Gil Noam's Fieldwork in an Urban Frontier

By John C. Lawrence

Special to the Gazette

To the average American adult who devotes even mild attention to newspapers and network news, most of the details of crime, violence, and despair that exist as the everyday reality for many students will not be surprising. Those same Americans are subject to almost daily reports of falling test scores and failing public schools, of dropout rates and general disaffection.

Still, very few people consider the two together when addressing the ills of urban education.

Educators and academics, as well, are inclined to err when they conceive of education programs entirely irrespective of social circumstance.

Gil Noam, a clinical and developmental psychologist with a joint appointment as an associate professor at the Graduate School of Education (GSE) and the Medical School, along with his colleagues in the Risk and Prevention Program at GSE that he presently directs, are among the small minority who have already begun to make this type of connection between environment, education, and human development.

Using more than 15 years of research and fieldwork on child and adolescent development as a guide, Noam is training educators and clinicians to confront the unique demands of the fin-de-siècle schoolhouse.

"Schools are faced with students with a much broader range of health, mental health, behavioral, and academic problems than ever before. The at-risk student [a term applied to children with high potential for learning or behavioral problems] is no longer the rare exception," declares Noam while opening to a text he uses with his students.

He reads aloud: "The increase in risk behaviors has been linked to the fragmentation of the adolescent social world. In particular, evidence suggests that many adolescents face multiple risks in such diverse settings as the family (abuse, neglect, parental discord and divorce), community (violence, drug abuse, poor health conditions, etc.), peer world (delinquency, truancy, excessive risk-taking, etc.) and school environment (lack of resources, lack of adult support, disorganization, etc.)."

Research and Resiliency

Besides understanding problems and symptoms developmentally, the central focus of Noam's research is on competency and resilience.

"Along the way I developed a different perspective on resiliency from the one found in most of the literature," Noam says. "Typically, articles refer to resilience as the characteristics that protect some children from showing symptoms of psychological distress, despite encountering great adversity.

"My research focuses on the fact that when people are confronted with major losses or misfortune, they often end up showing some signs or symptoms. We should see that as a very natural response, not necessarily as part of the cycle of psychopathology."

Noam is one of the leaders in the new interdisciplinary field of developmental psychopathology. His research in the Child and Adolescent Program at McLean Hospital is directed toward differentiating transient symptoms from serious psychopathology.

"So many children are anxious or oppositional, but most of them will not become phobic or antisocial adults," he says. "It's an important new area of empirical longitudinal research to differentiate the pathways that lead to chronic disorders from the more typical problems that tend to decrease over time.

"The more important issue involves discerning the factors that enable some kids to overcome great stresses. It's not as simple as saying, well, they get treatment. There are countless factors involved. My research is about discovering those factors -- those characteristics of individuals and their environments that enable them to 'transfer' to adaptive pathways."

Over the last 10 years, Noam and his associates at the Medical School have conducted a longitudinal study involving 120 adolescents and their parents. The children were originally being evaluated in a local hospital for clinical problems in their early adolescence. The participants are now in their 20s, and the researchers plan to follow them through adulthood.

"This is the third phase, the third time we've reconnected with them," Noam says. "We look at psychosocial strengths and stresses, their friendship patterns, cognitive development, work history, symptoms and psychiatric problems. We will also invite the patients in for a brain scan. That will give us more information concerning the possible biological dimensions of their progress or lack of it.

"We do have some findings already that are connected to this resiliency issue. An element of cognitive development -- an ability to recognize your problems and analyze yourself -- is an important predictor toward getting better. Another important dimension is the building up of support systems -- relationships in the community and with family and friends that buffer against a sense of isolation, a feeling that you're doing it all on your own, a finding supported by numerous studies across the country.

"This is the link to my work in the schools. I've always been interested in the problems and risks children face, but the majority of my research was completed in mental health facilities.

