The Importance of Environment in Education
Hello, welcome back to another episode of the Drug Prevention Power Hour. I’m your host, Jake White. And today we are hanging out with Joshua Stamper. And I’m going to tell you a little bit about him. He’s a dedicated educator, speaker, author, and the creator of Aspire to Lead. With a rich background in teaching and school administration, Joshua brings invaluable insight into the challenges and opportunities within the education system.
His personal journey as a struggling student combined with nine years of experience as a middle school administrator fuels his passion for creating supportive and transformative learning environments. Joshua is committed to helping educators and leaders unlock their full potential, fostering growth and inspiring lasting change in education. And this is what I’m really excited to learn more about is he’s the author of the new book, The Language of Behavior.
Joshua focuses on equipping educators with trauma responsive strategies and alternative behavior practices to support student success. Through his work, he continues to empower education pros to lead with empathy, implement innovative approaches and make a meaningful impact in their schools and communities. So welcome to the show, my man.
It’s great to see you, Jake. I don’t know if everyone knows, but I got a chance to see you in person, meet you, and see your phenomenal program, and it was just an honor and joy to be in your presence.
Thank you. I appreciate that. And same, I got to go to your session and see you actually teach and coach on these practices. And we really connected because, I mean, you are such a great advocate for something that is dear to our heart at Vive 18 and in the prevention community, which is how do we take care of our students who are going down a path or trying a substance?
And instead of thinking that we’re going to solve it by punishing them and somehow it’s going to change behavior, you just explained so eloquently why restorative practices or accountability and different things that you talked about were like the way to go. Like it made sense to me, but before we get in, can you just give us a little intro, maybe a minute or two of like, who are you?
What’s your day to day? Where are you from? All that good stuff.
Where I’m from is an interesting question. I won’t bore the audience with that, but started out in California, then Minnesota, then we moved to Texas, and now we’re in Colorado. So I’ve just done a big loop, saw all over this country, not only in living in different states, but then also I have the honor and pleasure as a consultant to travel all over the country and speak and work with school districts and wonderful educators. And especially right now, it’s the busy time people are preparing for the new school year and yeah, it’s been amazing. Obviously the language of behaviors, the book, it hasn’t been out for very long it was dropped in the spring of this year. So just a few months and now people are really, you know, finding the resource. starting to do some book studies. They’re starting to use it to kind of prepare for their students as the new school year is beginning. And so we’ve been extremely busy, but yeah, my world is writing books, speaking. I do a lot of podcasting and then of course my family, have six kids and a wife, two dogs, and a partridge in a pear tree. So we are rockin’ and rollin’ the Samper household, and I just absolutely love just all the different things that I get to do.
Yeah. Before this, we were just chatting and, in Joshua’s ear, we were talking and all of sudden he’s like, wait, Jake, there’s some minions in my ear. And one of his six kids got the iPad paired to his headphones.
Yeah, you sounded very weird, man, I was confused. But yeah, that’s how this works. mean, at any moment, my office door might bust open with my three year old and asking for something. So you just never know. But I do appreciate your time and just your patience with my household and the craziness that exists.
Right? Yeah, it’s awesome. It’s part of who you are. It makes you relatable too.
Yeah. Well, and so in what we were talking about too, I know Jake here in my session, but you know, my kids are part of my story too. I mean, they’re a huge part of my change, not only as a parent, but then also my perspective as a teacher, a coach and an administrator because you know, my biological and just a little background, I have two biological children and four adopted and my wife and I were foster parents for 12 years and we had six placements of the six. had four that we adopted and due to the training that we received as foster parents really opened my eyes to a whole new world and where a lot of the reasons why I made the shift as an administrator in the way that I work with students.
