REASONS FOR BEING PLACED ON THE CLASS REGISTER:
Inadequate behavior, non-fulfillment of norms of behavior of students, aggressiveness, tendency to vagrancy, to theft; conflicts with classmates, with teachers; problems in learning; connivance of parents to the education of these students.
The goal of work with children from the “risk group”:
To remove the mood of the situation of conflict in relations with teachers, with peers, to restructure the attitude to learning activities, to work, transformation of forms of interaction between the team and the individual, inclusion of “difficult” in communication with peers, in the system of business and interpersonal relations, in collectively organized types of activity.
Objectives:
1. To conduct individual work, assisting in learning, overcoming ineptitude, strengthening interest in cognitive activity, friendship with classmates.
2. Educate “difficult” students in conscientiousness, ability to cooperate, frugality, industriousness, responsiveness to kindness, politeness, diligence, emotional restraint.
3.Involve “difficult” in KTD and class self-governance.
4. Correction of forms of communication and behaviour, developing a culture of behaviour, and combating
5. Correction of forms of communication, behavior, forming a culture of behavior, combating bad habits.
6. Joint work with the family of the pupil, with specialists: psychoneurologist, psychologist, speech therapist.
The predicted result is to achieve a positive result through the realization of the set tasks.
Directions of work of the class teacher.
1. Pedagogical support – a process of jointly defining with a child his or her own interests, goals, opportunities, and ways of overcoming obstacles that prevent him or her from maintaining human dignity and independently achieving the desired results in education, self-education, communication, and lifestyle.
2. Social diagnostics. This direction assumes special attention to children in care and to teenagers with deviant behavior. Social passports of classes are drawn up to identify these categories. Diagnostic work is carried out, aimed at studying the social and psychological climate in the class, interpersonal relations and the social status of each student.
3. Correctional work. Group lessons and individual consultations are held with children “at risk” and those who have problems in adaptation. Work with the family is also important. The main task is to attract the attention of parents to the activities of students “at risk”, to stimulate their interest in school life, to make them participate in various activities.
4. Educational work. Organization and holding of preventive talks, lectures, thematic class hours, excursions, meetings with interesting people. In the educational work the emphasis is made on the prevention of delinquency, vagrancy, neglect among students.
5. Work with students. Minors, who have committed an offence or are prone to unlawful actions, are identified. Preventive work is conducted, individual talks are organized with the children of the “risk group”.
6. Work with the teaching staff. Joint identification of the causes of the child’s problems, socio-pedagogical and psychological remedial work to assist and prevent possible problem situations.
Various forms of work with children “at risk” are conditioned by the presence of psychological difficulties.
The most typical psychological difficulties include the following:
– Relationships with parents, teachers, other adults;
– relationships with friends, classmates and other peers;
– self-attitude, self-understanding;
– formation of life reference points, ideals, “idols”, “values”;
– inner loneliness, not being expressed and not being understood by others;
– search for freedom through escape from pressure, rules, norms, demands, search for the boundaries of the possible;
– search for a comfortable existence, emotional well-being;
– lack of positive life aspirations and goals;
– resentment of fate, specific people, for their own difficulties;
– experiencing his or her own failure, lack of problems, lack of volitional control and the ability to self-control and possession of the situation;
– disorganization;
– dependence on others, low self-esteem;
– difficulties in learning;
– lack of adequate means and ways of behavior in difficult situations;
– difficult character – the presence of “uncomfortable” character traits: resentfulness, aggressiveness, disinhibition, etc. – absence of a feeling of safety, a search for protection or a “protector”;
– guilt (shame) for dysfunctional parents (low material well-being, unemployment), lack of respect for parents.
The teacher’s work is built according to the difficulties highlighted. This work may be individual and group work on the basis of diagnostics and forecasting of the development of the child’s personality and behavioral reactions.
Children of “risk groups” are children who are in a critical situation under the influence of some undesirable factors. Children are usually exposed to risk due to lack of normal conditions for their full development. Undesirable factors that affect children with developmental peculiarities and cause a high probability of their adverse socialization are physical defects, social and pedagogical neglect, etc.
Theoretical aspects of work with children at risk
Contemporary social and psychological literature tentatively suggests five basic problem groups of children who are at risk and may grow into a risk group unless they are provided with adequate developmental conditions, psychological, medical and pedagogical support in an educational institution, love, upbringing and care in the family, and an individual approach to meeting their special needs.
1. Gifted children.
2. The weakly learning (children with learning and developmental problems).
3. Sick children (children with disabilities, psychophysically and somatically challenged).
4. Children from problem and disadvantaged families.
5. The pedagogically neglected children.
Children with non-standard thinking, who differ from their peers in ways of thinking activity, outstanding artistic data and sports achievements, as well as those children who show traits of leadership behavior fall into the risk zone in terms of giftedness.
We would like to draw attention to the difficulties that gifted children may face:
– Negative attitudes towards learning and upbringing;
– Disruption of relationships with parents;
– susceptibility to frequent mood swings;
– spirit of contradiction;
– depression;
low self-esteem;
– high anxiety;
– a sense of being different from others;
– tendency toward self-justification;
– shifting blame to others;
– lack of perseverance;
– aversion to leadership;
– boredom;
– aversion to competition;
– sensitivity to criticism with a love of criticizing others;
– some arrogance;
– a tendency to set unrealistic goals, etc.
