brendtro,
Fecser, and Nichols (1999)
listed the following
models…

17. A model that developed from
psychologist Alfred Adler, the
psychodynamic model
places the biggest emphasis
on emotions in resolving
inner conflicts.

18. This is probably the best-known
model in today’s general and
special education classrooms.
With a foundation in learning
theory, the behavioral model
uses principles of reinforcement
to modify observable behaviors.

19. This model sees the peer group as
the primary agent to change
behavior, thinking, and values. This
psycho-educational model has a
strong foundation in social
psychology and its concepts of
social power and the role of group
members.

20. Known as the re-education
model, this model combines
complex social systems like
mental health and human
services, and personal
factors in interaction.

21. This model emerged from theories of
personality development and developmental
psychology; that is, theories regarding how
human characteristics develop in healthy
ways, or in predictable and sequential phases.
This model believes that our experiences with
other people, or our social environment,
influence the way we behave, feel, and think;
also our motivation, attitudes, and values.

22. This is the psycho-educational model that
most strongly connects the way we think with
our emotions and behavior. The model helps
troubled and disruptive children make sense
of their experiences focusing on teaching
thinking and emotional self-regulation skills.
Contrary to the behavioral model, structured
exclusively on external controls, the cognitive-
affective model develops self-management of
behavior by teaching personal understanding
and decision-making skills.

23.  As Wood et al. caution, all psycho-educational
models overlap, so we need to distinguish the
models only by their relative degree of
emphasis on some factors over the others.
Regardless of which psycho-educational model
we apply, therapeutic teachers see their role as
one of helping habitually disruptive students get
along better with themselves and with their
peers by learning how to self-manage their
thinking, their emotions, and their behaviors.

24. Wood, M. M., Brendtro, L. K.,
Fecser, F. A., and Nichols, P.
(1999). Psychoeducation: An
idea whose time has come.
Reston, Virginia: Council for
Children with Behavioral
Disorders.

25.  Optimal emotional communication and child
guidance skills equate to an improved ability
in promoting self-awareness, self-
determination, and self-efficacy in all of our
students, especially in that student seated in
the back of our classroom that we always
believed was so hard to reach

26.  FACEBOOK PAGES AND
GROUPS
 PSYCHOEDUCATION FOR
TEACHERS (Page)
 https://www.facebook.com/psych
oeducationalteacher
 FREE OR CHEAP TEACHING
RESOURCES (Page)
 https://www.facebook.com/freere
sourcesforteachers/
 WE TEACH THE WORLD
(Group)
 https://facebook.com/groups/222
247571474300
 BOOKS IN CHILD GUIDANCE
 THE PSYCHOEDUCATIONAL
TEACHER
 https://www.amazon.com/author/t
hepsychoeducationalteacher/