That’s incredible. And yeah, that’s experience. You have that’s hard fought experience being a foster parent, being that person in their life that they can trust and count on. And that’s the kind of safety we want in our schools that allow people to really know like, yeah, you’re taking care of my kids and the students feel like they have a second home or maybe even a home that’s more safe than the one that they’re at when they leave school in some cases.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the kids that had the most trauma or had the most things going on at home were the ones that had like perfect attendance because school was a safe place for them. And sometimes our teachers would be like, are they ever going to get sick? Are they ever going to be absent? But that’s, there’s a reason why they’re there. They, they had breakfast provided for them. They had lunch provided for them. They had safety and trusted adults that were in their life and they knew exactly the predictable schedule that they had and they knew what was going to occur.
And so their emotional safety, their physical safety was in that schoolhouse. And so there was a reason they were there every single day. So it’s just something to think about sometimes. I know their behaviors can be difficult and take a lot of time and energy for the adults, but they’re there because they feel safe. They feel like they belong and they feel like they have a really healthy connection.
That’s so cool. And if you don’t mind, I’d love to dive in to your book and some strategies. And I’m sure this conversation is going to go so fast because I love talking to you, but when it comes to this experience you’ve had, right? You’ve been an administrator for nine years. You have kids and kids from the foster care system that are now, you know, the loves of your life and you’re taking care of them.
You see both of those environments. What are some small things that you’ve learned and implemented in the classroom or you now teach people through your book that have really helped in those cases with maybe a student that you’re like, I wish I didn’t have to deal with this right now, but you developed a tool or a strategy or a framework that’s been born out of that and that you could share with us.
Yeah, so my co-author, my co-host also to the Linguistic Behavior podcast, Charlie Peck, she’s brilliant. She was a teacher and then turned social worker. So she’s got her lens in the social work world. I’ve got that kind of admin lens. so combined, we put together three tenants that we teach and also just kind of, I was talking before we pushed record is, you know, we do long-term deals with school districts too, so that we can get in and do something that’s a little bit more long-lasting and we can dive in a little bit deeper and really help induce observations in classrooms. But the first thing was consider your environment because a lot of our students, mean, the world of neurodivergent is just growing. Our students are being identified more so than ever. And so if we’re looking at our environment, and it doesn’t matter, this book really is for parents, for people outside of the education world too, is some of our kids are either seeking sensory or are adverse to sensory. Like they wanna get away from and so if we don’t know those things, we might have a room that is extremely chaotic to them, which is going to trigger them in some negative ways. And sometimes, you know, especially our younger kids, they don’t possess the skills to even identify that that’s occurring in their brain. And so it’s just a natural reaction that’s happening. for the adults, if we don’t look at behavior as a form of communication, then we just say, okay, they are acting out.
and then we kind of fill in the blank. just kind of, unfortunately go to the negative. ⁓ That’s just kind of human nature. I’ve done it myself plenty of times. And instead it’s something that is an adverse reaction. That’s truly just the environment that’s setting in. And then you factor that into maybe a classroom that has 34 kids in it. Well, then you start looking at the furniture. You start looking at the lighting, not only like the noise level, the energy level, but then also, you know, sounds and you know, as our music playing, sometimes we just create this like over sensory environment for them. And then we expect them to act normal, sit there, learn, engage with others in an appropriate way, you know, and just be their angel version that we don’t usually get. And so it’s just something to consider when we’re looking at all of these factors. And especially right now, as we’re starting the school year, but even like if you’re doing a breakout group with a group of, know, if you’re a counselor and you’re working with a small group, like where is that actually occurring? And is there a million things on the wall on the ceiling and you know, it’s just chaotic with colors and vibrance. You know, that might be something that you might want to think about going to maybe a more subdued environment or going outside. I was just talking about that. My kids, my own kids, if I go and take a camping trip with them or take them on a hike, thankfully we get to do that often in Colorado, they are totally different. Well, why is that? Well, they’re not around fluorescent lights. They’re not around chaotic potentially music or TV on or some type of electronic device.