The presence of one of the difficulties or their combination is an indication for psychological and pedagogical support.
Under failure is understood as a situation in which behavior and learning outcomes do not meet the educational and didactic requirements of the school.
Underachievement is expressed in the fact that the student has weak reading, numeracy, weak intellectual skills of analysis, generalization, and systematic underachievement leads to pedagogical neglect, which is understood as a set of negative personal qualities that contradict the requirements of school, society. Rejection of a failing student by teachers, parents, peers leads to persistent social maladaptation. After conflicts with teachers, parents, children who do not succeed become aggressive, fighting, uncontrollable, spiteful to their peers. Already by adolescence, asocial forms of behavior are formed: theft, hooliganism, vagrancy, alcoholism. Such a situation leads to the fact that children stop attending mass school, they no longer care about failure, they join a risk group.
3. Children from problematic and dysfunctional families.
Children from problematic or disadvantaged families who end up in the risk zone are characterized by emotionally unstable behavior, connected with constant worries and sufferings of the child because of psychological, moral, physical, moral-economic difficulties of his or her family.
Families that have socio-economic problems, but are well off, are in the socio-economic risk zone. These are single-parent families, large families, foster families, families with children with disabilities, where parents are disabled, refugee families, families of war veterans, at this time it is relevant to add migrant families to this classification. Families in the socio-economic risk zone, as a rule, have a low standard of living, poor housing and living conditions, are in need of state, social support and protection. At the same time, the family in the risk zone, despite the existing problems, can be successful for the full education of the child, as it preserves positive emotional relationships between family members.
A family in the border zone, i.e., one that has problems that aggravate a child’s living conditions, may regress to the status of a dysfunctional family. Positive changes of living conditions of the child in the family guarantee improvement of family relations and style of upbringing.
A family that has crossed the border of a risk zone and has become dysfunctional can be included in the risk group. Violation of family upbringing functions is the main indicator of a dysfunctional family.
The main violations include:
1. parents’ avoidance of their responsibilities, unwillingness to responsibly perform their parental duty;
2. destructive behavior of parents;
3. gross distortions of child-parent relations, such as: lack of adequate system of upbringing, control over children and proper care for them, as well as manifestation of violence and cruel attitude to children, disregard of their needs.
4. Pedagogically neglected children.
At the center of the classification is the category of pedagogically neglected children, who have problems in two or more of the following ways. Children become pedagogically neglected due to improper pedagogical influence, distorted forms of family upbringing, but only when their problems were not noticed by adults in time and not adequately addressed; psychological and pedagogical help of corrective and rehabilitative content was not provided in time.
This is the most difficult category of children. This includes children with severe psychosomatic traumas, whose general background behavior has a socially negative tone, children who have serious irreparable problems in child-parent relationships. Anger, aggression, hatred, envy, demonstratively disparaging attitudes toward others – this is the nature of emotional reaction to a distorted perception of the world by educationally neglected children. Often such children do not “get accustomed” to one educational institution, fruitlessly change places of study, circles, sections, live with different relatives, more and more clearly understand their uselessness in the family, feeling painful experience of misunderstanding by parents, teachers, peers. The term “neglected” in a single-root context is close to the adjective “neglected”, which is synonymous with the words “conniving” and “abandoned”. The era of change and the current socio-economic situation in the country have sharply exacerbated the problem of “neglected” children. And we are talking not only about children who do not have a home, who have left home, children of the “streets”, but also about those who have no support in the family, were unnecessary to their parents. Recently teachers and psychologists talk about latent (hidden) forms of homelessness. Children even from well-to-do families run away from home, and teenagers from seemingly quite prosperous families need psychological and pedagogical correction connected with deviant, abnormal behavior.
The main reasons for children’s asocial behavior include the following:
1. lack of clear socio-economic prospects for development, low living wages in the family. This problem not only neuroticizes adults who do not fulfill their parental duty to their children, but also negatively affects the physical and mental health of the children themselves, whose childhood is spent against the background of painful worries about their relatives.
2. Parents’ permissive attitude to the upbringing of children leads to a lack of formed ideas about the norms of behavior.
3. an abusive attitude toward children (violence) or disregard for their needs in the family and at school forms in the child a negative attitude toward those around him or her.
A determining role is played by the psychogenic factor (presence of psychopathological symptoms, behavioral disorders), which has a different nature and degree of expression in different children. Medical support coordinated with psychological and pedagogical support is obligatory for children with similar problems.
5. Individual psychosomatic features that complicate the social adaptation of teenagers (character accentuations, inadequate manifestations of self-esteem, disorders in the emotional-volitional sphere, phobias, heightened anxiety and aggression). More often than not, behavioral disorders in teenagers are connected not with one factor (biological, psychological or social), but with a complex “internal course of development itself.
Accordingly, the psychological disadvantage of children in conditions of social instability, the absence of formed notions of the bases and ways of human behavior in society, the presence of psychiatric symptomatology and individual psychological features which impede social adaptation, are the basic factors which influence education and change the trajectory of the child’s development.