"Now, I'm interested in intervention -- reaching children before they are removed from their normal environment. With the foundation this research provided, it became clear that I had to take my work into the community. That's where kids live, it's where they experience relationships, it's their world. So while we continue in this lab setting to study kids when they are taken out of the community and into a hospital, the research points directly back to experiences in schools, in families, and in the community."

An Innovative Collaboration

In 1993, as part of a districtwide movement toward inclusionary education, the Boston Public Schools' Department of Special Education launched The Vanguard Program, an effort to enlist local universities as consultants for building programs for at-risk youth.

In the fall of 1994, Harvard was matched with Taft Middle School in Brighton (where Kendra Winner is the site coordinator), Irving Middle School in Roslindale (where Robert Kilkenny is the site coordinator), and Ohrenberger Elementary School in West Roxbury (where Caroline Watts is the site director), and more recently with the Sara Greenwood School in Dorchester. The partnership between Harvard educators and psychologists and Taft Middle School is in its second year under Noam's leadership.

"Inclusion is actually a court-ordered attempt to get special education students back into regular classrooms, rather than in the more restrictive clinical or separate classroom environments," says Noam. "It also involves preventive measures to keep students from being placed in special education classes. The idea is to provide the appropriate service within the context of regular classroom life."

For most of the last decade, special education has inspired fierce controversy; inclusion has remained the subject of passionate debate.

Some consider inclusion tantamount to dumping students back into classrooms in order to cut costs and avoid providing services, while they also see a decline of academic learning for all children.

Others see it as the best opportunity for every student to develop his/her talents and interests in an environment that mirrors society more closely.

Through his work in Boston schools, Noam knows the situation to be much less simple and dichotomous. For him, a fundamental aspect of special education is seldom addressed.

"You need to study the student population in special education," he says. "Many of the kids in special classes are people of color, boys, and students with behavioral problems. Some children are placed in special education because their teachers are fed up with them disturbing class. Once they're in the special education system, it's very difficult to get out.

"We need to distinguish the students in that type of situation from the kids who really need more restrictive environments. We need to come to the understanding that some children do benefit from various forms of special learning in separate classrooms, but only for a period of time. We know that the vast majority of at-risk children benefit a great deal from being with their peers in the regular classroom.

"Inclusion is part of the larger social movement towards diversity. You're just pushing the boundary of diversity -- including the idea that people have different ways of learning and different adaptational styles.

"Instead of saying here are the 80 percent who are 'normal,' and here are the 20 percent who are 'abnormal,' inclusion forces you to cut the pie in a different way and discard the primitive labels. Once you understand that all of us have certain areas of risk, certain strengths and certain weaknesses, that we're all composites of strengths and weaknesses -- then you are more tolerant of differences."

Each university together with its partner school defines the target population. Harvard's focus at the Taft Middle School is learning disabilities in relationship with emotional and behavioral problems.

The goal of the project is to provide interventions for students at risk for both failure and placement in more restrictive clinical or educational settings. Its work, as Noam describes it, is based on "the premise that positive and supportive relationships with adults can enhance resiliency. Relationships between adults and children that provide individual attention have been shown to be an essential ingredient for children who succeed despite great adversity.

"It's been a slow process. We spent one entire year basically just learning from the schools, being anthropologists. Even though we had a clear sense of certain things, like how children develop, what helps them, what are typical problems at different ages and stages of development, we had to learn a lot from teachers, administrators, and the children.

"Building a partnership with the teachers was crucial. They've seen a lot of well-meaning people come and go. We needed to prove to them that we're committed to their school for the long term, that we're not just researchers, trying to get our data and run. We're really concerned about the development of children and we're concerned about making the teachers' jobs a little bit easier. I admire the work they do, what they're up against. What they have to do day-in and day-out is remarkable.

"Still, we are very clear and adamant about our part of the partnership. We're not there only to support existing practices, we're there to work towards change in the schools. And not just as caseworkers -- what we're after is systems change. When we think about inclusion, our intention is to change the practices for every kid."

Educators for a New Age

For Noam, sustainable change will involve the development of two things.