It’s just fresh air. They get to explore. They get to be active, right? So some of that too is like the movement. Is there movement going on in the classroom? Is there ways for them to get that sensory seeking behavior out? So that’s the first tenet. Second one is like more is the exploring the breakdown, right? So for instance, we like to use the brain and the model of the brain because if students are going through an adverse situation, chronic stress or maybe something much bigger where it’s a form of trauma. Well, obviously that’s gonna not only affect the brain, but it actually is gonna affect other pieces of the body. And so that can happen in utero or that could happen after birth and sometime in their experience where it actually is breaking down the brain. And if you look at a scan of the brain and someone that’s gone through chronic stress or trauma in their life, there’s actually pieces that are not lit up in that scan. So you should see in the brain, the whole brain should light up like a Christmas tree.
But unfortunately, when you’re going through all these adverse situations, then you start to see spots that just aren’t glowing or as lit up. And sometimes if it’s really bad and for a long extended period of time, a mass can actually grow in the brain. So it’s kind of crazy just how living through such terrible situations can not only affect your brain, which for educators is really important because we’re trying to get knowledge to the brain, but then also it can break down your liver and your uh, immune system and all these different things literally break down. Now the human body is amazing because with a safe environment and changing some experiences for that child over time that can build back up, which is great, you know, so as far as our educators or anyone else that’s helping our kids, that gives us hope, you know, for the work that we do. Yeah. So exploring the breakdown is more of like looking at a child. So if you’ve ever had a kid, maybe they’re at a heightened state.
They have glossy eyes, stiff as a board, nonverbal. Maybe they got their fist balled up. There’s a lot of things that you might see. Well, what’s happening is that their brain is literally in survival mode. And so it’s just shutting down. So the limbic system is not active. They’re not having a rational thought in their brain. And so for that, if you’re an adult and you see that, then you just disengage. Because whatever you’re saying to that child, it’s not computing. They don’t hear anything you’re saying.
So it’s just good for them to deescalate and give them a safe space. And you can ask them questions over time, but just giving time and space for them to recover in that. And so we try to show what fight looks like, what freeze looks like, what flight looks like, because all of these are survival behaviors, but sometimes our educators just aren’t prone to knowing what that looks like as far as our form of communication. And so if they’re in this mode, we just know, okay, something’s been triggered.
So we need to dive a little bit deeper with that child, right? So getting him into.
So if you’re in that, because I’m imagining I’m in a situation and I’m looking at the environment, too, I’m exploring the breakdown and I notice some of those things, right? They’re really stressed. They’re in that flight or freeze mode or something. And yeah, they’re not going to get the information or it’s not going to be the right time to have a teaching moment. How do you, What do do if you’re managing a class and that might happen? How do you discover maybe what’s going on? Do you have to just ask them later or is there something you can do in the moment to help get them back?
Understanding Trauma and Its Impact on Learning
Yeah, so no learnings are going to occur in the classroom at that point. So it depends on the environment, right? If we go back to the first tenant. Now some folks, some teachers have the space. Now everyone’s classroom’s different and you can assign what you get assigned. But if you have the space, some folks will create an actual safe space for kids to deescalate in. So maybe it’ll be a table with like a blanket over it. know, sometimes elementary they’ll do that, create kind of a cave, if you will. So it still has an opening for the teacher to be able to see to make sure that the child is safe, of course, but it does allow them to kind of go into a space that they feel like it’s condensed, it’s dark maybe, maybe it constricts the noise level and it allows them to kind of just chill out for a bit, right? And everyone’s different and depending on how they are as far as their emotional wellbeing, how escalated they are, it may take them 15 minutes.
