The approach wouldn’t only train them after they’re already in the classroom. On the other hand, if you “turn a child off” through punishment and control, she will do poorly.Ĭomer said he is currently working on a new approach to train educators in how to support students’ development. Students will be more likely to feel motivated, to want to please the teacher, and to want to please themselves. If they do that, kids will “see you as a helper rather than a controller,” and they will form a positive attachment to their teacher.

Teachers need to see those bad behaviors as an opportunity to help kids who are “underdeveloped,” Comer said. “Teachers lack the tools to understand what that behavior is about,” Comer said, so they resort to a system of “punishment and control.” Often, kids respond to frustration, disappointment and loss “in ways that are viewed as bad.” “Teachers are faced with behaviors every day that they need to be able to respond to,” he said. “That is a problem,” Comer said, a sign of a disconnect between academic learning and “development.” And of the schools that did, 65 percent offered those courses outside the education department. A 2010 survey found that 10 percent of schools of education did not require aspiring teachers to take a course in child development, he said. Another 10 have fully implemented the Comer Method, which includes a “student and staff support team” and a parent team, who make decisions by “no-fault problem solving” and consensus.Ĭomer attributed the Comer Method’s declining popularity not only to No Child Left Behind, but to a lack of knowledge among educators about how kids develop and grow. Twenty-two schools in New Haven are using a School Planning and Management Team, which is one component of Comer’s method. Now an educator who fully supports the Comer Method, Gail DeBlasio, has taken over the school as principal Comer said he is optimistic about the continuation of the Comer Method under her leadership.

At Katherine Brennan School, for example, teachers who had fully bought into the method left the school, and the practices disappeared. In New Haven, the method has fallen into and out of favor.

Leave No Child Behind by James P. Comer