Nurturing the wellbeing of students in difficulty

Thirty years ago, Paul Cooper published his first and highly influential book on students with social, emotional and behaviour difficulties (SEBD), Effective Schools for Disaffected Students (Cooper, 1993a). The book presented Paul’s research on the views of students who were excluded from school because of their challenging behaviour. It provides the narratives of the students themselves on how they could become engaged in their learning once they feel secure and valued and are provided with opportunities for them to be successful. Paul Cooper was one of the first to give a voice and listening ear to students with challenging behaviour. Learning from pupils’ perspectives (Cooper, 1993b) and Pupils as partners (1996) were another two key papers advocating for students’ voices at the time. Paul argued that students should be seen as a source of knowledge and expertise, having unique and inside knowledge of what it is like to be a student in a particular context (Cooper, 1996) (see also Cefai & Cooper, 2010). This contrasts with common practices at the time which tended to punish and exclude such students (see Cooper et al., 1994).

It was during this time in the mid-1990s when working on my Master’s dissertation on students with SEBD at the University of Wales (Cefai, 1995) that I first came across Paul Cooper’s work. One of the key publications which informed the conceptual framework of my dissertation was the paper by Paul and Graham Upon (1991) evocatively titled Controlling the urge to control. An ecosystemic approach to problem behaviour in schools. It was a fresh and innovative approach to the conceptualisation and understanding of students with SEBD, contrasting with the prevalent behaviouristic and classroom management approach at the time (e.g. Canter & Canter, 1992). The ecosystemic perspective shifted the focus from the students and their (mis)behaviour towards the interactional patterns and relationships in the social systems in the lives of the students and how these influenced and shaped their behaviour. Paul was clearly challenging lineal, reductionistic and within-child conceptualisations of challenging behaviour (cf. Elton Report, 1989). He also argued that the needs of all the stakeholders, including those of the students themselves, need to be taken into consideration when addressing the issue. For instance, his well-known book with Jerry Olsen Dealing with Disruptive Students in the Classroom (2001) which has been adopted as a textbook in numerous courses in Initial Teacher Education courses, takes a systemic approach to classroom management, with behaviour difficulties seen in a broader context particularly in the systemic interactions between the stakeholders involved, including the relationship between the school and the families.

The ecosystemic approach to SEBD was in a way the forerunner to another major contribution of Paul Cooper in this area. The biopsychosocial approach to individual educational needs and disability provided a broad, multifaceted approach to understanding and supporting students with SEBD, integrating sometimes diametrically opposing views such as biologically determined behaviour and socially constructed behaviour (Cooper, 1997, 2008). The biopsychosocial perspective of ADHD, one of the first to construe ADHD from such a broad, integrated approach, ‘was a way to combine and bring together a more complex synthesis not just as an intellectual exercise, but as critical to enhancing educational practice, especially for those with disability and difficulties’ (Norwich, this volume). The educational psychology students and learning support educators at the University of Malta had the opportunity to listen directly to Paul explaining how this perspective may be effectively applied to understand and address the needs of students with SEBD such as those manifesting externalising problems, internalising problems, and ADHD (see Part II of this book).