It’d take them 45 minutes. You just never know. So if you have a space in your classroom that the child’s willing to go to, perfect. But sometimes it requires another adult to intervene, right? So maybe that’s calling a counselor, maybe it’s calling a neighboring teacher, maybe it’s calling an administrator to come and grab them. And so I got radio calls all the time for behaviors that were very similar, you know? And so it was great because we had a space built in our school where it was essentially a calmed down room. It was for kids to be emotionally well and get themselves to a state where they could go back to the classroom and learn. It wasn’t a discipline. It wasn’t ISS. It was literally having people, adults in there that knew how to get a student regulated. But then also once they were regulated and were able to have a conversation, to ask those important questions to get kind of to the bottom of maybe identifying what that trigger was. And sometimes our kids are just, they don’t possess the skills. They may look like they should have the skills but they just don’t. And so it’s also a teach piece for that adult that’s with them to kind of work through, okay, let’s, let’s back up what occurred before you got to that escalated. Okay. A kid said something. What did they say? they insulted your mom. Okay. You got really upset. And so instead of fighting, it was a freeze moment where they, their brain did get in survival mode and they wanted to hit the kid initially, but they didn’t. And they just kind of locked down their body, literally locked down.
Now backing up, okay, now we understand where the trigger was, why you got to that emotional state. You know, if that was to occur again, and in middle school, it happens like every lunch, right? The mama jokes get thrown out. So when that happens again, what are some skills that we can possess in the future to make sure that you don’t have this adverse reaction where you’re going to get to that escalated state? And maybe, you know, you were in flight mode this time, maybe next time you’re going to be in fight mode, right? So what would that look and kind of working through that with that child that we don’t want to get to that point because obviously there’s gonna be a lot more consequences just in your life when you react in that negative way. So again it’s not only having the knowledge but building something and then consistently going through that procedure with all children and making sure that we’re really looking at the behavior as okay there is a trigger there’s something behind that underneath it.
The Impact of Adverse Situations on Children
And then of course that teach piece is the most important because it’s awesome that we teach math, science, and all these other subjects. But at the same point, like if we’re trying to build healthy, strong, productive adults, I mean, we got to look at the emotional side, the EQ and some of these, you know, executive function skills and, uh, regulating our emotions and knowing what to do in the future. And so I feel like, and I’ll speak on this on the top of the hill every day is like, I feel like that’s just as important, if not more so than some of the subjects.
Right, because if you don’t have that, like you said, the subject matters not even getting into their brains. And before we move on to the third one, I want to share something that I learned from you in your workshop that I think our audience would love. having this question of like, if there’s an escalated situation in the classroom, how do you deal with it in the moment? What does the rest of the class do? Like, do you have to move all your attention from everyone to one student or embarrassed them or like there’s all these worries of what might happen. And you explained something that was so cool. And since I’ve never been a teacher in the classroom, just, didn’t never heard of, and you explain the concept of a push-in and I’ll do my best. You can tell me if I’m correct. And I, and I learned it well enough from you, but the push-in was a way where there were three or four staff members who didn’t have their own class that period. And you had some sort of walkie talkie or maybe you had cell numbers or something.
And if something was escalated, they would use the walkie talkie and ask for a push-in. So that teacher on break would come in, they’d help out with the class for a moment while the teacher could step outside and work with that student. And why I think this was so cool is you had said, if the relationship they have with a teacher or someone caring that they get to see every day ends anytime they do something disruptive we’re not learning how to better serve each other and they send them to you and you have to try to solve the problem or you get to have that relationship, but you never get to see the kid as much. We really want them to become the pro at helping the students. So the whole go to the office thing wasn’t really serving anybody. And this push-in method was a great way to see, how can we help you develop the relationship, build rapport so that those things happen less and the student can feel safe in your classroom. So that blew my mind. I think I’ve told like five people of that since we met and that was only last week.