First, modern schools require a more rigorous educator, adept at the frontiers of the social sciences, pedagogy, curricula and human relations. Toward this end, the Harvard-Vanguard Project takes advantage of Harvard's educational and clinical expertise to begin to provide professional training for teachers. Among other things, this entails a shift in teaching from lecture mode to small group mode, as well as a shift toward peer and experiential learning. Another component of the project's training stresses the teacher's role in the recognition of problem behavior. The goal is to help teachers expand their knowledge concerning child and adolescent development in order to play a more active role in prevention and early intervention.

Second, inclusion requires expanding the customary notion of the education professional. The goal of the Harvard Vanguard Project is the creation of a new type of professional called a "prevention practitioner," that is, Noam declares, "someone who knows something about the school and student population, knows something about risk and resiliency and is able to put research-based knowledge into specific activities for the classroom.

"Teachers can't meet the educational and emotional requirements of all their students alone. They need extra help. We have an entire training program devoted to preparing Harvard graduate students for school and community-based work. We don't just want to work at the meta-level. We want to work to improve the lives of at-risk children, youth, and adults.

"Traditionally you have paraprofessionals who help in the classroom and other people who run programs after school hours, as mentors, etc. The services offered are generally very fragmented, involving children moving from several different adult-supervised, and usually unrelated, environments in a single day. In our program, prevention practitioners are beginning to bridge these multiple worlds by establishing contact with children's schools, and over time, their community neighborhoods, and most importantly, their families.

"The emphasis is on supporting adolescents in various contexts, trying to foster a sense of cohesion in their lives. Since it's clear from our research that resiliency is fostered by close, focused relationships with a committed and encouraging adult, what we're building is a practitioner who is focused on individual at-risk students, helping these students, developing relationships with these students. Many of these kids are underserved. We work to create links to medical services, counseling, or whatever they need.

"So rather than look at our program as extracurricular, prevention practitioners are assigned classrooms as well as students. We're in the classroom and we're also providing services outside the classroom, and we're focusing on skill learning.

"It's a collaborative effort. In training practicum students we try to ensure that they understand the perspective of the teacher. I always use the model of the family therapist, a person intervening in a complex intersection of relationships. You can't just act as an ally to the child. Each player's feelings and point of view are important to consider. While our program's intention is unequivocally to concentrate on and support the student, the teacher is often our most important ally.

"Over time, it's easier for a teacher to observe the sources and symptoms of behavioral problems. Once these things are pinpointed contextually, it's much easier to develop a strategy for helping that student, which may involve simple lessons in sharing or ongoing lessons in conflict resolution. For prevention practitioners to work most effectively with students identified as at-risk, they need to coordinate their efforts with teachers and benefit from their knowledge.

"At first, we expected a great deal of resistance on the part of the more at-risk kids. We haven't found that. We've found that they are desperate to talk, they really want someone to give them attention, and most of them are very ready to develop relationships."

A New Movement

The hope for Noam and The Vanguard Project is that they will, in fact, be part of a new movement in education, that they can use their pilot data to make the argument for the importance of such programs across the country.

"In five years' time, I would like to see the project really having made inroads in a number of areas," Noam says. "First, having some of the schools we're working in looked at as models, providing model curriculum, model interventions, that can be used as guides. Almost like a modular system, where people can apply pieces that fit their environment and student population.

"Second, I would like to have gathered some good long-term, longitudinal information paralleling the other longitudinal studies. So we can systematically compare and contrast those children who went through some kind of hospital experience with students similarly at-risk who remained in the community. I would like to have new and deepened insights into how kids create strengths despite a great deal of adversity. This knowledge base, in turn, will help to guide the development of more sophisticated models.

"Lastly, I hope we will have made progress in further defining this new professional role, the prevention practitioner -- people who are not traditional counselors, nor traditional special-education teachers, but who contribute a new set of skills based on this way of thinking about risk, protection, and resiliency. Our ultimate goal is to bring the clinical and the educational worlds together, to focus on the whole child."