Understanding Behavior, Building Skills
Collaborative Problem Solving Speaks Our Language
Childhood is often imagined as a carefree time, full of joy, curiosity, and endless possibility. We want that for our students. We want them to experience the world as their oyster, to feel wonder, optimism, and excitement about what lies ahead. But we also know, whether from experience or observation, that childhood isn’t always so simple. Life doesn’t always feel light. At school, expectations are high — students are asked to navigate friendships, manage frustration, persist through social, emotional, physical, and academic challenges, and make thoughtful choices — often all at once. Though they’re all swimming in the same waters, their experiences riding the waves vary widely. Some children bob with relative ease; others feel overwhelmed and adrift, unsure why coasting seems to come more naturally to their peers.
When students feel this way, it often shows up in behavior. Sometimes those behaviors are clear cries for help — a tearful face, a request for teacher support, a trip to the nurse’s office — and it is relatively straightforward to step in and find resolution. Other times, the signals are harder to read. A frustrated child may blurt out during a lesson; a child feeling embarrassed might shut down or walk away; a child who is overwhelmed might refuse to do work or say something unkind to a peer. As educators, we know these behaviors — often labeled “challenging,” “disruptive,” or “attention-seeking” — are usually reflective of deeper needs.
Even in a school with robust social-emotional programming and meaningful opportunities for relationship and community-building, there are times when our usual tools don’t quite reach the student who needs them most. That’s where we pause and ask: What can we do differently? How can we better support every student in developing the skills they need to succeed — not just academically, but as members of a community? At GUS, these questions live at the heart of our work. When we think about community conduct and engagement through this lens, we are called to approach our students not just with expectations, but with curiosity, empathy, and a commitment to understand.
Last spring, we found a thought partner in Think:Kids, a philosophically aligned program based in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, that invites us to reconsider a long-standing belief: that when children don’t meet expectations, it is because they are choosing not to. Instead, they offer a different perspective: kids do well if they can. This idea shifts our thinking away from behavior as a matter of will, and toward understanding it as a matter of skill. When a student is struggling, the question becomes not “how do we make them comply?” but “what skills are they missing, and how can we help them build those skills?” If a child is splashing as they learn to swim, we recognize they are trying as we steer them to safe waters, determine what skills they still need to develop, and scaffold as they build strength, stamina, and the ability to swim independently. This perspective reminds us that an overwhelmed child is never giving us a hard time - they are having a hard time.
Think:Kids conceptualizes the various tools we use for community conduct practices as “Plan A,” “Plan B,” and “Plan C”. Plan A, common in schools, uses rewards and logical consequences to encourage students to meet community expectations. Plan C, also common, is used when a student is struggling to meet an expectation in the moment, so the expectation is temporarily dropped in favor of reducing stress and focusing on connection and redirection. Think:Kids adds Collaborative Problem-Solving into the mix, a process they call Plan B: a way to build the underlying skills students need for long-term success. Collaborative Problem Solving guides us to work backward when a child is struggling. We start by noticing their behavior, then identify the situations in which it occurs, and finally consider the lagging skills that may be getting in the way. These skills typically fall within executive functioning domains such as communication, attention and memory, emotion regulation, cognitive flexibility, and social thinking. When we understand these underlying challenges, we can respond in ways that are proactive, supportive, and effective.
CPS is not a scripted program or a single block in the schedule. Like so much at GUS, it is woven into the fabric of daily life. It might look like a teacher sitting beside a student and saying, “I’ve noticed this is hard—what’s going on?” It might unfold over multiple conversations, returning to a problem when a student is more regulated and ready to engage. The brain-based CPS framework provides a shared structure for these conversations: first, we seek to understand the student’s perspective and empathize with their feelings to help them regulate. Next, we each share our concerns clearly and concisely, supporting the child’s ability to relate. Finally, we collaborate on a realistic solution, which supports the development of reasoning skills. At its best, CPS is a partnership: two people working together toward a solution that addresses both student and teacher concerns.
This process takes practice, patience, and flexibility. It relies on strong relationships — something we already prioritize through advisory, morning meetings, homeroom, Open Circle, Life Skills, partners, community conversations, clubs, and the many informal moments of connection that make up a GUS school day. CPS also encourages us to be strategic, and to consider that sometimes, the most effective next step is to reduce stress in the moment so that a student can engage more meaningfully in problem-solving later. For students, this approach sends a powerful message: they are not defined by how they respond in a moment of struggle. Instead, they are supported in understanding themselves, building skills, and growing over time. They have a voice in the process and experience school as a place rooted in care and connection.
As a faculty, we build our understanding of this work through training and reflection. Last April, our full faculty participated in an introductory training led by a Think:Kids facilitator, and over the summer, a group of ten faculty members engaged in intensive “Essential Foundations” training (Emily Rabinowitz-Buchanan, Maureen Twombly, Brad Belin, Janelle Young, Elliott Buck, Katie Lewis, Jen Mallette, Emilie Cushing, Emily Twombly, and Kate Doyon). In August, we came back together to discuss how we would incorporate CPS more broadly into our community conduct and engagement practices. As part of this work, we reflected on what it means to truly see “the whole child,” using poems written by Shel Silverstein and Naomi Shihab Nye to guide a creative exercise. Each student, like a poem, is layered, full of strengths, quirks, and complexities. Some traits are easy to see; others are hidden, waiting to be uncovered and cherished. Our role isn’t to shape students into something polished and predictable — it’s to discover who they are, make space for their individuality, and help them grow. Sometimes that means finding beauty in the unexpected and asking: What might be possible if we approach this differently?
Like all meaningful work at GUS, implementing Collaborative Problem Solving is ongoing – something we will continue to refine through practice, reflection, and partnership. In the year ahead, we will continue to build faculty capacity and consistency, deepen our approach, and expand family engagement in this process. This work offers something powerful: a way to meet students where they are, honor their humanity, and support them in becoming the engaged, curious, and compassionate individuals our mission envisions. At GUS, everything we do matters, and when we work in partnership, with our mission, vision, and values at our core, we create a community where every child has the opportunity to succeed — not just because they are expected to, but because they are supported in learning how.