Well, that you’ve said it so well and outgoing man, you you get an A plus you you killed it. So Jake, the reason that we implemented that was because a lot of the things that you’re talking about, right? I mean, we know what that system looks like. Everyone that’s listening has been in school. They’ve seen that, right? They’ve probably lived it. I know I did. I mean, if you get in trouble for even distracting a class, it was get out and then you’re heading to the office or getting sent right to ISS and you’re sitting in room by yourself, right? So that model doesn’t work, we knew that. And we were losing thousands of minutes for our students that needed the most to be with that content expert. But then on the flip side, there’s a breakdown in the relationship. And so, they’d go to ISS, we’d ask them to reflect, or we’d just assume that they’re gonna reflect on what happened and that they’re gonna build new skills and then they’re gonna go back to class. It’s gonna be kumbaya, everyone’s gonna be healthy as far as their communication and their feelings and emotions. And then they’re gonna had that adverse situation occur again, and they’re gonna do something magically different. And we know that doesn’t occur. And so for us, it was like, okay, everyone’s upset with this traditional model. I’m upset, my teachers are upset, my parents, my students, like nobody’s happy. And then we’re just repeat and rinse and repeat every single day. so, you know, everyone’s upset, everyone’s angry.
And then also like there’s animosity between the student and teacher, because there was never any resolution from what occurred before. It’s just like we’re supposed to forget it never existed. So the teachers were like, I want time to build in to my students. And I also don’t want to kick them out, but they didn’t have an alternative system. And so for us, you know, the push-in model was a godsend because one, we gave the teachers time to have that relationship with the kid and get to the bottom of the behavior. They got to accept them back into the classroom after the expectations were agreed upon but then also I’m not building a really cool relationship with the kid, it’s the teacher that’s doing that. And then we were taking away the animosity, we’re helping them be with the content expert. So what we found was like we got not only the minutes back in the classroom, but there was a correlation with the time missing grades, of course. So their grades went up, but then also, I know we hate to say this, but state testing is important, while state testing grades and scores went up also.
I felt like just as far as the culture piece, it improved, but then also grades, how kids felt about the classroom, the relationship with the teachers improved, but then also just what I was telling you earlier about that anger piece, that black cloud that existed prior to was lifted because of this new system.
Wow. See, that’s so important. And I want to highlight this for our audience is that all the things that you mentioned, the disruptions went down, grades went up, testing went up, and we don’t love talking about it. But if you’re trying to get your program into a school or if you’re trying to, for example, people listening to this, you’re trying to introduce prevention strategies or SEL or restorative programming, we need to learn to speak that language because that’s the scorecard of the administrator.
Like we have to speak to that scorecard because their boss is asking them, what are you, are you improving your metric I’m giving you? So we have to learn to speak that language, which I think is a really good point. Now I got us on, I think a really good tangent. We ended on environment, exploring the breakdown. We learned a lot from it. Let’s do number three. And then I’d love to talk about restorative programming with you.
Yeah, of course. And actually number three kind of embeds that. So it’s responding intentionally. Yeah. So responding intentionally is kind of what we’re talking about. So not to get too weighty with your audience, Jake, but we, you talk about data and just using things to kind of prove. And John Hattie is known in the education world for his studies that he’s done. And so his main one was, and most popular is looking at effect. So what affects a student’s learning in a positive manner and what does in a negative.
Recognizing and Responding to Escalated Behavior
And of course, ISS OSS is, I think, second to last, second to most if you want to go as far as the negative, right? So it’s taking away, and for obvious reasons, right? You’re taking a child away from what I said earlier, a content expert. But then also, if you look at duration of time, for us, when I first got to every campus, because I’ve been on four different campuses, if I looked at the behavior records, our repeat offenders, I mean, they were on a very short lease. So if they did something third, fourth, fifth time, and usually it’s a low offense, so maybe disrespect or a disruption in a classroom, that one thing that happens five minutes in class means that they’re missing 40 minutes of class time. And then you say that over and over and over and over. You can start to see how we get to thousands and thousands of minutes that are lost in the classroom. So the responding intentionally was allowing teachers to say, okay, what happens? Well, obviously the push-in model is one of those things, but then on the back end too, like because our kids are not perfect, they’re gonna mess up.
Everyone does. So what are we doing with that? And the big thing was that we are associating the consequence with the behavior. So for instance, if a kid throws something in the cafeteria, well, in a traditional model, it’s go to ISS. But what we would do is we’d pull them, and we’d have some kind of main concepts that need to occur. this is, you can call this restorative practices. You can call it a lot of different things. But these are the components that always occurred. One is the student need to take ownership in their actions. Because if they don’t take ownership, it doesn’t matter what you say or what the consequence is, they’re not going to learn from it because in their mind, they didn’t do anything wrong. So sometimes that takes the most time is to get them to agree like, I did something. And once they take ownership of it, then it’s like, okay, well, there’s a ripple effect, right? If I, there’s a cause and effect. If I throw a rock into a lake, obviously there’s going to be ripples with that. And if you’ll throw in some of the cafeteria, it’s just like you throw in a rock.
So who did it affect? And so typically, especially in our middle schoolers that I worked with, the ego is so large, it’s like, it only affected me. No, it didn’t. Let’s talk through that a little bit more, right? So you start to talk about all the things that are occurring. So for that child that’s drawing something, they eventually get to, yeah, well, the janitor is affected because they have to go and clean up the mess, right? I’m making their job harder.
That’s where we start to think about the consequence. Okay, ISS, let’s take that off the table. That’s not there. So what’s a consequence that we can start to think about? What can we do as far as the restoration piece? You obviously made something a mess. So how can you fix that? Well, the kid’s like, well, I could go clean the cafeteria. Sometimes they’ll be like, I can clean my table or I can clean where I threw it. And it’s like, well, let’s expand that a little bit more. Let’s think about this in a greater span, right? You made the life of the janitor hard. Let’s make his life a little bit easier.
And then also the kid that you threw it at, like, can we do to mend that relationship too? Cause that’s the thing is a lot of times we have our students affect a lot of other people and then there’s no way of repairing that relationship with that child. just move on. Like I said before, where, anyone that was affected doesn’t know about the consequence, doesn’t hear from the child again. They don’t get the skill as far as, okay, I made a mistake. I need to go apologize. I need to make amends with that person you know, it’s that teach piece of also like not only how we make amends, but also if you’re in that situation again, right? So maybe the kid said something as a joke that offended you, right? That’s why you threw the piece. Well, if that happens again, what are you going to do in that situation? What’s something that’s not a negative? It’s actually a positive and still allows you to communicate the ill will that you feel toward that student, right? And so you actually sometimes role playing and modeling that for them and breaking it down.
There’s always a teach piece after like that consequence if you will or them repairing the harm and then yeah that last piece is that the teaching of the correct skills when they’re in that situation because it’s going it’s gonna happen again. So we want to make sure that they have the skills and we can’t just assume Okay, you’re 16 years old. You should know how to deal with this situation. I don’t know that I can’t assume that obviously the the behavior wasn’t appropriate so do they possess the skills?
Right. Yeah. You don’t know. It could be a right. Depending on where that student came from and what they’re involved in or have seen and the stress in their life, it could be a quote, 12 year old’s brain in a 16 year old body based on development or whatever that might be or right, they just have never learned that skill because no one had modeled it for them. So, okay. I love this. I wrote down a couple of things. So John Hattie, probably not. So I need to see you.
If you’re listening, he has some great studies to check out on what works and what doesn’t. So if you need some information to bring to your administration on why restorative programs or accountability practices are better, by the way, Joshua, you taught me this as well in our short conversation. If the school doesn’t like restorative because they think it’s all kumbaya and there’s no justice, just say the word accountability or something like that, that they could get hold of. So now that’s part of my language. Thank you.
Well, it just depends on where you are in the country. mean, some states, you know, they bristle at that term. Like you said, they think you’re holding hands seeing kumbaya and there’s no punishment or consequences with that. the other thing too, is when I do sessions is I literally try to break it down as far as what the term means. Like punishment is, or discipline means to be a disciple. means to teach and to learn. And unfortunately that word has been manipulated and changed over time, especially in American culture and society that it means like to hurt, to literally like make it uncomfortable to a degree of pain for a child. And so, you know, for me, it’s like, let’s think outside the box. We can and have the power to be creative in what we do. So take the time to do that because you’re either gonna do it on the front end with a kid or you’re gonna do it on the back end. And if you’re not teaching the appropriate skills and you’re not restoring, you’re not doing all these steps, I can assure you that this child’s gonna be a repeat offender with the same things going over and over and over. You’re gonna spend way more time on the back end with that child than what we’re talking about today.
Dang, you know what just hit me? And I don’t know your faith background or anything if we’re similar, but when you were explaining that, I, all right, Jesus, let’s go. I thought of that verse that says that it’s talking about teaching and through Christ, like, your rod and your staff, comfort me. And I always thought that was so funny because I was like, a punishment is comforting, but it probably was this bias of the term discipline or the thought of, no, someone keeping you in line and the shepherd taking care of their sheep is giving them guardrails, giving them bumpers to stay going in the right direction. But yeah, we kind of skewed it. And maybe even my mind when I read scripture was like, that sounds harsh. When in reality, it’s totally not. It’s very loving and teaching.
Building Trusting Relationships in Schools
So Jake, have you been in sports? Have you had a coach before? Okay, well, I don’t know about you, but my coach has coached me hard, and I wanted that. I wanted that attention. I wanted them to make me better. I wanted them not to go easy on me. And did it suck? Running sprints and doing bear crawls and all these other things?
Yeah, I did, but did it make me stronger and better and more of a better athlete and player moving forward? Yeah, I would say that based on that scripture and that coaching and that experience, I would say, yes, I would lean into that and felt comfort in that relationship. And that’s a far different model than what we think of when we think of school.
Yeah. that’s so cool. I’m having so many like revelations right now in this. That’s me to you. This is awesome. And I want to recap for our audience. The four steps that you said to help, you know, get it in our brains is you, you talked about ownership, getting the student to own. And this, guess, yeah, responding intentionally. This is what falls underneath it. The ownership and the ripple effect he restoration or consequence and then the teaching of skills and all that you said that. Like we’re giving them a skill so they can improve next time. And yeah, this is really cool. So is this all in your book?
Yeah, yeah, so like I said, we’ve got different examples and things and stories that I work through and I know your audience loves stories. I don’t know how much time we’ve got, but I’ve got plenty in there as far as looking at that in a more creative way, but then also breaking it down into steps because I know sometimes, and I can think of one off the top of my head that I don’t know if we have time for, but kids stole something from the library and I literally walked through you know, each the four things that you talked about with that student. But then on the back end also of just sharing like what occurred with the relationship between him and the librarian, what occurred when I called that mother and how she felt joy from the steps that we went through with her son versus what she already knew, which was a traditional model of him just sitting in room for eight hours and how she knew that this system was going to be better for him as an individual and building skills for him to be an adult. And that’s what I’m gonna say for all of these strategies. If you’re looking for buy-in with your community, if you’re looking for buy-in with your parents, they know what occurs in the classroom. They know what happens in schools because they were students. And what’s crazy is that when we were students in the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s, it’s still, for the most part, the same way. Now, instruction might look different as far as the classroom, but as far as punishment and discipline matrix and all of those systems, ISS, OSS, expulsions mostly that’s the same. And so for them to see something different because they know what it was and what it looks like and then the result, they’re so on board with doing something different.
That’s cool. And I would love it. You did have a story of some relationships that were enhanced in the school. And we know how important those relationships are for mentorship or just that caring person that you show up and you’re like, I can’t wait to be at school because I see this. So I would love to hear one of those stories of that. And then let’s definitely hear about how we can stay in touch and get your book and all that good stuff.
Yeah, well, we did a survey and a lot of schools do this and states require, but, you know, Texas eventually changed the question to be, do you have a trusted adult on your campus? And what we found out was a chunk, almost 25 % of our kids didn’t have a trusted adult. And that was, talk about shoving a spear through your heart. I mean, that means that if a kid’s going through something, they don’t feel like there’s any adult on the campus that they go and tell. And so for us, we tried to find ways you know, and there’s class check-ins and things that we put in place to say, like, here’s a very safe way to express that you need a need or a resource, and we’ll get that to you because a lot of our kids were just in survival mode. Learning and going to school was not the top of their list as far as priorities.
They didn’t know where they were going to go that night, and they might be crashing on the couch, or they didn’t know, you know, if they’re going to have a meal or if they’re going to see their parents for multiple days. So, you know, getting those that form of communication helps in that, but then also just letting our staff know like we need to build relationships in a better way or more consistently. And so as far as an admin staff, really modeling that for our teachers to say, what is something that takes 30 seconds to a minute? And we talk about that in the book too, of just like having relationships circles or asking low level, non-threatening questions just to get to know your kids and make those connections. Because that’s the biggest thing that we lack is that, you know, we might do that for a week at the beginning of school, and then we never touch it again. And our kids are dying to talk about themselves and ⁓ they want to share and they want to make human connections with other people, either with their peers or their teachers. And so, ⁓ you know, I was talking about that kid in the librarian. Well, the kid stole the book, librarian caught him. Instead of going to ISS, we did a restore circle. He made a beautiful relationship with that librarian. He took ownership. He he stole the book because he just wanted to call out with his friends.
But because of his consequence, which he actually created, which was volunteering for two weeks in the book fair, he actually decreased kids stealing, helped the librarian immensely. And then afterwards, after his punishment was done or his consequences, he built this beautiful relationship where he would go and volunteer, shelving books afterwards. Right. And I already talked about the effect with the mom. Mom loved the school. She felt like we had her son’s best interests. So anytime I called her, was like, Yes, you know, because we had this already beautiful relationship constructed because she knew our heart and what we were trying to do with her son. But also just like that kid would never have had that relationship with that trust relationship with that librarian based on situation. And we could have looked at it as, it’s a negative. He’s a bad kid. Throw him an ISS, you know, and that and we’re done with him. Or we can actually invest in him because our kids are going to mess up, but the mess ups shouldn’t define who they are. Right. Because if they can learn from that situation and grow, obviously it’s going to make them a better human being moving forward.
Yeah, I love that story. That was the one I think that stuck with me so much. That student’s life got immensely better because you had that system in place that was very caring. So I would love to just end the episode by sharing what are some ways that people can follow you or check out your book, anything to stay in touch.
Well, you probably hear my dog in the background because we just got a package. if you hear him, I apologize. But joshdambler.com is my website. And so you can find all of the different things on there as far as podcasts, services and books. If you go to Amazon, Barnes and Zombo or any local bookstore, you’re going to see a spider lead and the language of behavior will be there for you to purchase. know, we also have a free book study also on my website. So if you go to joshdambler.com slash language of behavior.
There’s downloads on there for free too, but the book study is there for you because Charlie and I want to make this resource available as much as possible for folks. Like I said, we’ve got people doing book studies and they’re trying to start the process of implementing these strategies to not only build healthy relationships, but then also decoding behavior and then also being creative as far as responding to the behaviors that will occur eventually in the school year.
Okay, that’s great. And is it joshstamper.com or joshuastamper.com?
Yeah, so it’s joshstamper.com. If you’re trying to email me though, it’s joshua at joshstamper.com. Because I gotta make it as difficult as possible for you.
That’s right. I’m getting too many emails. I gotta switch this up. This has been great. Thank you so much, Joshua. And I appreciate the work that you’re doing and for everyone listening, please stay in the game. Your work is vitally important. I know that you learned something today because I’m in a very similar role and I learned so much. So please share this episode with a friend or a colleague who needs to hear it.
Share it with that administrator who is maybe needing some new tools and resources for their school and they can get in touch with Josh as well and take advantage of all the great things that they’re doing. And of course, just stay in the game. You’re saving lives with your work. It’s making a bigger difference whether you can see it today or not. And we will see you all next Monday for another episode of the Drug Prevention Power Hour.
